Wollstonecraft developed first systematic feminist critique. Discuss her main ideas.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is the first sustained application of Enlightenment reason to the position of women, written against Rousseau's Sophie in Emile and against Burke's defence of hierarchy.

Her main ideas.

• Reason has no sex. If rationality is the ground of rights, and women are rational beings, the exclusion of women is a contradiction in Enlightenment thought, not an exception to it.
• Femininity is manufactured, not natural. Women's apparent frivolity is the product of an education that trains them for display. The claim that a false system of education has made them weak, and then blamed the weakness on nature, is her decisive move — the ancestor of the sex/gender distinction.
• Equal education. She proposes national, co-educational day schools, since character cannot be reformed while the sexes are separately trained.
• Marriage as legal prostitution. Denied property, professions and independent income, women trade beauty for maintenance. She demands civil and political existence, and representation of their own.
• Virtue is one. There cannot be a separate feminine virtue of docility; the same standard must apply to both, or morality has no foundation.

Limits. She writes for the middle class and is dismissive of aristocratic and working women; she accepts that most women's sphere will be domestic, arguing chiefly that rational women make better mothers and citizens. Later feminists also fault her rationalism for treating the body and sexuality with suspicion.