Mary Wollstonecraft

British political philosopher who argued in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that women's apparent irrationality is a product of deficient education, not natural incapacity, and that women are entitled to the same rational autonomy as men.

Women are rational beings; their apparent moral and intellectual inferiority results from education that cultivates sensibility and vanity instead of reason; the same Enlightenment principles that ground men's rights ground women's. Marriage should be a rational partnership between equals.