A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects [Paperback]

First published in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was an instant success, turning its thirty-three-year-old author into a minor celebrity. A pioneering work of early feminism that extends to women the Enlightenment principle of the rights of man, its argument remains as relevant today as it was for Woll-stonecraft's contemporaries. Mary Wollstonecraft was not the first writer to call for women to receive a real, challenging education, writes Katha Pollitt in the new Introduction. But she was the first to connect the education of women to the transformation of women's social position, of relations between the sexes, and even of society itself. She was the first to argue that women's intellectual equality would and should have actual consequences. The winds of change sweep through her pages.

This classic work of early feminism remains as relevant and passionate today as it was for Wollstonecraft's contemporaries. This edition includes new explanatory notes."We hear [Mary Wollstonecraft's] voice and trace her influence even now among the living."Katha Pollitt is a poet, essayist, and columnist for The Nation. Author of the recently published Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture, she lives in New York City.Chapter I
The Rights and Involved Duties of Mankind Considered

In the present state of society it appears necessary to go back to first principles in search of the most simple truths, and to dispute with some prevailing prejudice every inch of ground. To clear my way, I must be allowed to ask some plain questions, and the answers will probably appear as unequivocal as the axioms on which reasoning is built; though, when entangled with various motives of action, they are formally contradicted, either by the words or conduct of men.

In what does man’s pre-eminence olC†