Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women
date: label: date made
content: 1792
notes: label: Description
content: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), an Englishwoman who wrote social and political commentary in the “republican” tradition of her day, produced A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. The pamphlet quickly became a sensation in both Europe and the US. This copy is an early American edition, published in Boston just a few months after the original appeared in London. It was popular reading among a broad public in the early nation, when citizens of the US eagerly followed international debates. The handwriting on the top of the title page suggests someone named “Lettice” may have owned this one.
label: Description
content: Wollstonecraft was one of a very few women who tried to make a living as a professional writer in the 1790s. Her first publication, on the topic of female education, drew on her experience as a private governess. Her second, A Vindication of the Rights of Man, defended the French Revolution against those who preferred hierarchy and elite control and lamentcd the new political engagement of ordinary men. Her more famous treatise, on the Rights of Woman, responded to a French Revolutionary proposal that would have the government fund schools for French boys but leave girls to learn domestic skills at home. Wollstonecraft defended females’ capacity for rational thought and denounced social mores that rendered women frivolous and passive. Her work did not claim social equality or political rights, such as voting, for women, but it insisted that educated women could contribute to the sum of the world’s knowledge both as mothers within families and as participants in their broader society.
label: Description
content: Widely discussed and debated, Wollstonecraft’s work was received well even by some who disagreed with her radical ideas. Late in the 1790s, however, information about her unconventional personal life discredited her ideas among some. In the early 1800s, a growing backlash against women’s revolutionary gains made Wollstonecraft denounced more often than read. Still, her ideas galvanized supporters of improving women’s education; informed abolitionist women who pressed to speak in public in the 1830s; and, inspired participants in the formal women’s rights movement of the 1840s and beyond. Twentieth- and twenty-first century women also rediscovered her pathbreaking ideas.
place: label: place made
content: United States: Massachusetts, Boston
title: label: Title
content: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstoncraft, 1792
topic: label: general subject association
content: Women's History
label: general subject association; classified
content: Women's Rights
label: general subject association
content: Books
setName: label: See more items in
content: Political History: Political History, Women's History Collection
label: See more items in
content: Government, Politics, and Reform
label: Exhibition
content: Within These Walls
label: Exhibition Location
content: National Museum of American History
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2017.0079.01
label: accession number
content: 2017.0079
label: catalog number
content: 2017.0079.01
objectType: label: Object Name
content: book
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: paper (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 8 in x 5 in; 20.32 cm x 12.7 cm