A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

1792
Mary Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
B

Wollstonecraft's most famous work still holds up.  Society has of course changed dramatically in the last two centuries, and yet her insights into women's hearts and minds are timeless.  In fact, while I've never read Women Who Love Too Much and suspect that that author comes to very different conclusions, the part about how women are encouraged to think only of love, usually with negative results, is definitely about "women who love too much" of any era.  Although Wollstonecraft is mostly writing to and of middle-class women, she has good insights into upper-class ladies (whom she amusingly compares to soldiers).  Also, some of her suggestions, like coed schools, abolition of the double standard, and medical training for women, seem surprisingly modern.  The title is interesting, since her earlier work was about "the rights of men."  I think with this one she was trying to convey something general, Woman in the abstract, rather than the total rights of all women.