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?

Nervous Conditions is a modern classic in the African literary canon, vividly bringing to life the politics of decolonization with the energy of women's rights. This extraordinarily well-crafted work is a visionary novel that deftly negotiates race, class, gender, and cultural change.

It dramatizes the 'nervousness' of the postcolonial conditions that still affect us. Through the character of Tambu and the women of her family, African women see themselves, whether at home or displaced, engaging in daily battles with their changing world with a mixture of tenacity, bewilderment, and grace.

Three Guineas is written as a series of letters in which Virginia Woolf explores the complex interconnections between gender, war, and intellectual freedom. The book is structured around three requests for a donation of a guinea: one for a women's college building fund, another for a society promoting professional women, and a third to help prevent war and protect culture and intellectual liberty.

Woolf's response is a profound meditation on the state of women's education and employment in the 1930s, questioning why education for women is so poorly supported and why women are discouraged from professional careers. She challenges the liberal orthodoxies of her time and presents discomforting arguments about the relationship between gender and violence.

This work is a pacifist-feminist essay whose message continues to resonate in contemporary global issues, making it a classic in feminist literature.