Early proponent of women's rights

• A. Mary Wollstonecraft
• B. Voltaire
• C. Montesquieu
• D. Catherine the Great

Answer: (A)

Advocacy for women's rights through education and equal reasoning ability. Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women are not naturally inferior to men but become limited by lack of education and restrictive norms. In her influential writing, she called for equal access to education for girls and boys and asserted that women can reason as well as men, so they deserve the same rights and opportunities. This idea helped spark the modern feminist movement by showing that improvements in women's status depend on changing how society trains and treats women, not on waiting for some innate change in women. The other thinkers were major Enlightenment voices on liberty, government, and social critique, but they did not center on advancing women’s rights in the same foundational way, and Catherine the Great, while reform-minded in various areas, is not typically labeled an early feminist advocate. So the strongest fit is Wollstonecraft’s argument for equality in education and rational capacity.