•Education
•felt that denying education to women would deprive them of the tools they needed to properly exercise their reason.
•Women’s rights movement
•Many regard her writings as the beginning of the modern women’s rights movement.
Wollstonecraft education
Title page of Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
Wollstonecraft believed women were kept in ignorance “under the specious name of innocence.” She refers here to a common argument of the time which held that women should not be educated because it would ruin their natural “innocence” and have a detrimental effect on their character. She felt that denying education to women would deprive them of the tools they needed to properly exercise their reason.

In the first chapter of her book, Wollstonecraft proclaimed, “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to them their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.” Many regard A Vindication of the Rights of Women as marking the beginning of the modern women’s rights movement.