The newly minted free and equal men who strode out of the pages of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government into the burgeoning public sphere, and out to the colonies, did so on the backs of the poor, the non-European and women. That women were omitted from “mankind” came as a shock to Mary Wollstonecraft.

She had watched the French Revolution with joy, raged at Edmund Burke’s criticism of it, and gamely joined English radicals such as Thomas Paine in their rebuttals of Burke, writing her own Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). As it became clear, however, that liberté and égalité were tied inextricably to fraternité, she took up her pen again, this time to write the masterpiece A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Liberalism has since claimed Wollstonecraft for itself. She now appears in its pantheon, credited with extending the rights of man to all human beings, “regardless of the distinction of sex,” as she wrote in Vindication. Why should women, she asked, “be excluded, without having a voice, from a participation of the natural rights of mankind”?

While this certainly sounds liberal, it is questionable whether she fits the term. Liberals classically define freedom as non-interference, so that you are considered free if you are unconstrained by physical impediments, such as chains, or by coercion, such as a gun to your head.

If you are dependent for all your liberal rights on the goodwill of your master, then you are a slave

Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, goes further, defining freedom as non-dependence, advocating a theory that has since been identified by Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit as republican. According to this theory, even if you are free in the liberal sense, that is, you can move about and live without restriction, if you do so at the discretion of someone else, then you are not really free. If you are dependent for all your liberal rights on the goodwill of your master, then you are a slave.

Although some liberals respond that their view of freedom encompasses the republican view, it is important to pick out the difference between the particular horror of living under arbitrary power, and the particular horror of being incarcerated. Wherever Wollstonecraft sits precisely in relation to liberalism, however, it is unarguable that she launched the most extraordinary manifesto for freedom. It would have led her to champion three causes today.

The first would be opposition to arbitrary power, and as a consequence, a commitment to social equality. If freedom means being governed by your own will, then in political terms, parliament, the representative body of the people, must be sovereign. To be ruled according to the wishes of the executive turns us all into slaves.

The same goes for the home, which ought not to be a place of tyranny. For Wollstonecraft, dependency is awful not just because it makes you a slave but because it turns you into a slavish person. You bow and scrape and flatter, diminishing yourself and becoming unable to speak truth to power. Wollstonecraft’s approach to liberty requires equality—in a move that runs contrary to much liberal thinking.

Hierarchies per se—of class, race and gender—breed dependency and corrupt all parties. Society needs levelling out, if we are to be rid of monsters. As Wollstonecraft says, “power … is ever true to its vital principle, for in every shape it would reign without control or inquiry. Its throne is built across a dark abyss, which no eye must dare to explore.

Wollstonecraft’s second cause would be feminism. She believed that gender is in many ways a construct of power. There are no essential differences between men and women that explain or justify the arrangement of the world. With regard to their minds, men and women have equal capacities. One consequence of the dominant status of men is that it makes women obsessed with “the art of pleasing” them.

If you are told that what is valuable about you is your appearance, then you come to believe it, and it twists your life. “Taught from their infancy”, says Wollstonecraft, “that beauty is women’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” She would have supported Endangered Bodies, the brilliant initiative that challenges the toxic culture that turns us against our own bodies, and aims to create a body positive world.

Power… Its throne is built across a dark abyss, which no eye must dare to explore

Finally, Wollstonecraft would have supported free, universal education. In England in her day, girls fell out of education earlier than boys, if they had any at all, and there the social rot set it. Her view that the education of girls would transform not only the position of women, but society more generally, is now a core principle of development theory. She would have campaigned for Camfed, an international non-profit that supports girls into schools in sub-Saharan Africa, as a way to empower women and tackle poverty and inequality.

Wollstonecraft looked to the education of individuals to benefit everyone. She would have baulked at our sharp-elbowed parenting and private schools. “Parents often love their children in the most brutal manner,” she despaired, “and sacrifice every relative duty to promote their advancement in the world.” For Wollstonecraft, education was the path to freedom, but not freedom in the competitive mould; rather the kind that nurtures “the common relationship that binds the whole family on earth together.”

Hannah Dawson is a lecturer in the history of political thought at King's College London. She is the author of “Life Lessons from Hobbes” (Pan Macmillan, 2013); “Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy” (Cambridge University Press, 2007); and “Disputations on the Law of Nature” (Oxford University Press, 2017).