Equality

If reason is the basis of rights, then whoever can reason has rights. Wollstonecraft followed the argument wherever it led.

The Enlightenment built its politics on reason: natural rights, individual dignity, the capacity to govern oneself. But it drew the boundary of these rights around men of property. Wollstonecraft asked why. If reason is the faculty that grounds rights, and women possess reason, then the exclusion of women from civil and political life is not a natural fact but a political choice, maintained by deliberate ignorance. Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman is not a polemic but an argument, patient and detailed, that the same principles the Revolution claimed to defend required extending them to half the human race. No one had said it so plainly before.