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  • Published: 21 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9780307757814
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman





One of the strongest and earliest arguments for the importance of female equality

Presented here in a stunning hardcover edition with an introduction by Barbara Taylor, this first great manifesto of women’s rights, published in 1792 and an immediate best seller, made Mary Wollstonecraft the toast of radical circles and the target of reactionary ones.

Writing just after the French and American revolutions, Mary Wollstonecraft firmly established the demand for women’s emancipation in the context of the ever-widening urge for human rights and individual freedom that surrounded those two great upheavals. She thereby opened the richest, most productive vein in feminist thought, and her success can be judged by the fact that her once radical polemic, through the efforts of the innumerable writers and activities she influenced, has become the accepted wisdom of the modern era.

Challenging the prevailing culture that trained women to be nothing more than docile, decorative wives and mothers, Wollstonecraft was an ardent advocate of equal education and the full development of women’s rational capacities. Having supported herself independently as a governess and teacher before finding success as a writer, and having conducted unconventional relationships with men, Wollstonecraft faced severe criticism both for her life choices and for her ideas. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she dared to ask a question whose urgency is undiminished in our time: how can women be both female and free?

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines. Everyman’s Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

  • Published: 21 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9780307757814
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Other books in the series

Emma
Persuasion
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in Spitalfields, London. After an unsettled childhood, she opened a school following which, her first work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, was published in 1787. After a stint as governess in Ireland, she continued to write and published several other works including Mary (1788), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and her most famous, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). That year she travelled to Paris where she met Gilbert Imlay, by whom she had a daughter, Fanny. Her travels around Scandinavia with her baby daughter in 1795, inspired her travel book Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, but on returning to London Imlay’s neglect drove her to two suicide attempts. In 1797 she married William Godwin, and had a daughter, the future Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia shortly after the birth.

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