A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Vintage Feminism Short Edition)

Vintage Feminism: classic feminist texts in short form

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ZOE WILLIAMS

The term feminism did not yet exist when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this book, but it was the first great piece of feminist writing. In these pages you will find the essence of her argument – for the education of women and for an increased female contribution to society. Her work made the first ripples of what would later become the tidal wave of the women’s rights movement. Rationalist but revolutionary, Wollstonecraft changed the world for women.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) was a writer and founding feminist philosopher. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is her most famous work, but she also wrote novels, treatises and a history of the French Revolution, many of whose events she witnessed first-hand in Paris. She died eleven days after giving birth to her daughter, Mary Shelley.