Did the Enlightenment's rights belong to women? What Mary Wollstonecraft answered

Mostly not, which is exactly what Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out. The rights of women and non-white people were generally overlooked in Enlightenment philosophy. In 1792 she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a pioneering work of what is now called feminist philosophy, arguing that women are human beings deserving the same fundamental rights as men.

She was reacting to events. Talleyrand's 1791 report to the National Assembly in revolutionary France stated that women should receive only a domestic education. At the end of 1791 Olympe de Gouges had also published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, and women's rights had become central to political debates in France and Britain.

Her central argument was about education. It was often assumed that women were incapable of rational thought. Wollstonecraft answered that women are capable of rationality and only appear otherwise because men have refused to educate them and encouraged them to be frivolous. If natural rights are given by God, she argued, denying them to one part of society is a sin.

There are limits to what can be said about her: it is uncertain whether she believed women should have full voting rights, and the word feminist did not appear until decades after her death. Her book was generally well received at first. Her reputation fell only after her husband's memoir of her life.