Jessica Ennis leads the women's pentathlon 60m hurdles at the 2012 IAAF World Indoor Athletics Championships.

Like domestic animals, their true natures had been perverted but this also meant -crucially - that through being differently educated there is the possibility that they might regain what she called woman's 'natural state'. Drawing comparison with the plants and animals described in natural history books, she could argue that women only behaved this way because of their education. When Wollstonecraft looked around at the women of her society, she saw them as childish, weak in body and mind, concerned only with their dress and other frivolous pastimes. For example, she was fascinated by the fact that species of animals and plants were capable, through domestication or cultivation, of degeneration, becoming physically weaker and prone to disease. During the time that she was thinking about and writing her Vindication, she reviewed a significant number of natural history books and in her reviews of them she considers issues that come up again in Vindication. In my new book, Creating Romanticism, I argue that Wollstonecraft had been led to this new understanding of woman's capacities in part by her reading and reviewing of works of natural history for a politically radical journal called the Analytic Review. This perhaps partly explains why her work, after initially being well received, was neglected until the feminist movement of the 1970s found in it a very modern sense of gender identity. Way ahead of her time, Wollstonecraft was convinced that gendered behaviour was learned through education and experience, rather than being something with which one was born. I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties', and she railed against those male conduct book writers who instead considered 'females rather as women than human creatures One of Wollstonecraft's main objectives in publishing her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 was that women should be viewed as human first and foremost rather than as a separate and irreconcilably different species to men. It's clear that debates concerning which characteristics are masculine and feminine rumble on even today and continue to chip away at the idea of equality. More than two hundred years ago, Wollstonecraft similarly asked why particular virtues should be regarded as specifically 'manly' and not - 'more properly speaking' - virtues that ennoble all humans.

Mary wollstonecraft a vindication