Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

JoEllen DeLucia (Central Michigan University)

Ed. by Daniel Robinson, Widener University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.06: English Writing and Culture of the Romantic Period, 1789-1837.
Vol. editors: Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Nicole Kennedy (University of Newcastle), Daniel Robinson (Widener University), Emily Rohrbach (University of Durham)

Domains

Political Science
Women's Studies

Dates

First circulation or publication 1792

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-fictional prose

Resources

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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

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2650 words

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 19 June 2025.]