- Length
- 320 pagesTodd and Butler, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Oxford, 1993
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
The founding text of modern feminist philosophy, written in six weeks by a woman who had already published the first reply to Burke. Its argument is not that women are the equals of men in fact but that nobody has any idea what they would be, because the question has never been tested.
- Date
- 1792
- Author
- Mary Wollstonecraft
- Region
- London
- Language
- English
- 1792 French, anonymous Published within months Consensus
- 1793 German, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann With a preface by the translator Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 2 years
Widely read and translated on publication, then buried for most of the nineteenth century in Britain by a biography written in tribute by her husband.
What the book says
An argument that the qualities everyone attributes to women's nature are the predictable results of how women are raised. Wollstonecraft's method is to take the accepted description - that women are frivolous, cunning, obsessed with appearance, incapable of sustained reasoning, governed by feeling - and grant every word of it, then ask what else could be expected of people denied education, kept from useful occupation, taught from childhood that their whole prospect depends on being found attractive, and rewarded for helplessness. A being trained to please cannot also be trained to think, and a mind fed on novels and accomplishments will produce exactly the behaviour observed. Her central target is Rousseau, whose account of the education of Sophie in Emile prescribes for girls precisely this formation and calls it natural. Against it she argues that virtue cannot be different in kind for men and women, since it rests on reason and reason has no sex; that a wife who is a rational companion serves a marriage better than one who is a decorative dependant; and that the whole arrangement corrupts men too. The practical proposals are national co-educational day schools, useful work, and the opening of professions.
What it argues
That character is formed by circumstance, and that an argument from women's observed behaviour to women's nature is worthless because the circumstances have never varied. Wollstonecraft is not claiming that women are already rational and virtuous; a good deal of the book is severe about how women in fact behave, which has embarrassed later readers and is central to the argument. What she claims is that the behaviour is manufactured, by an education that substitutes accomplishments for understanding and by a social arrangement in which a woman's entire prospect depends on attracting a husband. The remedy is not sentiment but structure: real schooling, useful occupation, economic independence, and the extension to women of the same account of virtue - grounded in reason and answerable to the same standard - that applies to men.
What it answered
Burke first, and Rousseau throughout. Against Burke the argument is that inherited arrangements are not self-justifying, and that his own case, resting on what feels natural to those inside it, cannot see the people the arrangement excludes. Against Rousseau it is more intimate and more damaging: she admires him, quotes him at length, and shows that a philosopher who made the whole of Emile's education an argument against artificial constraint prescribed for Sophie an education consisting of nothing else. Talleyrand's report on national education, which proposed schooling for boys, supplied the immediate occasion and the dedication.
How it argues
By observation, quotation and attack, in prose written at speed. Wollstonecraft takes the conduct books and educational treatises of her day - Rousseau, Fordyce, Gregory - and reads their advice back to them, showing what it would produce. The book is repetitive and its organisation is loose, and she says so herself. What carries it is the quality of the observation and a controlled anger that never becomes shrill: she is at her best describing the small daily mechanisms by which a person is taught to be less than they are.
The moment
London in 1792, three years into the French Revolution, with English radical opinion arguing about the rights of man and nobody asking the obvious next question. Wollstonecraft had run a school, worked as a governess, and made a living as a translator and reviewer for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson - one of very few women in England supporting herself by writing. She went to France later that year, lived through the Terror, and returned with a child and no husband.
How it travelled
Into eclipse by way of a tribute. The book sold well, was translated into French and German within two years, and made her one of the best-known writers in Europe. She died in 1797, eleven days after giving birth to the daughter who became Mary Shelley. Her husband, William Godwin, wrote a memoir in her honour and published it in 1798, recording with complete candour her affairs with Fuseli and Imlay, her illegitimate child, her two suicide attempts and her views on marriage. The reaction was ferocious - the conservative press attacked her as a prostitute rather than a writer - and her reputation in Britain did not recover until the late nineteenth-century women's movement.
The strongest objection
That she concedes too much of her opponents' ground. Wollstonecraft argues for women's education substantially on the grounds that it will make them better wives and mothers, accepts that women's sphere is largely domestic, and is harsh about women as she finds them - which has led critics from the 1970s onward to ask whether she is arguing for equality or for a more competent version of the existing arrangement. The defence is that she is arguing to an audience that had to be moved, and that the principle she states - virtue is one thing and reason has no sex - carries further than the applications she draws from it. That is probably right and it does not remove the tension in the text.
Why read it
Because it is direct, angry and unexpectedly funny, and because the analysis of how a person is shaped into helplessness has not dated. Chapters two and five, on the prevailing opinions of sexual character and on the writers who have made women objects of pity, are where the argument is sharpest. Read it with the Rights of Men, which most editions now print alongside it.
- First printed
- 1792
- First in English
- 1792
- Digitised
- Yes
Wollstonecraft planned a second volume, on the laws affecting women, and never wrote it; the unfinished novel Maria, published after her death, takes up some of that ground.
Written in English. All editions are public domain, and French and German translations appeared within two years.
Where it stands
Live, and read as philosophy rather than as a historical document. The argument that observed differences cannot settle questions about nature where the conditions have never varied is a standing move in feminist theory and well beyond it, and Wollstonecraft is now a fixture in political philosophy courses in a way she was not fifty years ago.
The passage
I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, chapter IV. Public domain, and Wollstonecraft's own words.
Contested
Whether the received story of a century of neglect is accurate has been questioned: the Memoirs and the post-revolutionary political climate certainly drove her reception underground in Britain, where she was treated as a fallen woman through most of the Victorian period, but her reputation in continental Europe, the United States and Brazil was more positive and more continuous. How radical the book's practical programme really is - it stops short of demanding the vote and only gestures at political representation - is argued. And how far her severity about women reflects her own position as an exception, supporting herself in a world where almost no woman did, is a question her biographers return to.