THE FOLIO SOCIETY

As revolution raged in France, and old hierarchies were being torn down, the most brilliant minds in Europe were hotly debating ideas that would shape the modern world. Among them came an entirely new voice – radical, confident, uncompromising, and, most extraordinarily perhaps, it belonged to a woman. Mary Wollstonecraft argued for the rights of man and woman to be equal. A woman, she claimed, was not naturally inferior to a man. A woman lacked education not intellect; she was man’s equal, not his play thing nor his caretaker; and if she had vices (which she did) then they sprang from society’s faults. Nothing but true reform would correct this, to improve the lives of half of humanity, and the relations of everyone.

Her book – impassioned, impetuous and incisive in its arguments – earned Wollstonecraft the label of ‘a hyena in petticoats’ and changed the social landscape forever. Over two hundred years later, Wollstonecraft’s concerns are still our own: the over-sexualisation of women, the tyranny of fashion, the corruption of politics, the need for better parenting, better education and equal, loving relationships. Reading her arguments today, in her distinctive voice, one is struck by how much we now take for granted, how formative Mary Wollstonecraft’s vision has proved, and how brilliantly she put into words an irresistible ideal for the world to live up to.