A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

An age was busy declaring the rights of man. Wollstonecraft asked the obvious next question and was decades ahead of anyone willing to hear it. Reason is not gendered, she argued. Women denied education are not lesser by nature but starved by design. And a republic that grounds itself in human dignity cannot exclude half of humanity and stay honest. The founding text of the argument that the franchise has no sex.

The English writer who took the language of rights that the age was applying to men and asked the obvious next question. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argues that reason is not gendered, that women denied education are not lesser but starved, and that a republic claiming to rest on human dignity cannot exclude half of humanity from it. The argument was decades ahead of its hearing. The hearing eventually came.