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Philosophy Then

A Vindication of A Vindication

Peter Adamson asks what Mary Wollstonecraft wanted.

Can you name a philosopher who gets us from the French Revolution to Frankenstein in one move? One valid answer would be Mary Wollstonecraft. She was born in 1759 and died in 1797, which means she had the chance to be inspired, and then crushingly disappointed, by the French Revolution.

Wollstonecraft wrote about the French political experiment in one of a number of treatises she produced on political topics. In fact her masterpiece, the pioneering work of feminist philosophy called A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a kind of sequel to her earlier Vindication of the Rights of Men. That was published in 1790, with the more famous work on the rights of woman following two years later.

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