A different face

Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the eighteenth-century classic, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, did not march through life toward specific goals of feminism. Instead she fought her way to personal independence with a passionate, stubborn intensity at a time when women--presumed inferior--were narrowly circumscribed by law, custom, and religious belief. She demanded also a ration of happiness and sexual fulfillment, refusing to conform to the model of a submissive, decorative, domestically useful woman. Possessed of great intellectual ambitious, and largely self-educated, she rebelled against injustice everywhere she perceived it, and gradually became a political radical.