Mary Wollstonecraft

The New York Times devoted the cover of today's Book Review to a new biography of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Romantic Era aficionados and feminists will remember her not only as an intrepid freethinker, but also as the mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
It's sounds like a fascinating book, and the review is keen.
Here's a bit from the review that summarizes Wollstonecraft's masterwork, "The Vindication of the Rights of Women." I like how the reviewer punches up the sentence's end with a modern reference.

''The minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement,'' [Wollstonecraft] wrote, continuing: ''Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind . . . and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show . . . that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being.'' So begins her uncompromising polemic, a document as necessary an admonition today as in her own in its plea to the owners of wombs to invest in that invisible fortification called character before fluffing their petticoats or tattooing their bellies.