A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1792.
First edition. xix, 452 pp. Recent full leather binding. Contents Near Fine with a few light stains along top edge that intrude slightly into margins; generally pages quite bright and generally free of foxing, though. Occasional thin tidemarks along bottom margin. Former owner's name written on front free endpaper, dated 1792. A famous rebuttal of contemporary conservative thinker Edmund Burke, who decried the French Revolution and individual rights. Wollstonecraft asserted that both sexes should have equal access to education, thereby bettering women as citizens of an enlightened republic. Many have viewed the work as proto-feminist, for it anticipates feminism in many ways, even though no such organized movement would exist for decades. Critic and author Katha Pollitt writes in a recent introduction to the book, “Mary Wollstonecraft was not the first writer to call for women to receive a real, challenging education. But she was the first to connect the education of women to the transformation of women’s social position, of relations between the sexes, and even of society itself." As such it represents the peak of radical Enlightenment thought, and a very important step towards universal suffrage.
Sold