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Mary Wollstonecraft

Britain · 1759–1797

A philosopher who made education central to the argument for women’s equality, Wollstonecraft challenged the idea that women existed to please men. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman connected intellectual independence with the conditions of everyday life.

Her work is an early landmark, not a complete blueprint for later feminism. Reading it in its eighteenth-century setting reveals both the reach of her challenge and the assumptions of her time.

“It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.”

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), excerpt.