Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, argues that women are reasoning beings who need the same education as men, and that a society which denies them that education harms itself. This post sets out what she argued, who she was answering, and where readers still disagree about her.

Learn 100 Influential People teaches who the people who shaped history were in short lessons of about 9 minutes, and Wollstonecraft is one of the thinkers in its course on power, reason and rights.

What is Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman?

It is a book-length essay on education, reason and the place of women in society. It is the second of her two "Vindications". The first, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), answered Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says she wrote the second within months of the first.

Its main aim, in the entry's words, is for women to become rational and independent beings whose sense of worth comes from self-command and knowledge, not from appearance. Training their minds and bodies would make them good companions, wives, mothers and citizens, and above all fully human.

Who was Mary Wollstonecraft?

She was born in Spitalfields, London, on 27 April 1759, the second of seven children. Her father mismanaged his inheritance and the family moved often and slipped down the social ladder. Only her brother received a formal education. Hers was haphazard, though not unusual for a woman of her position, and she read widely.

She worked as a lady's companion, a schoolteacher and a governess. She planned a school with her sisters and her friend Fanny Blood, and at Newington Green she met the minister Richard Price. Her publisher Joseph Johnson paid an advance on her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), which eased her money worries. She went on to write more than 200 reviews for his Analytical Review.

Who was she answering in 1792?

The book is a reply. It is dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand, whose plan for a new French curriculum proposed to confine girls to domestic education alone. For Wollstonecraft that was unjust, and it also contradicted the principles of the Revolution it claimed to serve.

She also took aim at writers on education, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Emile (1762). If you want his side of that quarrel in his own terms, read Locke vs Rousseau on the social contract first. Her argument is easier to follow once you know what she is pushing against.

The main arguments: reason, education and citizenship

Her starting point is that duties and virtue need reason. A person kept ignorant cannot be expected to act well, so a girl raised only to please is set up to fail. The Stanford entry says she thought rights bring duties, and that none can be expected to do their duties if their natural rights are not respected.

That puts her in the same Enlightenment conversation as Kant's categorical imperative, which also rests morality on reason. Her step was to say plainly that the reasoner includes women.

The proposals in the book include:

• Changes to the school curriculum, set out in detail.
• Civil and political rights for women, and elected representatives of their own.
• Skills that let women support themselves and their children, so no one has to marry or remarry out of money need.
• Reclaiming midwifery for women, and the claim that women could be physicians as well as nurses.

What she said about marriage and family

Wollstonecraft held that marriage should rest on friendship, not physical attraction. Husbands and wives, she wrote, should keep some reserve toward each other, though she also thought sex should rest on genuine mutual desire.

For her, the family was where a society's habits are copied. She held that girls brought up to be empty-headed playthings could not make dutiful mothers, and a society chasing property and display would reproduce itself through them. Vindicating the rights of men alone, as Price had done, was in her view not enough: a moral society needed families to change.

In December 1792 she went to France, where she met the American merchant Gilbert Imlay. Their daughter Fanny was born at Le Havre in May 1794. The relationship ended painfully, and she twice attempted suicide in 1795. She broke with Imlay in March 1796, renewed her acquaintance with William Godwin, and married him in March 1797. Their daughter Mary, born on 30 August 1797, became the author of Frankenstein.

The entry notes something worth keeping in mind when you read her call for reason: her love for Imlay brought her to see that the passions are not easily brought to heel by reason.

Where readers disagree about her

Her standing changed a great deal. Godwin's frank Memoirs (1798) revealed her relationship with Imlay and cast a deep shadow over her reputation, and many derided her through the nineteenth century. John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women (1869) eclipsed most other contributions to the debate. Yet her work was translated, read around the world and admired by advocates of women's rights such as Flora Tristan and Mathilde Franziska Anneke.

In the twentieth century she was heralded as the first English feminist. Recent scholars read her differently, and they do not agree with one another:

• A liberal thinker. Some read her as a proponent of liberal values, the individual's rights and reason.
• A republican thinker. Others, such as Sandrine Bergès, Alan Coffee and Lena Halldenius, read her view of freedom as independence and the absence of subordination to arbitrary power.
• A theorist of education. Bergès reads the book primarily as a treatise on education.
• An Enlightenment moral thinker. The entry's own summary is that she is now seen as one whose works present a self-contained argument about the change society would need for men and women to be virtuous in private and public life.

Set out fairly, these readings overlap more than they clash. Which one you prefer depends on whether you want to read her as a founder of a later movement or as a thinker of her own century.

A worked example: read one section in four steps

You can test your own reading on any passage of the book. Take one section, such as her case for a shared school curriculum, and work through it.

1. State the claim in one sentence. For example: girls and boys should be taught to reason, not to please.
2. Name who she is answering. Rousseau on girls' education, or Talleyrand's plan.
3. Write down her reason. Virtue and duty need reason, and reason needs education.
4. Add one reading from the list above. Does a liberal, republican or educational reading change what you notice?

Doing this on three passages gives you a short, defensible account in your own words.

Frequently asked questions

When was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman published?

It was published in 1792, within months of her first Vindication on the rights of men (1790).

Who was it written against?

It answers Talleyrand's plan to give girls a domestic education only, and Rousseau's account of how girls should be raised in Emile.

Did Wollstonecraft ask for votes for women?

The Stanford entry says the book suggests women be granted civil and political rights and elected representatives of their own. Education is still the heart of the book.

Is she a feminist or something else?

Scholars differ. She has been called the first English feminist, a liberal, a republican and an Enlightenment moral thinker, and the readings overlap.

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Learn 100 Influential People puts Wollstonecraft in its Power, Reason and Rights course with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant. Lessons last about 9 minutes, every lesson lists its sources, and 38 cards across the courses set out where researchers disagree. You sign in with your email and an emailed code, and accounts are for people aged 13 and over. The about page is open without signing in. Read the full Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Wollstonecraft for the scholarship behind this post.