A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Penguin Classics)

by Mary Wollstonecraft (Author), Miriam Brody (Introduction), Miriam Brody (Introduction)

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $8.84

  Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity, and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. Mary Wollstonecraft's work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrage - Walpole called her 'a hyena in petticoats' - yet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $3.44

  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.

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $18.83

  Written during a time of great political turmoil, social anxiety, and against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft's argument continues to challenge and inspire. This revised and expanded Third Edition is again based on the 1792 second-edition text and is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations. Backgrounds and Contexts is also significantly expanded and contains twenty-four works organized thematically into these groupings: Legacies of English Radicalism, Education, Wollstonecraft's Revolutionary Moment, and The Wollstonecraft Debate. Opinions on a variety of reforms that may be compared and contrasted with Wollstonecraft's include those by John Milton, John Locke, Mary Astell, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hannah More, Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin, among others. Criticism includes six seminal essays on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Elissa S. Guralnick, Mitzi Myers, Cora Kaplan, Mary Poovey, Claudia L. Johnson, and Barbara Taylor. A Chronology of Wollstonecraft's life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.