A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The First Edition of this Norton Critical Edition was both an acclaimed classroom text and ahead of its time. This Second Edition offers the best in Wollstonecraft scholarship and criticism since 1976, providing the ideal means for studying the first feminist document written in English.

The text of the work remains that of Wollstonecraft's second edition of 1792, for scholarship has vindicated that choice. The annotations have been greatly expanded.

Backgrounds documents more fully the early concern for women's education, with important extracts from the relevant works of John Locke and Mary Astell, as well as three more of Catherine Macaulay's influential "Letters on Education."

A new section, The Wollstonecraft Debate, provides a wide spectrum of opinions about the woman herself, from the nastiness of Richard Polwhele to the adulation of William Blake, balanced by the cool intelligence of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

Criticism contains essays by Emma Rauschenbusch-Clough, Carolyn W. Korsmeyer, R. M. Janes, Elissa S. Guralnick, Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd, Mitzi Myers, and Mary Poovey.

A Chronology of Wollstonecraft's life and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) first achieved fame for her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she extended the radical idea of the "rights of man" to women and laid the groundwork for modern feminism.