Mary Wollstonecraft: The Contract’s Missing Signature

A 1792 challenge to Rousseau: what good is consent if half the public can’t sign?

The book dedication was not a curtsey but a gauntlet. “To M. Talleyrand-Périgord,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote on the opening page of her new treatise, addressing the French statesman who had just proposed a national education plan that sidelined girls. She wasn’t asking for a favor; she was serving notice. If a republic was to be built on reason, she argued, then women must be trained to reason—or the whole edifice would tilt.¹

Wollstonecraft was not the salon celebrity type. Picture instead a determined former schoolteacher at a publisher’s table, translating for wages by day and demolishing bad arguments by night. The one question that consumed her was simple to state and radical to pursue: if modern politics rests on the consent of rational individuals, on what grounds do we declare millions irrational—and then rule them?

Her big idea, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), was that the “social contract” collapses unless women are treated as equal contractors. Consent is not magic ink; it’s learned handwriting. Deny girls the schooling that cultivates judgment and independence, and you don’t just injure women—you counterfeit the very consent that legitimates law. Her best line still rings: “I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”²

Analogy time: imagine a club that writes rules binding every member, then bars half the membership from the meeting where rules are drafted and from the classes that teach how rules work. You can ask those excluded to obey. You cannot plausibly say they consented.

Wollstonecraft’s antagonist-in-chief was Jean‑Jacques Rousseau. In Émile, Rousseau designed a robust, civic-minded education for boys and a compliant, ornamental one for Sophie, the girl destined to marry him. Wollstonecraft called the bluff: if republican citizenship rests on reason, how can you deduct half the species from reason and still preach equality? Educate women like citizens, she argued, or admit the social contract is a gentlemen’s agreement.

The stress test came in revolutionary Paris. In 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen trumpeted universal principles with conspicuously gendered nouns. Talleyrand’s 1791 report on public instruction gestured at national schooling yet left girls’ education cramped. Wollstonecraft responded the next year with a book-length brief and that pointed dedication to Talleyrand—praising what deserved praise, then insisting that “independence…is the grand blessing of life” and women must be placed to “advance, instead of retarding, the progress” of moral and civic virtue.¹ It was a lawyerly move: name the principle, show the contradiction, demand a remedy.

Her remedy was practical, not utopian. Start with co‑education and a civic curriculum; train bodies as well as minds; open professions; make marriage a friendship between equals rather than a barter of protection for obedience. If the republic wants virtue, it must stop teaching half its citizens to please before they learn to judge. If it wants stability, it must stop making women economically dependent and then calling dependence “nature.”³

So what? Today’s headlines still circle her puzzle: laws, platforms, and workplaces claim legitimacy because “users” or “citizens” consent. Wollstonecraft’s test is ruthless and portable:

• Who is presumed less rational—and therefore excluded from the training that builds rational agency?
• Who must rely on someone else’s paycheck, status, or algorithm to be heard?
• Who is taught presentation before argument, deference before dissent?

If any answer maps onto a group (women, migrants, gig workers, minors online), the contract is wobbling. Her point is not that power should flip hands, but that power should be internalized: “over themselves.” The measure of a just order is not how well it protects the charmingly dependent, but how well it equips the formerly dependent to stand upright.

A final nudge for reading the news: When you encounter a fresh “terms of service,” a new public safety rule, or a civic education fight, try Wollstonecraft’s club test. If the rule would make sense—and feel fair—when applied to your daughter, your mother, and your younger self with exactly the same training and independence as any man, then you may be close to a real social contract. If not, you’re looking at a ritual of obedience dressed up as consent. She warned us that chivalry is merely polite domination; citizenship requires the unromantic work of equal education and economic independence. That’s how a pamphlet from 1792 still signs today’s consent forms in indelible ink.