The Enlightenment was a period when great thinkers advanced ideas generally favoring the rights of individuals to govern themselves through democratic processes. Philosophers such as John Locke, Voltaire, and Cesar Beccaria argued that the time of absolute rulers and class-based destiny should end. The rights and potential of the individual were something to be respected, they argued.

Mary Wollstonecraft was very much a product of this new wave of thinking. She took these ideas of the importance of individual rights and extended them to include the rights of women as well. Just as other Enlightenment thinkers argued that a peasant should not be beholden to a noble based purely on the position of his birth, Wollstonecraft argued that women should not be subjugated to men based purely on their sex. Furthermore, other philosophers argued the importance of an education for all men. Wollstonecraft was an outspoken supporter of the right of women to receive an education too.

Wollstonecraft's most important work, Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792, advocated a woman's equal station with men. This work argued that a woman should have the same agency over her own destiny as her contemporary philosophers were arguing that all men should have. This work would be cited many times over the next century by women's rights groups in Europe and North America.

In short, Mary Wollstonecraft expanded on the work of other Enlightenment thinkers. It was a time when philosophers were stressing the value and rights of the individual. They argued that all men should be able to control their lives and destiny. Wollstonecraft took these notions and applied them to women as well, arguing that women have the same right as men to be able to control their own lives.