Modern feminism has brought the reputation of the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) to something approaching the luster it deserves. While she enjoyed a certain celebrity among political radicals in the years just after her death, beginning in the nineteenth century her fame as a writer was hidden by disproportionate attention to her unconventional and, at the time, shocking personal life. When, therefore, Virginia Woolf wrote in 1925 of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that they felt like books so true that they seem now to contain nothing new in them, it was more a wishful than an accurate statement of the case. Wollstonecraft’s advances in moral thinking still have the power to shock position-takers of every party. The importance of gender even today is said to cut across other criteria for judging the conduct of men and women in society; Wollstonecraft, by contrast, believed that the shared morality of men and women should cut across all specifications of gender.
