Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity, and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner.

Mary Wollstonecraft's work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrage, yet it established her as the mother of modern feminism. She firmly established the demand for women’s emancipation in the context of the ever-widening urge for human rights and individual freedom that surrounded the great upheavals of the French and American revolutions.

Challenging the prevailing culture that trained women to be nothing more than docile, decorative wives and mothers, Wollstonecraft was an ardent advocate of equal education and the full development of women’s rational capacities. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she dared to ask a question whose urgency is undiminished in our time: how can women be both female and free?