A Vindication of the Rights of Men

This book contains Mary Wollstonecraft's major written works from the 1790s, in the order of their publication. The first volume includes her passionate reactions to the beginning of the French Revolution, as well as her anxiety about its later, more violent phase. It shows that she gradually became aware of women’s involvement in both political and social life and of the relationship between these things and economics. In personal terms, it reveals her attempts to understand humankind’s “perfectibility” through rational education and how this notion weakened after she had to deal with miserable experience herself, along with the revolutionary massacres.