Wollstonecraft developed first systematic feminist critique. Discuss her main ideas. (Answer in 250 words)

- Wollstonecraft developed first systematic feminist critique. Discuss her main ideas. (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is the first work to treat women's subordination as a systematic political injustice with an intellectual cause, an institutional mechanism and a programme of reform. Wollstonecraft turned Enlightenment reason against the Enlightenment's own exclusion.

Body
1. Reason has no sex: if virtue rests on reason and reason is a human faculty, women cannot be governed by a separate morality. Whatever inferiority exists is produced by a defective education, not by nature.
2. The attack on Rousseau: Book V of Emile trains Sophie only to please, and Wollstonecraft charges Rousseau with making women alluring mistresses instead of rational companions and thinking mothers.
3. Femininity as manufacture: taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body. This critique of socialisation anticipates Beauvoir's claim that one is not born a woman.
4. Marriage as legal prostitution: economic dependence makes affection a transaction in which women barter charm for maintenance, degrading both parties.
5. Against the cult of sensibility: the fashionable elevation of feeling over judgement disarms women intellectually and is itself a device of subjection.
6. A concrete programme: national co-educational day schools, access to the professions and to property, and, in her most radical passage, representation of women in government.

Conclusion
Wollstonecraft founded liberal feminism, and Mill, Harriet Taylor and Friedan work in her line. Its limits are hers too: she argues from rational motherhood, addresses the middle class, and leaves the sexual division of labour standing — the ground on which later radical and socialist feminists depart from her.