Wollstonecraft argued that women are entitled to an equal education, one which aligns with their position among society, as mothers, housewives, and laborers. It is one of the first texts by a female author that presented women’s educational as an issue of universal human rights. The Independent includes Wollstonecraft in its series on the world’s greatest philosophers.The visionary treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published by the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1897) in 1792. The seven-volume The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (Pickering, 1989), is the first edition containing all the known published writings. Revised editions of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men and other collected works of Wollstonecraft are completed by Wollstonecraft scholars and published in single volumes. In 1974 Claire Tomalin publishes a substantial new biography The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974) and wins the Whitbread First Book Prize. Vindication is republished, edited by Eleanor Louise Nicholes (Scholar’s, 1960) and Miriam Brody Kramnick for Pelican Classics (Penguin, 1972) and thereafter repeatedly republished under that series.

Wollstonecraft’s work and intellectual contributions are reclaimed by historians during the second-wave feminist movement. Vindication is published within Everyman Classics making copies more readily available.

The Times articulates the establishment view that the interest of her work is “mainly historical”. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is republished with an introduction by Fawcett (1891). Vindication: the rise of Wollstonecraft’s reputationĭetails of Wollstonecraft’s unorthodox personal life that emerge after her death in 1797 overshadow her literary output during the Victorian period.Īs women campaign for the vote, suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett argues for a reappraisal of Wollstonecraft.

Mary wollstonecraft a vindication