On A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

An age was busy declaring the rights of man, and Mary Wollstonecraft asked the obvious next question that almost no one was willing to hear: what about the rights of woman? A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792 in the white heat of the revolutionary era, was decades ahead of the world it spoke to, and reading it now is a lesson in how long the obvious can be resisted.

Wollstonecraft's case is built on a single, devastating premise: women possess reason, the same faculty that the whole Enlightenment treated as the ground of human dignity and the basis of rights. If reason is what entitles men to liberty and self-government, then women, being equally rational, are entitled to the same. The only thing standing in the way is an education and a social system designed to keep women ignorant, ornamental, and dependent, and then to treat the resulting weakness as proof of natural inferiority.

That last move is the heart of her attack. The supposed frivolity and weakness of women, she argues, is not nature but training. Deny someone a real education, confine them to pleasing others, reward them only for beauty and charm, and you manufacture exactly the helpless creature you then point to as evidence that they need a master. The remedy is education, real education, that treats girls as rational beings capable of virtue and independence.

It is tempting to file Wollstonecraft under women's history, a chapter to itself. That is the wrong place for her. She belongs in the main line of the argument about rights, because she does something the celebrated declarations of her era failed to do: she takes their own principles seriously enough to apply them universally. The men declaring that all are created equal carved out enormous exceptions. Wollstonecraft held the principle to its logical end and showed how much further it had to go.

That makes her essential reading next to the founding documents, not apart from them. The Declaration's claim that all are equal, the long American argument over who the word all includes, the suffrage fight that took another century and more, all of it is anticipated here, in a book that simply refused to accept that a universal principle could have a private exception.

The full text is public domain and freely available. The prose is of its time and can be dense, but the argument is bracingly clear, and its central move, holding a principle to its own logic until the exceptions collapse, is one of the most useful things a citizen can learn to do.