Mary Wollstonecraft's achievement as a prose writer is twofold. She was the most notable arguer for women's equality in her time. She also explored new ways of arguing for such equality as a woman in domains and discourses dominated by men. She looked for ways of arguing and uses of style and genre that would answer both to her claims for women and to her own position as a woman, writing and arguing in political and literary terrain from which women were to be excluded.

She lived in an age of increasing social conflict and change, conflicts and changes she knew well from family and personal experience. Wollstonecraft was born the second of seven children to a family of London master weavers and small-scale rentiers. But her father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, decided to attempt the jump from trade, however successful, to gentleman farmer--a significant rise up the social...