Vindication of the Rights of Women

This is Mary Wollstonecraft's most famous work. While she does not seek to undermine the family, she argues strongly for a woman's right to enter any sphere of activity she chooses, affirming a woman's right to fulfilment as a human and not merely as a sexual being. This was a view inevitably limited by the age in which she wrote, and this edition incorporates as appendices writings by contemporary philosophers such as Rousseau, Locke and Kant, thereby placing Wollstonecraft's thinking in context.