Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women is an incendiary attack on the place of women in 18th-century society. Often considered to be the earliest widely-circulated work of feminism, the book is a powerful example of what can be achieved by creative thinkers - people who refuse to be bound by the standard ways of thinking, or to see things through the same lenses that everyone else uses. In the case of the Vindication, Wollstonecraft's independent thinking went directly against the standard assumptions of the age regarding women. During the seventeenth century...