Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is considered the ur-document of modern liberal feminism. Adapting the language of the rights of man that Wollstonecraft first tested in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), her second Vindication applied the revolutionary rhetoric of universal rights to women. As a result Wollstonecraft’s essay has been considered alongside other eighteenth-century texts, such as Olympe de Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791) and Abbe Raynal’s History of the Indies (1770) as early attempts to transform the eighteenth-century discourse of the rights of man into what we now recognize as a more inclusive human rights discourse.

Both of Wollstonecraft’s Vindications were written in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on Revolution in France (1790). Burke’s conservative critique of the fervor of the French revolutionaries was itself a response to the Dissenter Dr. Richard Price’s A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), which celebrated Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 as well as the more recent revolutionary activities in America and France. With the backing of publisher Joseph Johnson, Wollstonecraft defended her friend Price and attempted to temper the backlash against the revolution that Burke had inspired in Britain. In fact, her Vindications of the Rights of Men was the first published response to Burke’s essay, preceding Thomas Paine’s more influential Rights of Man (1791–92). Both Vindications value equality and individual liberty in contrast to Burke’s defense of Britain’s “ancient constitution” and the aristocratic manners and feudal beliefs this political order represented for revolutionaries like Wollstonecraft.

In A Vindication of the Right of Woman (VRW), Wollstonecraft takes particular issue with the gendered hierarchies implicit in Burke’s nostalgic appraisal of aristocratic culture. She finds the feminine characteristics of beauty and delicacy—which in Burke’s view elevates women—to be stifling and a barrier to women’s acquisition of reason and virtue. In response to Burke’s essentialist approach to gender, Wollstonecraft declares reason and virtue to be universal traits that are available to all human beings and denounces beauty and delicacy as social constructions that distort women’s intellect and bodies. In Wollstonecraft’s view, the only way to return women to a natural state of gender equality would be to topple the existing political and social order.

Wollstonecraft wrote her near three-hundred page call for female liberty in under three months. In a letter to her friend the poet and historian William Roscoe, Wollstonecraft bemoaned the hurried pace of her composition and described the printers as ripping the freshly written pages from her hands:

I am dissatisfied with myself for not having done justice to the subject.—Do not suspect me of false modesty—I mean to say, that had I allowed myself more time I could have written a better book, in every sense of the world. . . . I intend to finish the next volume before I begin to print, for it is not pleasant to have the Devil coming for the conclusion of the sheet before it is written. (qtd. in Tomalin 136)

Despite the rushed nature of Wollstonecraft’s work, she was able to intervene in many eighteenth-century controversies—debates over not just politics and philosophy, but education and aesthetics.

An effort to write women into the Age of Reason, Wollstonecraft’s VRW signifies most powerfully as a feminist intervention in the primarily male domain of Enlightenment philosophy. Wollstonecraft’s essay begins with a letter to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord. Talleyrand had recently recommended to the French National Assembly that women should be educated to cultivate the domestic arts as opposed to the more intellectual pursuits he recommended for men. Wollstonecraft invites Talleyrand to reconsider his opinion and suggests that he underestimates the capabilities of women. By beginning with Talleyrand, Wollstonecraft positions herself as a republican like Talleyrand, but also as a female revolutionary advocating for the logical extension of universal rights to women.

Within Wollstonecraft’s critique of the gender-biased rhetoric of revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau emerges as central to her argument; she devotes the beginning of her essay to a critique of his philosophy. Much ink has been spilled on Wollstonecraft’s ambivalent attitude toward Rousseau. Despite her sympathy with Rousseau’s critique in The Social Contract of the political and social “chains” that incapacitate civilized man, she was deeply critical of his view of women, particularly his depiction of Sophie in his influential novel Emile (1762). Rousseau presents Sophie as his protagonist’s ideal female companion. Wollstonecraft critiques this portrait in Chapter II of VRW, “The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed”, describing “his character of Sophia” as “grossly unnatural” and takes issue with “the principles on which her education was built” (24). She finds it difficult to reconcile Rousseau’s appreciation of virtue and liberty in general with his desire to make women obedient:

He carries arguments, which he pretends to draw from the indication of nature, still further, and insinuates that truth and fortitude, the corner stones of all human virtue, should be cultivated with certain restrictions, because, with respect to the female character, obedience is the grand lesson which ought to be impressed with unrelenting rigour. (25)

Reared to be submissive to her future husband, Rousseau creates Sophie as “a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself” (25). Through her critique of Rousseau, Wollstonecraft reveals the inconsistencies between his accounts of the political and social development of humankind.

