Born April 27, 1759, Mary Wollstonecraft became one of the most influential intellectuals of late eighteenth-century Britain. In her short but turbulent career, she worked as a governess, a teacher, a book reviewer, a political essayist, a historical and travel writer, and a novelist. Her most widely known work is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A product of the Enlightenment tradition, which stressed the importance of reason, Wollstonecraft sought to elevate women from their dependence on men through “a revolution in female manners” (Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 192). Inspired by the rational ideals put forth by the supporters of the French Revolution and her own life experiences, Wollstonecraft wrote passionately throughout the 1790s about the suffering of women and men of various classes. In 1790 she published A Vindication of the Rights of Men, which, like Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791-92), asserted that there are “rights” that “men inherit at their birth” (Wollstonecraft, Vindications: Rights of Men, p. 43). In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she shifts the focus to women. Women, she argues, have to become more independent and rational, and better educated.
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