A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)

Teach a girl to be charming instead of thoughtful, then cite her charm as proof she was never built for thought: that is the trick Mary Wollstonecraft caught polite society playing, and the catching is what gives _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ its heat. The fury is the argument. Her age had agreed that rational creatures deserve liberty, and she simply took the claim at its word, only to find it stopped quietly short at half the species. What looks like female frivolity, she insists, is no flaw of nature but the efficiency of the damage, an education that builds the cage and then calls the bird unfit to fly. And the harm does not stay put: women schooled to flatter rather than reason raise their children badly and make flatterers of their husbands. She wrote for contemporaries not yet persuaded, and you can hear it in the prose, combative, circling, stubbornly unwilling to please. The demand at its centre still cuts cleaner than almost anything since: not power over men, but power over themselves.