Manuscript draft fragment of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

In this text, Mary Wollstonecraft bases her demands for women’s equality on what they have in common with men: a moral duty to strive to be the best they can. “The end, the grand end of [women’s] exertions should be to unfold their own faculties and acquire the dignity of conscious virtue,” she writes. In the draft fragment in her hand shown here, the only one known to survive, she takes to task both the women who indulge in extravagant fashions and the men who mock them: “To laugh at them, then, or satirize the follies of a being who is never to be allowed to act freely from the light of her own reason, is as absurd as cruel… .” Wollstonecraft would no doubt feel that the redemptive political work of her Vindication is not yet finished.