Recommendations
Books Like A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Best books to read after A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
Readers who love A Vindication of the Rights of Woman — Wollstonecraft's founding feminist argument that women's weakness is the product of defective education and social condition — will enjoy these works of feminist philosophy, the literature of women's rights, and the great tradition of political writing on gender and equality.
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Buy on AmazonThe Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
The twentieth-century equivalent of the Vindication — de Beauvoir's existentialist feminist argument that 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' is the most important feminist philosophical text since Wollstonecraft and develops the same argument (that femininity is constructed, not natural) with existentialist philosophy rather than Enlightenment rationalism.
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Buy on AmazonThe Subjection of Women
by John Stuart Mill
The philosophical sequel in the liberal tradition — Mill's 1869 argument for women's legal equality makes the same Enlightenment case as Wollstonecraft with seventy more years of evidence; Mill explicitly acknowledged the debt to Wollstonecraft.
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Buy on AmazonThe Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan
The American feminist text that renewed Wollstonecraft's argument for the 1960s — Friedan's account of the 'problem that has no name' (educated women confined to domestic roles) is Wollstonecraft's argument about defective female education applied to postwar suburban America.
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Buy on AmazonThe Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria
by Mary Wollstonecraft
Wollstonecraft's own fictional complement to the Vindication — the novel of a woman imprisoned by her husband and lacking all legal recourse illustrates concretely the abstract arguments of the Vindication; essential reading with it.
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Buy on AmazonA Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's essay on women and fiction extends Wollstonecraft's argument into the literary realm — women need money and privacy to write; both texts are about the material conditions for women's intellectual and creative life, and Woolf explicitly honours Wollstonecraft as a predecessor.
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Buy on AmazonEmile
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Wollstonecraft's primary target in the Vindication — Rousseau's educational treatise argues for an education for girls (Sophie's education) designed to make them pleasing to men rather than rational agents; reading the Sophie section of Emile alongside the Vindication gives the argument its sharpest context.
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Buy on AmazonThe Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's dystopia is the most powerful fictional response to Wollstonecraft's argument — Gilead explicitly creates the social conditions that Wollstonecraft argued reduce women to irrationality and dependence, and Offred's situation is the literal embodiment of Wollstonecraft's theoretical warning.
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Buy on AmazonLetters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
by Mary Wollstonecraft
Wollstonecraft's most personal prose work — the travel letters written during her period of greatest personal distress (following Imlay's abandonment) show the author of the Vindication as a feeling, suffering person; Godwin fell in love with her by reading them.
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