A Vindication of the Rights of Woman -- 1. The Rights and Involved Duties of Mankind Considered -- 2. The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed -- 3. The Same Subject Continued -- 4. Observations on the State of Degradation to which Woman is Reduced by Various Causes -- 5. Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt -- 6. The Effect which an Early Association of Ideas Has upon the Character -- 7. Modesty -- Comprehensively Considered, and Not as a Sexual Virtue -- 8. Morality Undermined by Sexual Notions of the Importance of a Good Reputation -- 9. Of the Pernicious Effects which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society -- 10. Parental Affection -- 11. Duty to Parents -- 12. On National Education -- 13. Some Instances of the Folly which the Ignorance of Women Generates, with Concluding Reflections on the Moral Improvement that a Revolution in Female Manners Might Naturally Be Expected to Produce.
Summary:
"In an age of ferment, following the American and French revolutions, Mary Wollstonecraft took prevailing egalitarian principles and dared to apply them to women. Her book is both a sustained argument for emancipation and an attack on a social and an economic system. As Miriam Brody points out in her introduction, subsequent feminists tended to lose sight of her radical objectives. For Mary Wollstonecraft all aspects of women's existence were interrelated, and any effective reform depended on the redistribution of political and economic power. Walpole once called her 'a hyena in petticoats', but it is a tribute to her forceful insight that modern feminists are finally returning to the arguments so passionately expressed in this remarkable book."--BOOK JACKET.
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