A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Penguin Classics)

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

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.31

  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
  1992

  $3.31

  First published in 1792, this book was written in a spirit of outrage and enthusiasm. In an age of ferment, following the American and French revolutions, Mary Wollstonecraft took prevailing egalitarian principles and dared to apply them to women. Her book is both a sustained argument for emancipation and an attack on a social and economic system. As Miriam Brody points out in her introduction, subsequent feminists tended to lose sight of her radical objectives. For Mary Wollstonecraft all aspects of women's existence were interrelated, and any effective reform depended on the redistribution of political and economic power.

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $18.96

  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.