A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The books a carefully raised girl was actually handed were James Fordyce's sermons to young women and John Gregory's legacy of advice to his daughters: warm, much loved, and dedicated to teaching her to conceal what she knew, husband her health and reputation as capital, and marry well. Wollstonecraft had written in that line herself five years earlier. Joseph Johnson published her demolition of it in January 1792, dedicated to Talleyrand, whose report to the French National Assembly had proposed that girls be schooled at home in domestic duties and left there. The claim is not that women are as clever as men. It is that virtue has one standard for everybody, that an education built to produce an agreeable companion cannot produce a person capable of virtue, and that a society raising half its members as ornaments spoils the other half in the process. Rousseau is the largest target: she had read Emile closely, and thirty years on it still set the terms for how Europe thought about bringing up a child. Fordyce and Gregory supply the domestic edition of the same instruction. She wrote fast: 87,000 words, and she said afterwards she could have done it better with time. It sold well from the first: a second edition almost at once, then American editions, a French translation the same year, a German one by two schoolmasters in 1793, and warm reviews running from the Analytical Review in London to the New York Magazine. Thomas Taylor replied with a satire about brutes. The second volume she intended was never written. The unfinished novel she left at her death in 1797 is read as its fictional sequel. Then in 1798 her widower William Godwin published a candid memoir of her, recording her love affairs, her illegitimate daughter and her two suicide attempts, and the book went out of print until the middle of the following century. Millicent Garrett Fawcett introduced a new edition in 1891 and claimed its author for the suffrage campaign.