Wollstonecraft and Early Liberal Feminism

Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, only two years after she had first entered the pamphlet wars around the French Revolution with A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a rapid reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In the later, longer work she extends the revolutionary language of natural rights, already being applied to men by Thomas Paine in Rights of Man (1791) and to French citizens by the National Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), to women, arguing that the apparent frivolity, vanity, and weakness widely attributed to women is not a fact of nature but the predictable product of an education that trains them for ornament rather than reason. Her central target is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Emile, or On Education (1762) prescribes for the fictional Sophie an education subordinated entirely to pleasing and serving men; Wollstonecraft, chapter by chapter, quotes Rousseau at length in order to expose what she considers the self-serving inconsistency of a philosopher who elsewhere makes reason and independence the birthright of every human being. She calls instead for a shared, rational, co-educational curriculum for girls and boys, arguing that only educated women can be virtuous companions, sound mothers, and, ultimately, self-governing citizens of the kind the Revolution claimed to be creating.