Mary Wollstonecraft's vindication of women's rights and worn of form

 

Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) authored the book in response to Edmund Burke's late 1790 publication, Reflections on the French Revolution. Burke considered the French Revolution as an unavoidable failure because society required old structures such as hereditary positions and property to be strengthened. Wollstonecraft's original answer was to publish A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790), a rejection of Burke's argument in favor of legislative reform, and asserting that religious and civic liberty was part of a man's birthright, with corruption being produced mostly by ignorance. This was hardly a novel argument for men's rights — Thomas Paine released his Rights of Man in 1791, also fighting against Burke – but Wollstonecraft took it a step beyond and, for the first time, a book was written arguing for women's rights to be equal to men's.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written in 1791 and published in 1792, with a second version issued the following year. It was sold as the first book of the work, although Wollstonecraft never wrote any more. Prior to this era, books pushed for the reform of female education, frequently for moral grounds or to better prepare women for their function as men's companions. Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, condemns women's education in her introduction as follows:
I explain [these difficulties] to a flawed educational system derived from publications produced on the subject by men who, when considering females, She goes on to explain, "I shall first evaluate women in the great light of human creatures, who, like men, are here on this world to unveil their capacities....
Wollstonecraft's arguments were sometimes decades ahead of their time. In Chapter 12 'On National Education,' for example, she advocates for the development of a national education system to manage mixed-gender schools. She also claims that it is necessary.
It is essential for women's dignity that they have the right and ability to earn their own income and sustain themselves.
The book's chapters contain a wide range of issues, and the numerous digressions in the text back up William Godwin's claim that Wollstonecraft completed the book in six weeks. Wollstonecraft's tone communicates both her sense of humor and her rage at the weakened condition in which the majority of women were obliged to live:
My own sex, I trust, would forgive me if I treat them as sensible people, rather than praising their charming charms and regarding them as if they were permanent children, unable to stand alone.
During Wollstonecraft's lifetime, the reaction to Vindication was good in her own liberal intellectual dissident community, but quite hostile elsewhere. In one of his letters, Horace Walpole referred to her as a "hyena in petticoats." Following Wollstonecraft's death in 1798, her husband William Godwin released her memoirs, which he had written as part of his mourning process. In them, he was frank and honest about not just his own premarital connection with Mary, but also her former relationship with Gilbert Imlay and the birth of their illegitimate child, Fanny Imlay. The controversy that resulted meant that Wollstonecraft's literary legacy was ignored, and when, many years later, Fanny Imlay killed suicide as a consequence of an unpleasant relationship, and Mary Godwin committed suicide as a result of an unhappy relationship.  When Wollstonecraft and Mary Godwin (Wollstonecraft's daughter with William Godwin) eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, society quickly blamed Wollstonecraft's feminist beliefs.