This weekend, I celebrated the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the mothers of western feminism, by eating a cake baked entirely by men. This subversive culinary event was organised by the Unitarian chapel on Newington Green, north London, which Wollstonecraft attended as a young woman, coming into contact with the group of rational dissenters, led by Richard Price, who were to inform and inspire her radical political ideas. Wollstonecraft applied the emerging arguments of liberalism, which insisted that social status should be determined by individual ability and skill rather than birth, to women. Her landmark...