Editor’s Introduction
Reading Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, 1792 – 2014
EILEEN HUNT BOTTING
Born into a troubled middle-class family in the garment district of Lon-
don, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 –1797) learned early that she would have
to support not only herself but also others through her intellect and work
ethic. Largely self-educated, she sought the tutelage of better-off friends,
ministers, and neighbors in pursuing her youthful interest in theology,
philosophy, and literature. She fi nancially sustained her extended fam-
ily through work as a lady’s companion, schoolmistress, governess, and,
fi nally, professional writer. She charted an unconventional path in love,
marriage, and motherhood, which made her a controversial public symbol
of the opportunities and pitfalls of female independence (Gordon 2005).
Wollstonecraft overcame these life challenges to become the internation-
ally renowned leading women’s rights advocate of the late Enlightenment.
She was also the fi rst philosopher to pen a book-length defense of women’s
rights as a kind of human rights in the wake of the democratic debates of
the French Revolution.
This landmark book—A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London:
Joseph Johnson, 1792) —was well known in the British Isles, continental
Europe, and the United States during the 1790s. It has continued to infl u-
ence women’s rights discourse and activism around the world. Nineteenth-
century novelists, journalists, abolitionists, chartists, labor organizers,
suffragists, socialists, anarchists, missionaries, and a variety of feminists
found in the text a rich resource for their arguments and activism concern-
ing the promotion of social justice for women (Kaplan 2002; Taylor 2003,
248; Botting 2013a).