ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman at the midpoint of her short but intensive career. Wollstonecraft consistently argues for the idea of moral reason and supports her belief that all people, including women, share the right and the responsibility to act rationally. Rights of Woman developed the themes of Wollstonecraft's wider work, and focused for the first time on how these themes could be applied to questions of gender—and the rights of women. Although Rights of Woman continued to be read to some extent through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wollstonecraft's reputation was more closely linked to her unorthodox personal life. Rights of Woman was again seen as the central text of her body of work and as the text most explicitly concerned with women's rights. The impact of Rights of Woman as a foundational text of modern feminism gives it huge significance in Western history and philosophy.
