Mary Wollstonecraft is the most famous feminist of the eighteenth century. Her writings provided an inspiration for later feminist movements and became particularly popular with second-wave feminism in the 1960s. She earned her own living as a paid companion, teacher, and writer, and as a translator for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. She spent two years in France observing the revolution, had a child out of wedlock, and attempted suicide twice. She later married the political anarchist William Godwin and died in childbirth.

Her best-known work is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, published in 1792. She believed in education as a means of liberating women, and she denied the sexual double standard. Reason was not the prerogative of men alone. By the end of her life she was championing the natural rights of all victims of a patriarchal society, which...