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‘My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.’

In the midst of revolution, when fundamental social upheaval was reshaping France and America, writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft made an impassioned argument for women to have a place in this new world. Her demands laid out in this 1792 essay, to treat women as human beings deserving of a rational education, self-determination and equal rights alongside men, laid the foundation for modern feminism.

Wollstonecraft has been admired and loathed: called a ‘hyena in petticoats’ by Horace Walpole and an inspiration to writers and feminists such as George Eliot and Millicent Fawcett. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a key text to understand the making of the modern world.