Wollstonecraft uses her critique of Rousseau as a springboard for a more extensive discussion of female education, including an attack on the work of British conduct book writers. VRW has often been read as a rejoinder to popular female conduct books and essays on female education, particularly John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766), as well as the work of female contemporaries such as Hester Chapone, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Madame de Genlis, and Madame de Staël. Wollstonecraft argues that most conduct book writers encourage women to cultivate manners and sensibility at the expense of reason. In many ways, Wollstonecraft’s attack on female education draws on her personal experience. Before she began writing for Johnson in London, she was a governess for the daughters of the Kingsboroughs in Ireland. In fact, Wollstonecraft’s references in VRW to an overly refined aristocratic woman who ignores the needs of her children is often read as a caricature of her employer Lady Kingsborough, who dismissed Wollstonecraft because of her children’s excessive fondness for their unconventional governess. Wealthy women of Lady Kingsborough’s ilk are portrayed in VRW as “very unfit to manage a family. . . . If she attends to her children, it is, in general, to dress them in a costly manner—and, whether this attention arise from vanity or fondness, it is equally pernicious” (71). The emphasis VRW places on conduct books also seems a natural extension of her writings on the education and upbringing of children, including her first published work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786), as well as her Female Reader (1789) and Original Stories (1788), which was illustrated by William Blake.

In her previous work on education, Wollstonecraft struggled with women’s relationship to sensibility as well as sensibility’s role in civilization’s development. In VRW, she concludes that excessive sensibility weakens women, making them “objects of sense” and slaves to male desire (80). She works to rebuild a plan of female education that privileges reason above sensibility. She suggests that women and men be educated together:

To render the social compact truly equitable, and in order to spread those enlightening principles, which alone can meliorate the fate of man, women must be allowed to found their virtue on knowledge, which is scarcely possible unless they be educated by the same pursuits as men. (182–83)

Perhaps surprisingly, her egalitarian vision of education rests on an appeal to women’s traditional familial and social roles: “The conclusion I wish to draw, is obvious; make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives, and mothers; that is—if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers” (187).

Wollstonecraft’s attention to the deleterious consequences of society’s emphasis on the cultivation of female beauty and delicacy also functions as a response to Edmund Burke’s discussion of aesthetics in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). In her work, Wollstonecraft challenges Burke’s gendering of the sublime and the beautiful. She suggests that by naturalizing the association of women with beauty and men with the sublime, Burke distorts female physical and intellectual growth:

Every thing that they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind. False notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of their limbs and produce a sickly soreness, rather than delicacy of organs; and thus weakened by being employed in unfolding instead of examining the first associations, forced on them by every surrounding object, how can they obtain the vigour necessary to enable them to throw off their factitious character? (124)

Beauty and delicacy are first and foremost social distinctions imposed on women and created by the gendered biases of a society that imprison women in weak bodies and addle their intellects through false impressions and associations.

Wollstonecraft concludes her wide-ranging appraisal of women’s place in society by arguing that the “sexual distinction which men have so warmly insisted upon is arbitrary” (202). She calls for the end of the “tyranny of man” and a “REVOLUTION in female manners”, which will result in the amelioration of not just women but the whole of society (203, 202).

Janet Todd estimates that a relatively modest 1500 to 3000 copies of VRW were sold during its first five years in print (185). The initial reception of Wollstonecraft’s VRW was mixed. Like-minded revolutionaries such as the novelist Mary Hays praised the book, while more conservative factions critiqued her attack on traditional gender roles. The Scottish novelist Anne MacVicar Grant’s response in a letter to an acquaintance from 1794 provides a sense of the heated controversy Wollstonecraft’s book inspired:

I have seen Mary Wollstonecraft’s book, which is so run after here, that there is no keeping it long enough to read it leisurely. . . . It has produced no other conviction in my mind, but that of the author’s possessing considerable abilities and greatly misapplying them. . . . I consider this work in every way dangerous . . . she speaks in such a tone of seeming piety, and quotes Scripture in a manner so applicable and emphatick, that you are thrown off guard, and surprised into partial acquiescence, before you observe that the deduction to be drawn from her position is in direct contradiction, not only to Scripture, reason, and the common sense and custom of the world, but even to parts of her own system, and many of her own assertions. (qtd in Durant 217)

Despite the “dangerous” nature of Wollstonecraft’s arguments, readers such as Grant could not help but admire the author’s “considerable abilities”.

