HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. 'My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.' In the midst of revolution, when fundamental social upheaval was reshaping France and America, writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft made an impassioned argument for women to have a place in this new world. Her demands laid out in this 1792 essay, to treat women as human beings deserving of a rational education, self-determination and equal rights alongside men, laid the foundation for modern feminism. Wollstonecraft has been admired and loathed: called a 'hyena in petticoats' by Horace Walpole and an inspiration to writers and feminists such as George Eliot and Millicent Fawcett. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a key text to understand the making of the modern world. Competition: Reflections on the Revolution in France. The Social Contact.

A Treatise of Human Nature. The Subjugation of Woman. A Room of One's Own. The Second Sex. Aphra Behn. Virginia Woolf. Simone de Beauvoir. Betty Friedan.

John Locke. John Stuart Mill. Jean Jacques Rousseau. Immanuel Kant. Edmund Burke. Olympe de Gouges.