Wollstonecraft was prompted to write the Rights of Woman after reading Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord's 1791 report to the French National Assembly, which stated that women should only receive domestic education.

From her reaction to this specific event, she launched a broad attack against double standards, indicting men for encouraging women to indulge in excessive emotion.

Her ambiguous statements regarding the equality of the sexes have made it difficult to classify Wollstonecraft as a modern feminist; the word itself did not emerge until decades after her death.

In a lively and sometimes vicious pamphlet war, now referred to as the Revolution controversy, British political commentators addressed topics ranging from representative government to human rights to the separation of church and state, many of these issues having been raised in France first.

[4] When Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord presented his Rapport sur l'instruction publique (1791) to the National Assembly in France, Wollstonecraft was galvanized to respond.

[5] In his recommendations for a national system of education, Talleyrand had written: Let us bring up women, not to aspire to advantages which the Constitution denies them, but to know and appreciate those which it guarantees them ... Men are destined to live on the stage of the world.

[8] The Rights of Woman thus engages not only specific events in France and in Britain but also larger questions being raised by political philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

[9] The Rights of Woman is a long (almost 87,000 words) essay that introduces all of its major topics in the opening chapters and then repeatedly returns to them, each time from a different point of view.

[12] But sensibility also paralysed those who had too much of it; as scholar G. J. Barker-Benfield explains, "an innate refinement of nerves was also identifiable with greater suffering, with weakness, and a susceptibility to disorder".

[15] One of Wollstonecraft's central arguments in the Rights of Woman is that women should be educated in a rational manner to give them the opportunity to contribute to society.

Wollstonecraft, along with other female reformers such as Catharine Macaulay and Hester Chapone, maintained that women were indeed capable of rational thought and deserved to be educated.

)[22] Intent on illustrating the limitations that contemporary educational theory placed upon women, Wollstonecraft writes, "taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison",[23] implying that without this damaging ideology, which encourages young women to focus their attention on beauty and outward accomplishments, they could achieve much more.

[30]In the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft does not make the claim for gender equality using the same arguments or the same language that late nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminists later would.

[36] Wollstonecraft writes at the end of her chapter "Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society": I then would fain convince reasonable men of the importance of some of my remarks; and prevail on them to weigh dispassionately the whole tenor of my observations ...

Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers – in a word, better citizens.

[45] As Mary Poovey explains, "Wollstonecraft betrays her fear that female desire might in fact court man's lascivious and degrading attentions, that the subordinate position women have been given might even be deserved.

[48] But as Kaplan and others have remarked, Wollstonecraft may have been forced to make this sacrifice: "it is important to remember that the notion of woman as politically enabled and independent [was] fatally linked [during the eighteenth century] to the unrestrained and vicious exercise of her sexuality.

She points out the "false-refinement, immorality, and vanity" of the rich, calling them "weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner [who] undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society".

"[59] She contends that charity has only negative consequences because, as Jones puts it, she "sees it as sustaining an unequal society while giving the appearance of virtue to the rich".

[60] In her national plan for education, she retains class distinctions (with an exception for the intelligent), suggesting that: "After the age of nine, girls and boys, intended for domestic employments, or mechanical trades, ought to be removed to other schools, and receive instruction, in some measure appropriated to the destination of each individual ...

"[61] In attempting to navigate the cultural expectations of female writers and the generic conventions of political and philosophical discourse, Wollstonecraft, as she does throughout her oeuvre, constructs a unique blend of masculine and feminine styles in the Rights of Woman.

[62] However, Wollstonecraft also uses a personal tone, employing "I" and "you", dashes and exclamation marks, and autobiographical references to create a distinctly feminine voice in the text.

Upon completing the work, she wrote to her friend William Roscoe: "I am dissatisfied with myself for not having done justice to the subject ... Do not suspect me of false modesty – I mean to say that had I allowed myself more time I could have written a better book, in every sense of the word ...

"[72] When Wollstonecraft revised the Rights of Woman for the second edition, she took the opportunity not only to fix small spelling and grammar mistakes but also to bolster the feminist claims of her argument.

While Godwin believed he was portraying his wife with love, sincerity, and compassion, contemporary readers were shocked by Wollstonecraft's unorthodox lifestyle and she became a reviled figure.

Richard Polwhele targeted her in particular in his anonymous long poem The Unsex'd Females (1798), a defensive reaction to women's literary self-assertion: Hannah More is Christ to Wollstonecraft's Satan.

Hays, who had previously been a close friend[84] and an outspoken advocate for Wollstonecraft and her Rights of Woman, for example, did not include her in the collection of Illustrious and Celebrated Women she published in 1803.

George Eliot wrote "there is in some quarters a vague prejudice against the Rights of Woman as in some way or other a reprehensible book, but readers who go to it with this impression will be surprised to find it eminently serious, severely moral, and withal rather heavy".

[88] The suffragist (i.e. moderate reformer, as opposed to suffragette) Millicent Garrett Fawcett wrote the introduction to the centenary edition of the Rights of Woman, cleansing the memory of Wollstonecraft and claiming her as the foremother of the struggle for the vote.

[93] Further evidence of the enduring legacy of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication may be seen by direct references in recent historical fiction set: for example, in The Silk Weaver (1998) set in the late eighteenth century among Dublin silk weavers, author Gabrielle Warnock (1998) intervenes as narrator to hold up ‘Rights of Woman’ for the reader to reflect upon the politics, morals, and feelings of her female characters.