ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft's original concepts in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman helped make it possible for later feminists to develop their arguments about the character, potential, and place of women. Feminism aims to improve the position of women in society, but these movements-sometimes summarized as "waves"-have historically focused on different issues and problems. In the 1980s, scholars also began to point out the conservative aspects and limitations of Wollstonecraft's work, viewing it not only as a challenge to prejudices about gender, but a document of prejudices linked to class, race, religion, and sexuality. It has also come to be analyzed as a work of literature, and seen as a text linked to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movement of Romanticism in art and literature, as well as politics. Central to feminism, and to academic and political debates today, is the process of analyzing texts to show how they create or reinforce readers' ideas and assumptions.
