Wollstonecraft sought to improve philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712–1788) educational philosophy (the goal of education is to learn how to live) by leaps and bounds. Referring to gendered oppression as slavery, she brings the nebulous "woman question" into the spotlight of civil and human rights and lifts to public awareness the relationship between public political systems (the divine right of kings) and private personal systems (the divine right of husbands). She links race-based chattel slavery to gendered bondage, exposing how "masters" of women benefit from creating a subhuman female to fulfill their designs. She delves into the psychology of the materially dependent to examine why women generally play along with the prejudices held against them. Wollstonecraft repeatedly makes the connection between slaves and Western womeneven those in the middle class.
Long cited as the fundamental text of Western feminism, the book continues to contribute to modern social thought in many ways. Though she states that she loves man as her "fellow," she is clear that "his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man." Rooting her argument that women deserve an education equal to men's on the human duty to use God's gift of reason, Wollstonecraft set traditional gender roles on their ear.
Responding to other writers who praised or attacked these antimonarchical uprisings, the tone of the book is by turn confrontational, instructive, harshly critical, sarcastically funny, idealistic, and visionary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), by Mary Wollstonecraft, was published in London during the third year of the French Revolution and the fifth year of George Washington's presidency of the new United States of America.
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