SOURCE: Guralnick, Elissa S. “Radical Politics in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Studies in Burke and His Time 18, no. 3 (autumn 1977): 155-66.

In the following essay, Guralnick argues that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is much more than a feminist tract, and is a statement of extreme political radicalism that extends to criticizing, for example, the monarchy and the British educational system.

Since its publication in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman has been treated almost exclusively as a feminist manifesto, a simple defense of women's rights. Although critics have generally allowed that the Rights of Woman enlarges upon the political tenets expounded in the Rights of Men, little attention has been paid to the relationship between the two documents. It has been as if the warning implied in the March 1792 issue of the Analytical Review has been carefully and universally heeded...