A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Sheila Rowbotham, who helped start the women's liberation movement in Britain, is known internationally as a historian of feminism and radical social movements. She is the author of the groundbreaking books Women, Resistance and Revolution; Woman's Consciousness, Man's World; and Hidden from History. Her later works include Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties and Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) first achieved fame for her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she extended the radical idea of the "rights of man" to women and laid the groundwork for modern feminism.