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Mary Wollstonecraft

Enlightenment · Europe · 1759 to 1797

English writer who argued that women are held back by poor education, not by nature, and that reason belongs to both sexes.

What it is

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 to 1797) was a British writer, moral and political philosopher and early feminist. She is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), but her work ranged over education, politics, history, travel and novels.

Her central claim is that the apparent weakness of women is a product of how they are brought up, and that women and men share the same capacity to reason and to be virtuous. A society that keeps women in dependence, she argued, harms both sexes.

The main ideas

  • Women are rational. Women have the same capacity for reason as men, and the faults attributed to them come from an education that trains them to please, not to think.
  • Equal natural rights. All people, men and women, have equal natural rights, and a good society cannot be built until everyone is free to exercise them.
  • Virtue needs freedom. Virtue can only be cultivated when reason and feeling are allowed to develop freely in both sexes. False gender distinctions get in the way.
  • A critic of the age. She wrote against the aristocratic and commercial habits of her society, and against what she saw as a culture of consumption and display.

What it looks like in practice

Picture a girl who is taught only to be pleasing and never to question, and who then is told she is unfit for serious thought. Wollstonecraft would say the education made the weakness it then blamed, and that giving the same schooling to girls and boys would show their equal ability. This is an illustration of her argument, not a quotation.

Books and moments

  • A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) is a reply to Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution.
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is her most important work, on women's education and rights.
  • Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) is a travel book that shaped the genre.

Questions and criticism

  • Did she go far enough? Her demand was for education and equal standing, and later feminists asked for more.
  • Is her view of reason too narrow? She stresses reason and self-command, and some readers ask whether she undervalues feeling.
  • Does equal standing mean the same education? She asked for the same schooling for girls and boys, and it is still asked whether equality requires identical treatment or equal opportunity.

Close neighbours

She answered Burke's attack on the French Revolution. The pages on Rousseau and Mill show related arguments about education and equality: Rousseau is a thinker she read, and Mill a later one who argued for equality.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 9 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • Harriet Taylor Mill · She carried on the line of argument for women's rights that Wollstonecraft began. (scholars disagree about this link)
  • John Stuart Mill · Mill's argument for women's equality echoes Wollstonecraft. (scholars disagree about this link)
  • Simone de Beauvoir · Beauvoir's account of how women are made and not born has an ancestor in Wollstonecraft's argument. (scholars disagree about this link)

Influenced by

  • John Locke · Wollstonecraft's views on education and reason draw on Locke.
  • Mary Astell · Wollstonecraft carried on the argument for women's education that Astell had made a century earlier. (scholars disagree about this link)

Reacted against

  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau · The Vindication of the Rights of Woman argues against Rousseau's plan for a lesser education for girls.

Runs parallel to

  • Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz · Both defended women's right to learning in the face of church and social opposition. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Enlightenment thinkers

Sources we used

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