Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and philosopher whose work, 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,' argued that women are not naturally inferior to men but appear to be only because they lack education. Writing during the French Revolution, she suggested that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagined a social order founded on reason. She was a radical for her time, living an unconventional life and criticizing the institution of marriage as 'legal prostitution.' Although her reputation was tarnished for nearly a century after her death due to a scandalous biography written by her husband, she was rediscovered by the 20th-century feminist movement. She is also the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of 'Frankenstein.' Wollstonecraft’s insistence that women deserve the same fundamental rights as men remains the foundational argument of modern feminist theory.