Mary Wollstonecraft was a woman who was no stranger to female oppression. At the time of Wollstonecraft’s life (1759 – 1797) women were far from being seen as equal to men; women were typically viewed as being soft, weak, and submissive. Aside from trying to survive in a male dominated world, she had witnessed female abuse with the mistreatment of her mother by her father, and later the abuse of her sister by her sister’s husband. Fed up with female in-equality and the lack of education provided for women, Wollstonecraft wrote a book-length essay titled “Vindication of the Rights of Women”. The purpose of this treatise was to open the eyes of women everywhere; show them that it is ok to be a woman of independence, and education is crucial for women in order to achieve a sense of self-respect and would allow them to live to their full capabilities; this was also geared towered men, and to break them of the mentality that women were meant to be domestic, and subservient. Wollstonecraft condemned women for embracing their roles in the “great art of pleasing men”, and men for “trying to secure the good conduct of women by trying to keep them in a state of childhood”. Wollstonecraft’s essay has been called “feminism’s founding document” for the reason that it is considered the first written document of the modern feminist movement. With Wollstonecraft’s book, she was one of the first women to stand-up for what she believed to be the rights of women, and paved the way for females everywhere.