Mary Wollstonecraft: Enlightenment Feminist

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"Let not men then in the pride of power, use the same arguments that tyrannic kings and venal ministers have used, and fallaciously assert that woman ought to be subjected because she has always been so.... It is time to effect a revolution in female manners--time to restore to them their lost dignity.... It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners."--Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in London, England, where she later worked as a companion to a rich widow, as a governess, and as a proprietress of her own school. Her first published works were Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, a …