A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~96,800 words · 460 passages
Cite this work
- APAMary Wollstonecraft. (n.d.). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/mary-wollstonecraft/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman
- MLAMary Wollstonecraft. "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/mary-wollstonecraft/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman.
- ChicagoMary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/mary-wollstonecraft/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman.
What it is about
An argument that women are not inferior by nature but appear so because they are denied the education given to men.
Context and history
Wollstonecraft wrote it in a matter of weeks in 1792, answering Talleyrand's report on a French national education from which girls were excluded. The claim is not that men and women are alike in everything, but that no one can judge a capacity that has never been cultivated. It was widely read and attacked at once; the nineteenth century buried it under the author's private life before twentieth-century feminism recovered it.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Having read with great pleasure a pamphlet, which you have lately published, on National Education, I dedicate this volume to you the—first dedication that I have ever written, to induce you to read it with attention; and, because I think that you will understand me, which I do not suppose many pert witlings will, who may ridicule the arguments they are unable to answer. But, Sir, I carry my respect for your understanding still farther; so far, that I am confident you will not throw my work aside, and hastily conclude that I am in the wrong, because you did not view the subject in the same light yourself. And, pardon my frankness, but I must observe, that you treated it in too cursory a manner, contented to consider it as it had been considered formerly, when the rights of man, not to advert to woman, were trampled on as chimerical—I call upon you, therefore, now to weigh what I have advanced respecting the rights of woman, and national education—and I call with the firm tone of humanity. For my arguments, Sir, are dictated by a disinterested spirit—I plead for my sex—not for myself. 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.
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