“It is time to effect a revolution in female manners,” Wollstonecraft pronounced in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “time to restore to them their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world” (83; ch. 3). By “them,” of course, she meant “women.” Wollstonecraft was aware of the time in which she lived; it was a time for and of revolution. The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776; and then, with the aid of France, America won its independence from Britain. A mere 13 years and 10 days later (July 14, 1789), revolutionary insurgents stormed the Bastille, thus proving that the populace could and would overthrow the monarchy and the ancient régime. Wollstonecraft and many of the great thinkers of her generation assumed that both revolutions held promise that countries, including Britain, could someday become utopias where all people were equal and no person would go without the necessities of life, including freedom and the opportunity to pursue happiness, a basic right endowed by the Creator, or so said Thomas Jefferson.

It is in that aurora that Wollstonecraft optimistically believed that surely the Estates General was composed of the most “enlarged minds” (ROW vi; Dedication) of the world and would grant equal education, vocation, and legal rights to women in the new republic. She must have assumed that Britain, in its own disquiet about possible insurrection by oppressed groups, would follow suit. Ever since the French invaded England in 1066 and then established common law and its ideas of coverture, married women—and then by extension, all women—were declared legally as nonentities. By British law, women were understood to be subsumed by the men in their lives and “covered” by them, ostensibly to protect them and also to relegate them to a state of male possession. Supposedly the idea of coverture derives from 1 Cor. 11, where Paul says, “The head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.” Then the letter warns that if men pray and prophecy with their head covered, they shame their heads, meaning that they shame the Head, namely Christ. As for women, if they pray and prophecy without a head covering, they dishonor their head.