1A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMANDuring the utter tumult and confusion following the French Revolution of 1789,British philosophers and political observers saw the movement as a cruel overthrowing of alegal government, much like the execution of Charles I in 1649. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) entered the picture with her work ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men’ (1790),followed by her more celebrated work, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1792),where she contends against the 18th century political philosophies that regard the educationand empowerment of women as needless. In her work, especially the second chapter,Wollstonecraft deals with several social aspects like love, sex, marriage, education, religion;and shows portrays their interplay with the sexes- masculinity and felinity. Although Wollstonecraft’s work went on to influence many of the modern feministwriters like Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, it does not conform exactly to themodern theory of feminism, which essentially sees men and women as having equalcapabilities. In no point in her work does she state that men and women were born to beequal; but accepts the superior powers and status of men and suggests measures to bridge thegap. Unlike modern feminist writings which sometimes have a one-point-agenda of blamingpatriarchy for the present plight of women, A Vindication suggests that women also havetheir own share of blame, in the present inequity between sexes.The very first agenda Wollstonecraft dwells upon is education, which in theeighteenth century, was reserved exclusively for men. She says that women, due to their lackof education and rationale, keep walking into the ensnaring design of patriarchy whichadvises women to nurture only their beauty and physical attributes instead of receivingeducation. She declares in her preface: “...my main argument is built on this simple principle,that if (woman) be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stopthe progress of knowledge and virtue; for truth must be common to all" (Vindication, 102).According to her, equally responsible is "a false system of education, gathered from the

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