Mary Wollstonecraft had already drawn on much of the philosophy of Locke and Rousseau in her justification of the 1789 French Revolution two years previous to the writing of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, citing the natural rights of all men over hereditary power, and advocating for a popular republican government over what she viewed as a coarse, embezzling French Aristocracy. Wollstonecraft’s pamphlet, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men’ addressed directly Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)’ and chastised the writer for supporting the English and French nobility where he might instead be supporting dawning societies of equal rights, commerce, merit, and moral self-perfection.

Many of Wollstonecraft’s arguments were framed in the same spirit as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, whom she had met through publisher Joseph Johnson in intellectual circles in Southwark, London. At heart, Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a response to how women were being excluded from this moment of political opportunity, chiefly through their denial to education and in consequence their full participation as citizens in society. At the time of writing the new National Assembly in France were in deliberation over whether to constrict a woman’s role to be kept strictly in the home to which they were naturally accustomed, while men would be awarded a constitutional right to public education because they were naturally better suited to public offices and public life.

Wollstonecraft powerfully argued that women are capable of rational self-development, and that limits infringe the inalienable rights Locke had seen as a general human condition. Women were only made less adept to intellectual pursuits by their upbringing, not by some inherent disposition to sensitivity. Moreover, she argued, society as a whole would suffer for goodness and truth if mothers didn’t have the abilities to properly educate their sons and daughters. Women left to be only aides at home and restricted in fulfilling their moral potential by lack of education would lead to broader social decay.

Wollstonecraft’s arguments started to punch holes and highlight hypocrisy in the emergent democratic principles at the turn of the century, seeing Women’s educational liberty and social inclusion as coherent with, and justified by the democratic tradition. After witnessing women’s marches play a large part in the overthrow of the Ancien regime in France, while Rousseau declares in Emile, his work on children’s education, that his character Sophie ought to be made submissive, passive and ‘specially to please’ her great work, Vindication of the Rights of Woman pushes democracy to reckon with itself and consider how societies can extend freedom for those excluded individuals and for its own good.