Review of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792)
Mary Wollstonecraft (writer).
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It is not, I assert, a bold attempt to emulate masculine virtues; it is not the enchantment of literary pursuits, or the steady investigation of scientific subjects, that lead women astray from duty. No, it is indolence and vanity — the love of pleasure and the love of sway, that will reign paramount in an empty mind.
The author does make a couple of hundred appeals to “reason”, but the prescriptive foibles of the Enlightenment do not dominate this foundational feminist text. Its foundations are sound, its attacks on Rousseau are well considered, and all of that was obvious enough at the time that this text did not make Wollstonecraft infamous. It was a biography that came out a few years later that showed her practising what she preached.
References here: The Subjection of Women (1869).