Mary Wollstonecraft

In her seminal text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft crafts a masterful response to the inherently sexist public education system in eighteenth century England. Taking an uncommon position for her time, Wollstonecraft argued the importance of allowing young women equal access to the education system, and asserted that females, like their male counterparts, should be defined by their vocations and not their marital partners....

"Backgrounds and Contexts," significantly expanded, contains twenty-four works, spanning a period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, that are organized thematically into four sections: "Legacies of English Radicalism," "Education, ""Wollstonecraft's Revolutionary Moment," and "THe Wollstonecraft Controversy." These writings, by John Milton, John Locke, Mary Astell, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hannah More, and Edmund Burke, among others,...

"The two books here reprinted are milestones marking the advance of a great social movement, from a time when it was viewed with the contemptuous disregard or facetious notice reserved for that which is too eccentric even to arouse indignation as immoral, through a period when a few people of more intellectual than practical influence regarded its demands as politically feasible, to its present-day triumph. This triumph has, in turn, marked the beginning...