Extract

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.

Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, and the argument is so clear it still stings. Writing before the word feminism existed, she dismantled the assumption that women were naturally inferior and demonstrated that what passed for female nature was simply the result of denied education, enforced dependence, and a culture that rewarded women for being ornamental rather than rational. She wrote in direct response to Talleyrand's proposal to educate French girls only for domestic life, but her target was wider: Rousseau, Burke, and every philosopher who had spoken of human rights while meaning only men's. The prose is urgent, sometimes furious, and never pleading — Wollstonecraft does not ask for rights but demands them, on grounds of reason so self-evident that the reader's discomfort becomes part of the argument. She died five years later, at thirty-eight, of puerperal fever after giving birth to a daughter who would grow up to write Frankenstein. That her arguments still needed to be made two centuries later is the book's most damning vindication.