The Vindications: The Rights of Men and the Rights of Woman: McCourt Fiction Series

The works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) ranged from the early Thoughts on the Education of Daughters to The Female Reader, a selection of texts for girls, and included two novels. But her reputation is founded on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman of 1792. This treatise is the first great document of feminism--and is now accepted as a core text in western tradition.

It is not widely known that the germ of Wollstonecraft's great work came out of an earlier and much shorter vindication--A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), written in the context of the issues raised by the French Revolution. This edition, which follows the model of other Broadview Editions in including a range of materials that help the reader to see the work in the context of its era out of which it emerged, is arranged chronologically, opening with Wollstonecraft's "other vindication." It also includes a wide range of other documents in appendices, as well as a comprehensive and authoritative introduction, chronology, and full index.

The late D.L. Macdonald was Professor of English at the University of Calgary and was also the author of Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of The Vampyre.

Kathleen Scherf, Associate Dean of Arts at the University of New Brunswick, is also the editor of The Collected Poems of Malcolm Lowry.

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Written as a passionate riposte to Talleyrand's report to the French National Assembly, in which he declared that women needed only a domestic education, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the traditional view of decorative femininity and deplored the educational restrictions and the "mistaken notions of female excellence" that degraded women and kept them in a state of "slavish dependence". Indeed, independence, "the grand blessing of life", was at the heart of Wollstonecraft's philosophy, and it is a mark of the profound influence of her words that Virginia Woolf, writing almost a century and a half later, could state that "her originality has become our commonplace".

As a companion piece, this volume also includes A Vindication of the Rights of Men - an earlier influential pamphlet advocating republicanism and social equality. The two Vindications, taken together, showcase Wollstonecraft's rhetorical talents, as well as her brilliance and depth of thought as an anti-establishment polemist and social reformer.

We hear her voice and trace her influence even now.