Sublime

In late 18th-century England, women had very few rights. Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft was frustrated that this lack of rights limited a woman’s ability to be independent and make choices on how to live her life. Instead of arguing, however, for why women should get rights, she recognized that she had to demonstrate the value that these rights wo

Mary’s “trespass”—her insistence that women’s rights be included in a society founded on the basis of personal liberties—was one of her most important contributions to political philosophy and what would come to be known as feminism.

1881, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony published the first volume of their monumental History of Suffrage, they put Wollstonecraft at the top of their list of heroic women “[w]hose earnest lives and fearless words, in demanding political rights for women have been, in the preparation of these pages, a constant inspiration.”