Defending men's rights and defending women's rights

Author: Mary Wollstonecraft
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-07-01
Features: Mary Wollstonecraft, often described as the first major feminist, is principally remembered as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and there has been a tendency to view her most famous work in isolation. Yet Wollstonecraft's pronouncements on our women grew out of her reflections about men, and her views on the female sex constituted an integral part of a wider moral and political critique of her times which she first fully formulated in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Written as a reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), this is an important text in its own right as well as a necessary tool for understanding Wollstonecraft's later work. This edition brings the two texts together and also includes Hints, the notes which Wollstonecraft made towards a second, never completed, volume of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. SYLVAN TOMASELLI is an intellectual historian specializing in the Enlightenment. She is currently writing a study of Seduction and Civilisation: An Enlightenment Perspective on the History of Women, to be published by Weidenfeld.