A Vindication of the Rights of Man and a Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints

Mary Wollstonecraft, often described as the first major feminist, is remembered principally as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and there has been a tendency to view her most famous work in isolation. Yet Wollstonecraft’s pronouncements about women grew out of her reflections about men, and her views on the female sex constituted an integral part of a wider moral and political critique of her times which she first fully formulated in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). Written as a reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), this is an important text in its own right as well as a necessary tool for understanding Wollstonecraft’s later work. This edition brings the two texts together and also includes Hints, the notes which Wollstonecraft made towards a second, never completed, volume of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

• The first fundamental statement on \'feminist theory\' • Brings together for the first time two of her most famous works • One of the most important authors in the history of writings about women • This new presentation makes her work more accessible to students • Fully annotated throughout with a complete index

1. The rights and involved duties of mankind considered; 2. The prevailing opinion of a sexual character discussed; 3. The same subject continued; 4. Observations on the state of degradation to which woman is reduced by various causes; 5. Animadversions on some of the writers who have rendered women objects of pity, bordering on contempt; 6. The effect which an early association of ideas has upon the character; 7. Modesty - Comprehensively considered, and not as a sexual virtue; 8. Morality undermined by sexual notions of the importance of a good reputation; 9. Of the pernicious effects which arise from the unnatural distinctions established in society; 10. Parental affection; 11. Duty to parents; 12. On national education; 13. Some instances of the folly which the ignorance of women generates; with concluding reflections on the moral improvement that a revolution in female manners might naturally be expected to produce.

‘… a thoughtful, wide-ranging and important examination of Wollstonecraft’s thought … Wollstonecraft is skilfully considered in terms of radical Enlightenment thought, and the links between this and feminism are probed in a treatment that is alive to the diversity of this radicalism.’ Times Higher Education Supplement