In 1791 Talleyrand laid a report on national education before the French National Assembly. Schooling as a public entitlement, paid for by the state, owed to citizens as a matter of right. Girls were to be taught at home. The Revolution had proclaimed the rights of man, and then, in the clerical business of drafting a curriculum, quietly settled how far the word man reached. In London, a self-taught former governess read the pamphlet and answered it.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman went on sale in January 1792, written at speed, dedicated to Talleyrand by name and asking him to think again. Its claim is not that women are as clever as men but that nobody can be made virtuous by an education designed to make her agreeable, and that a society which raises half its people as ornaments corrupts the other half too. Virtue grows only among equals. That is a proposition about morality before it is one about justice, which is why the book keeps insisting that men are the second casualty of the arrangement.
The argument had a specific target, and she had loved him. Rousseau's Emile builds an education to keep a boy free of other people's opinion of him, incorruptible because independent. Then, in its fifth book, it turns to Sophie and prescribes the opposite: an upbringing whose whole purpose is to please. Wollstonecraft held him to his own principle: what he had diagnosed as the disease of civilised man — a self assembled out of the regard of others — was what he recommended for women, and called nature.
She knew the education she was attacking from inside it. Her father worked through the family money on a series of farms that failed; she had no schooling to speak of, and the reading was hers to do. She kept a school at Newington Green, lost it after leaving to nurse her friend Fanny Blood, who died at Lisbon in 1785, and went to Ireland as governess to the Kingsboroughs. In 1787 she told her sister Everina that she meant to become the first of a new kind — a woman who lived by her pen. She did. For Joseph Johnson she translated from French and German and reviewed more than two hundred books, working across Hume, Smith, Leibniz and Kant on a jobbing schedule.
That apprenticeship shows in the speed of her politics. Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790; her reply was in the shops the same month, anonymous, the first of the many that followed; the second edition, in December, carried her name.
She went to Paris in December 1792 and watched the Revolution turn. It cost her the simplest version of her own position. The letters she wrote from Scandinavia in 1795 concede that the passions are not brought to heel by reason as briskly as she had once required, and give the imagination work the earlier books had not; she complicated the argument without withdrawing it.
She married William Godwin in March 1797 and died on 10 September, eleven days after giving birth to the daughter who would write Frankenstein. The following year Godwin published a memoir of her that told the truth as he understood it: the affair with Gilbert Imlay, the child born outside marriage, the two attempts on her own life. For most of a century that book was used to avoid the argument rather than meet it, and the reasoning itself went unrefuted.
Her readers came back in the 1960s and have not agreed on what they found. Some take her for a liberal claiming rights, some for a republican for whom independence was the point, some for an early critic of commercial society.