English writer and philosopher who made the foundational argument for women's rational equality in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), challenging the Enlightenment's failure to extend its own principles to half the human race — and whose unconventional life became as contested as her ideas.
Wollstonecraft argued that women were not naturally inferior to men — they had simply been denied education and treated like slaves. She wrote this in 1792. The argument was obvious once made and resisted for another century and a half. The gap between the argument's logic and the world's response is the history of feminism.