*A Vindication of the Rights of Woman*, the book Mary Wollstonecraft published in London in 1792, looks at first sight like a hastily written polemic; in fact it is one of the most systematic immanent critiques the Enlightenment ever received. She had recently written a *Vindication of the Rights of Men* against Edmund Burke; she now responded to Talleyrand's post-revolutionary education report, which had proposed that girls be trained only for marriage.

Wollstonecraft's central argument is direct. The Enlightenment defines the human being by *reason*, and grounds rights on reason. If women are rational beings, they must be entitled to the same rights as men — education, property, political participation. If they are not, they would have to be treated like animals; no one defends that. The visible 'inferiority' of women, therefore, must not be natural but made.

The most powerful sections of the book anatomise that making. Women, she shows, are denied serious education and trained instead in 'charm', 'delicacy', and 'sensibility'; they are then despised for the very weakness, calculation, and ornamental existence that this training produces. Her harshest target is Rousseau, whose *Émile* prescribes a programme designed to make Sophie 'pleasing' to a man — the same Rousseau who defends freedom and self-government for the male citizen. Few texts expose so cleanly the internal contradictions of Enlightenment universalism.

Wollstonecraft is not a limitless radical — the book does not reject marriage outright, and even on suffrage she is cautious. But the structure she introduces is permanent: the claim that almost everything that appears natural about 'womanhood' has in fact been historically and institutionally constructed. A century and a half later, when Simone de Beauvoir wrote that 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman', she was extending the ground Wollstonecraft had opened. Modern feminist philosophy is, directly or indirectly, a series of reformulations of the argument she began.