Perhaps the most damaging response to Wollstonecraft’s work came from an unexpected source—her spouse the radical philosopher William Godwin. Godwin intended his Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (1798) to be a tribute to his recently deceased wife’s remarkable life as well as her literary and philosophical achievements. Unfortunately, his extensive discussion of their own premarital sexual relationship, her passionate attachment to the painter Henry Fuseli, and her extramarital affair with Gilbert Imlay, which resulted in the birth of her first daughter Fanny Imlay, undercut his assessment of her work. Readers focused on these biographical details at the expense of Godwin’s prescient appraisal of Wollstonecraft’s VRW: Godwin writes,

when we consider the importance of its doctrines, and the eminence of genius it displays, it seems not very improbable that it will be read as long as the English language endures. The publication of this book forms an epocha in the subject to which it belongs; and Mary Wollstonecraft will perhaps here-after be found to have performed a more substantial service for the cause of her sex, than all other writers, male or female, that ever felt themselves animated in the behalf of oppressed and injured beauty. (56–57)

Despite Godwin’s best efforts, Wollstonecraft’s “service for the cause of her sex” as well as her “genius” was lost beneath a series of ad hominem attacks. Richard Polwhele’s poem “The Unsex’d Female” mixed Wollstonecraft’s philosophy and biography in its critique of female revolutionaries and Wollstonecraft in particular:

See Wollstonecraft, whom no decorum checks,
Arise, the intrepid champion of her sex;
O’er humbled man assert the sovereign claim,
And slight the timid blush of virgin fame. (lines 63–66)

Many of Wollstonecraft’s female contemporaries, moreover, were her harshest critics. The conservative Hannah More refused even to read her work, and Maria Edgeworth satirized Wollstonecraft in her novel Belinda (1801) through the character of Harriet Freke. Freke apes male behaviors by wearing men’s clothing and encouraging her female friends to resolve their disputes with duels. Ultimately, her talk of equality and women’s rights undermines her friend Lady Delacour’s marriage. Edgeworth uses Freke to demonstrate that, by attempting to erase gender differences, Wollstonecraft’s philosophy disrupts the precarious balance necessary for harmonious social interaction. As a result of such critiques, Wollstonecraft’s reputation remained dubious throughout the nineteenth century.

The feminist movement of the twentieth century led to a reappraisal of her work as well as of her life. Despite twentieth-century thinkers’ agreement that VRW is a groundbreaking feminist text, which made equality and liberty central to the women’s rights movement, her text remains controversial. For instance, feminists have drawn attention to Wollstonecraft’s reticence regarding the extension of women’s roles in society beyond that of wife and mother. Feminist critics have found it paradoxical that Wollstonecraft’s argument for women’s capacity to reason like men and as citizens does not lead to an advocacy for their equal participation in the political and public realms, but, instead, that Wollstonecraft seems to restrict their newfound power to the domestic sphere, in the rearing of better citizens and in making better companions and interlocutors for their husbands. The philosopher Carole Pateman has termed this paradox “Wollstonecraft’s dilemma”, a contradiction created by the inequities inherent to the different valuations of male and female labor in a patriarchal state. More recently, critics have used Wollstonecraft’s work to reconsider not just the women’s movement but also the project of Enlightenment. Barbara Taylor in Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (2003) sees Wollstonecraft as participating in a religious Enlightenment that draws on her immersion in the radical Protestantism of the Dissenting tradition that so influence her work. In addition, Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice places Mary Wollstonecraft’s work at the center of a comparative strain of Enlightenment thought that contributed to the discourse of human rights by making “it unsustainable to have a defence of the freedom of human beings that separates some people whose liberties matter from others not to be included in that favoured category” (116).

Works Cited

Durant, Clark. “A Supplement to Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft. By William Godwin. Ed. W. Clark Durant. London: Constable, 1927.
Godwin, William. Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. W. Clark Durant. London: Constable, 1927.
Pateman, Carole. “The Patriarchal Welfare State,” Democracy and the Welfare State. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. 231–60
Polwhele, Richard. The Unsex’d Females: A Poem Addressed to the Author of the Pursuits of Literature. London, 1798.
Sen, Amartya. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.
Tomlin, Clare. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Penguin, 1985.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. Deidre Shauna Lynch. New York: Norton, 2009.

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Citation: DeLucia, JoEllen. "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 December 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6886, accessed 17 July 2025.]