Published in 1792 with the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is Mary Wollstonecraft’s second vindication produced during the revolutionary decade (see “Wollstonecraft [later Godwin], Mary and Vindication of the Rights of Men, A by Mary Wollstonecraft”). As such, it is best understood as a document that continues in the vein of Wollstonecraft’s earlier political expression in favor of liberal democracy and republicanism. In her second Vindication, Wollstonecraft criticizes the system of female education that has been developed by male philosophers and conduct book authors, lambasting this model as being inherently unequal in its treatment of the sexes. Wollstonecraft’s perspective on education is shaped by her rejection of the period’s fixation on sensibility and sentimentality (see “Sensibility”). As a rationalist, Wollstonecraft is critical of any excess of feeling and sensuality, features she identifies as being central to the way male educationalists conceptualized women. Wollstonecraft argues that the failure to recognize women as rational beings and educate them appropriately compromises their status as citizens of the nation. A symptomatic and consequential feature of a nation’s failure to adequately educate half its populace is, for Wollstonecraft, a failure of democratic and republican politics.