Mary Wollstonecraft Philosophical and Political Writings Collection: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Letters ... Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

by Mary Wollstonecraft

Three books in one! In one volume, the essential political and philosophical writings of early feminist thinker and influential political theorist and philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft . Included in this volume Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was a pioneering British feminist and writer who fought for the rights of women in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Born in London in 1759, she was the second of seven children. She received little formal education, but was well read and developed her own progressive views on society and education. In 1787, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women , which argued that women should be allowed the same educational and economic opportunities as men. Her arguments were radical for the time and she was heavily criticised for her views. Nonetheless, her work had a lasting impact on the struggle for women's rights and she is now considered one of the most influential feminists of the modern era. In addition to A Vindication of the Rights of Women , Mary Wollstonecraft produced several other works, including Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786), An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) and Maria (1798), a novel about a woman's struggle for independence. Mary Wollstonecraft died in 1797, shortly after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who would later become a famous writer in her own right. Mary Wollstonecraft's legacy remains a powerful influence in the fight for women's rights and her work is still widely read and discussed today.

254 pages, Paperback

Published April 25, 2021

About the author

Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth century British writer, philosopher, and feminist. Among the general public and specifically among feminists, Wollstonecraft's life has received much more attention than her writing because of her unconventional, and often tumultuous, personal relationships. After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement; they had one daughter, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight due to complications from childbirth, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts.

During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.


After Wollstonecraft's death, Godwin published a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for a century. However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences.

Information courtesy of Wikipedia.org