A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Analysis

Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication only three years after the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1789, which had been inspired by the American Revolution of 1776. Needless to say that revolution w...

Wollstonecraft writes this book as a first-person narrator. The book is a philosophical treatise, after all, coming from the mind of Ms. Mary W. herself, so the choice makes sense. But don't let th...

This book is no novel. This ain't fiction. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a straight-up philosophical treatise, one that Wollstonecraft wrote for a single central purpose: to show the wor...

If there's on thing that Wollstonecraft believes in, it's the power of Reason. She loves Reason so much that she even spells it with a capital "R." So it makes sense that she uses the most rational...

Wollstonecraft is harsh when she needs to be, which is something that many of her readers would have associated with "masculine" behavior. Shades of the argument to re-label "bossy", anyone? But as...

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a pretty no-nonsense title for a book. The word vindication in Wollstonecraft's title refers to "show(ing) that something that has been criticized or doubte...

"When I first began to write this work, I divided it into three parts, supposing that one volume would contain a full discussion of the arguments which seemed to me to rise naturally from a few si...

"Be just then, O ye men of understanding! and mark not more severely what women do amiss, than the vicious tricks of the horse or the ass for whom ye provide provender—and allow her the privileg...

Wollstonecraft does her darnedest to make A Vindication of the Rights of Woman a commonsense and approachable argument for women's rights. But the fact remains that she wrote this book in 1792 for...

Wollstonecraft opens the book by establishing three basic premises that she'll rely on for all of her arguments. First, she says that humanity is special because it has the power to overcome its an...

At the beginning of this book, Wollstonecraft realizes that there is a major problem with the way women are treated in English society (or pretty much any society, but she doesn't so much get into...

Wollstonecraft spends the first third of Vindication talking about the general rights of humanity. For her, human rights are due to anyone with the ability to reason. You got it: we all have the...

Wollstonecraft wasn't the only famous person in her family. Her daughter was Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. (Source)  Neither Wollstonecraft nor her boyfriend William Godwin believed...

Sure, Wollstonecraft sometimes mentions the possibility of uneducated women getting easily seduced into having sex with young men. But she buries these claims under so much reasonable, logical lang...

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