A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

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Written in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is one of the earliest works on "the woman question" and influenced the earliest feminists in Britain and America in the 19th century, primarily in their distancing themselves from the work due to the controversial life of its author.

Some major themes of this work are education for girls, the debased position of women in society, the necessary equality of men and women, and the right of women to work. Wollstonecraft intended this work to be a response to Rousseau's Émile which discusses education for boys. Wollstonecraft's argument in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was that boys and girls should be educated equally, while in Émile the education of boys and girls is not equal.

The work was in response to Olympe de Gouges's "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen."

[edit] Quotations from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

She said that educating women would produce better wives, daughters, and citizens "Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath."

"I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves."

"Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government."

"Let not men then in the pride of power, use the same arguments that tyrannic kings and venal ministers have used, and fallaciously assert that women ought to be subjected because she has always been so.... It is time to effect a revolution in female manners -- time to restore to them their lost dignity.... It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners."

"Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority."

"The being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason."

[edit] Chapter titles include:

CHAP. I. The rights and involved duties of mankind considered

CHAP. II. The prevailing opinion of a sexual character discussed

CHAP. III. The same subject continued

CHAP. IV. Observations on the state of degradation to which woman is reduced by various causes

CHAP. V. Animadversions on some of the writers who have rendered women objects of pity, bordering on contempt

CHAP. VI. The effect which an early association of ideas has upon the character

CHAP. VII. Modesty.—Comprehensively considered, and not as a sexual virtue

CHAP. VIII. Morality undermined by sexual notions of the importance of a good reputation

CHAP. IX. Of the pernicious effects which arise from the unnatural distinctions established in society

CHAP. X. Parental affection

CHAP. XI. Duty to parents

CHAP. XII. On national education

CHAP. XIII. Some instances of the folly which the ignorance of women generates; with concluding reflections on the moral improvement that a revolution in female manners may naturally be expected to produce