Wollstonecraft, Mary.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects

London: J. Johnson, 1792. First edition. Original publisher's boards. Lacking fragile paper backstrip, revealing original stitching, completely unrestored. Some soiling and bumping to boards. Internally clean and complete. In all, an exceptional and unsophisticated copy of one of the most important founding documents of feminism: "A rational plea for a rational basis to the relation between the sexes" (Printing and the Mind of Man).

One of the founding documents of the women's equality movement, Vindication was radical in that it was rational. Rather than calling for the destruction of institutions such as marriage or family, Wollstonecraft used those structures to bolster her assertion that "if woman be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be common to all." By barring women from equally rigorous educations, society prevented women from rising to their full potential: as individuals as well as in their social roles, including those of of wife and mother. A signpost of Enlightenment thinking, Vindication applied wider political arguments to the existing systems of oppression operating between the sexes; in making marriage a microcosmic example of governmental tyranny, she uncovered its illogic and issued a call for the system's reconstruction within the rules of logic. "The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger." And, indeed, she assures men that her intention is not to reverse the system by imposing a similar yolk upon them, but to bring equilibrium. "I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves." A text that is foundational to feminism as well as to humanist thinking.

PMM 242. Feminist Companion 1180. (Item #3252)