Mary Wollstonecraft was far from the first woman to wish for equality between the sexes. She was not even the first woman to write about such equality; there are texts older than The Vindication of the Rights of Women that are considered to be feminist works. However, when it comes to the modern feminist movement, Wollstonecraft is often seen as one of the founders. People who advocated rights for women before the feminist movement are known as protofeminists, as they were feminists before the term existed. Thus, while Mary Wollstonecraft was not the first woman with feminist ideals, she can be considered one of the first feminists, although she was not the first to push the modern movement. Prior to Wollstonecraft and her Vindication, there were feminists and feminist works. Christine de Pizan, an Italian author who lived in the fourteenth century into the fifteenth, wrote books with feminist themes (The Editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica). In the sixteenth century, Jane Anger (which may …show more content…
Jeremy Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, published in 1781, he gave examples of female rulers to prove that women do not have inferior minds and condemned the practice of denying women rights based on that logic (Williford, 167). A year before The Vindication of the Rights of Women, the Frenchwoman Olympe de Gouges wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Women and of the Female Citizen, which was a response to and critique of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen published two years before. De Gouges asserted that women should have the same rights that all men were being given (Kuiper). Both of these were written before The Vindication of Rights of Women, which was published in 1792. Wollstonecraft, de Gouges, and Bentham, among others, are commonly considered some of the earliest feminists in the movement as we know it