Probably the best known woman who will be discussed in this series, Wollstonecraft wrote on a variety of issues in addition to the rights, wrongs, and education of women including politics, morality, ethics, religion, the care of infants, a travelogue of her trip to Sweden, and the French revolution. She wrote in a variety of genres including letters, essays, poems, novels, and non-fiction books.

      Scorned in her own day and for generations afterward due to the illigitmacy of her daughter (who would become Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein and wife of the poet Shelley), her free lifestyle, and her unorthodox opinions, her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) is today a feminist classic and she is revered as an early English feminist foremother. In Vindication Wollstonecraft applied the language of the French Revolution to women, scorned the frivilous training of women common in her time, and advocated a real education for women.

      Here is a short excerpt from chapter 2 of Vindication:

      To account for, and excuse the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to prove, that the two sexes, in the acquirement of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character; or, to speak explicitly, women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue. Yet it should seem, allowing them to have souls, that there is but one way appointed by Providence to lead mankind to either virtue or happiness.

      If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? Men complain, and with reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex, when they do not keenly satirise our headstrong passions and grovelling vices. Behold, I should answer, the natural effect of ignorance! The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force. Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, everything else is needless, for at least twenty years of their lives.

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