A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a classic feminist essay by Mary Wollstonecraft. The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove, that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers that are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.

This edition features a shrewd, annotated abridgment of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) accompanied by an array of texts that help situate the Vindication in its political, historical, and intellectual contexts. Included are key selections from Wollstonecraft's other writings; from closely related works by Burke, Paine, Godwin, Rousseau, Macaulay, Talleyrand, and Brockden Brown; and from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and de Gouges' Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen (1791).

Product Description: One of the most radical feminist theorists in Europe before the nineteenth century, François Poullain de la Barre (1647-1723) was a man way ahead of his time. Applying Cartesian principles to "the Woman Question," Poullain demonstrated by rational deduction that the supposedly "self-evident" inequality of the sexes was nothing more than unfounded prejudice...read more

Product Description: During her lifetime, the gifted writer Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565-1645) was celebrated as one of the "seventy most famous women of all time" in Jean de la Forge's Circle of Learned Women (1663). The adopted daughter of Montaigne, as well as his editor, Gournay was a major literary force and a pioneering feminist voice during a tumultuous period in France...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) is increasingly recognised not only as one of the most influential thinkers on women's rights, but also as an incisive and observant writer on politics, education and social issues. Wollstonecraft wrote her first polemical work, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in 1790 in response to Edmund Burke's conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France...read more

Product Description: In this example of Cartesian rationalism, Poullain expounds a remarkably modern feminist position - that sexual inequality is not rooted in nature, but is the historical result of custom, ignorance, and prejudice. Translated into English text from the original French text of 1673, this edition also includes an introduction...read more

Product Description: Poullain de La Barre's De l'égalité des deux sexes is one of the earliest and most important statements on the difference between "sex" and "gender." Published in 1673, Poullain's treatise argues that the popular opinion of the inferiority of women is little more that socialized prejudice, legitimized by historians and philosophers who falsely assign their bias to nature rather than to their own psycho-sexual fears of female power...read more

Product Description: This work is a detailed historical and critical analysis of Wollstonecraft's unique work, based upon her own text and not upon the imperfect versions that are the result of time.