Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) Was a Political Radical, a Social Critic

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was a political radical, a social critic with a strong egalitarian bent, a distinguished novelist, and one of the great forebears of feminist thought. What she wrote about women's rights and women's situation in society is still relevant today-and still considered radical by many. By law and by custom, middle-class English women in her day were thought to be subordinate to men in countless ways. They lived under the weight of a damaging presumption: women exist for the sake of men. Women were denied property ownership, expected to defer to men in important matters, barred from almost all professions, excluded from voting and government posts, deprived of higher education, and judged by different moral standards than those applied to men. Few societies in the rest of the world treated women any better.
Wollstonecraft studied the conditions in which women found themselves, and she read what prominent men had to say about the character, duties, and education of women. Thus much of her literary output was in response to the views of the famous Edmund Burke, who wrote in support of aristocratic rights and privileges, and to Rousseau, who considered women inferior to men. Her greatest works are A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).
-According to Wollstonecraft, the most perfect education is one that enables the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render the individual dependent and wise.