A Vindication of the Rights of Women in fictitious form, written with great candor and an unbounded frankness by a female who had the audacity to challenge rigid English marriage laws, and to unabashedly proclaim that women harbored the “same capacity for rational thought and intellectual development as men.” Where in Vindication, Wollstonecraft (the mother of Mary Shelley, who wrote the novel Frankenstein) gave the first ray of hope for a different, more egalitarian form of marriage, Maria paints a bleak picture of women who are pummeled down mentally, spiritually and physically by tyrannical husbands. Very much ahead of her time, Maria asks the painfully rhetorical question “Was not the World a vast prison and women born slaves?” GC

Publisher: Norton
Paperback: 138 pages