Mary Wollstonecraft

Read Wollstonecraft against Rousseau, the thinker she most admired and most attacked. Émile had argued that girls should be educated only to please men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) replied that the "weakness" Rousseau described was the product of that very education, and that women denied reason could be neither good wives nor good citizens. Her case for equality rests on shared rationality, a premise later feminists would both build on and question.