Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer and philosopher whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a foundational text of feminist philosophy. She argued that women's apparent inferiority was a product of poor education, not nature, and demanded equal rational and political standing.

Wollstonecraft applied Enlightenment principles of reason and rights consistently to women at a time when her male contemporaries did not. Her critique of Rousseau's prescriptions for female education, her political writings on the French Revolution, and her defence of women's capacity for reason established her as a pioneering voice in liberal feminist thought.