A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With strictures on Political and Moral Subjects.
Boston: Printed at Boston by Peter Edes for [Isaiah] Thomas and [Ebenezer T.] Andrews, 1792.
Price:
$1,750.00
Second American edition, printed the same year as the first American (Philadelphia) edition (per LOC), and first English edition. 340 pp. Half title. 8vo. Contemporary calf, red morocco label, lacks front endpaper. Foxing. Windle, A5d; Colby Library Quarterly p. 256; Evans 25054; ESTC W2450; PMM 242 (first edition).
Item #378442
Tallyrand's new system of national education was proposed to the French Assembly in 1791. In it only males would be educated. This inspired Wollstonecraft to write this work to show the need for the education of both sexes. Wollstonecraft's theory, as defined in a letter to Tallyrand, was "built on this simple principle that, if woman be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be common to all." Her work was "a rational plea for a rational basis to the relation between the sexes" (PMM). Vindication was an immediate best seller and, although there was nothing particularly shocking in her writings, there was much critical reaction, with Horace Walpole describing Mary as a "hyena in petticoats," while the evangelical writer Hannah More found the very title so ridiculous that she publicly expressed her intention never to read it.
"She was the first to fuse experience, intellect, and emotion to attack the sexual basis of social and religious tradition and to bring to issue to life as a philosophically based and practical reform to be incorporated forthwith in a specific society" (Sunstein, A Different Face. The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 207)
This Boston edition appeared shortly after the Philadelphia first American edition printed in the same year (though was advertised earlier). Among the prominent American women"s rights activists known to have read and been influenced by the Vindication are Judith Sargent Murray, Abigail Adams, and (later) Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Item #378442
Tallyrand's new system of national education was proposed to the French Assembly in 1791. In it only males would be educated. This inspired Wollstonecraft to write this work to show the need for the education of both sexes. Wollstonecraft's theory, as defined in a letter to Tallyrand, was "built on this simple principle that, if woman be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be common to all." Her work was "a rational plea for a rational basis to the relation between the sexes" (PMM). Vindication was an immediate best seller and, although there was nothing particularly shocking in her writings, there was much critical reaction, with Horace Walpole describing Mary as a "hyena in petticoats," while the evangelical writer Hannah More found the very title so ridiculous that she publicly expressed her intention never to read it.
"She was the first to fuse experience, intellect, and emotion to attack the sexual basis of social and religious tradition and to bring to issue to life as a philosophically based and practical reform to be incorporated forthwith in a specific society" (Sunstein, A Different Face. The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 207)
This Boston edition appeared shortly after the Philadelphia first American edition printed in the same year (though was advertised earlier). Among the prominent American women"s rights activists known to have read and been influenced by the Vindication are Judith Sargent Murray, Abigail Adams, and (later) Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
