Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 - 1797) was an English writer, philosopher and advocate of women's rights. [1] Working as a translator, reviewer, novelist and political polemicist in the turbulent years around the French Revolution, she argued that the apparent weakness of women was the product of a deliberately impoverished education rather than of nature. Her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential works of feminist philosophy. [2]
Early life
Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London, the second of seven children in a family whose fortunes declined steadily as her father squandered an inherited income on failed farming ventures. [1] Her formal schooling was slight, and she educated herself through reading and through friendships with better-read acquaintances, notably Fanny Blood.
Like many women of her class with no independent means, she turned to the few occupations open to her. She worked as a lady's companion in Bath, opened a school at Newington Green with her sister and Blood, and served as governess to an aristocratic family in Ireland. [2] The Newington Green years brought her into contact with the Dissenting intellectual circle around the minister Richard Price, whose radical politics shaped her own.
Writing and radical politics
In 1787 Wollstonecraft moved to London determined to live by her pen, an unusual ambition for a woman of the period. The publisher Joseph Johnson employed her as a translator from French and German and as a reviewer for his Analytical Review, placing her among radicals including Thomas Paine, William Blake and William Godwin. [1]
Her A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) was among the first published replies to Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution. Two years later she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which extended the same reasoning to sex: reason is the faculty that makes a person fully human, women are systematically denied its cultivation, and no society can be genuinely virtuous while half its members are trained only to please. [3] She called for coeducation and for women's access to work, property and civic life.
France and later years
Wollstonecraft travelled to Paris in 1792 to observe the Revolution first-hand and remained through the Terror, producing a historical account of its early stages. [2] There she began a relationship with the American speculator Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had a daughter, Fanny. The affair collapsed, and after two suicide attempts she undertook a business journey through Scandinavia that produced Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), a travel book admired for its introspective voice. [1]
In 1797 she married the philosopher William Godwin. She died on 10 September of that year in Somers Town, London, of septicaemia following the birth of their daughter Mary, later Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. [1]
Legacy
Godwin's candid posthumous memoir, which disclosed her love affairs and suicide attempts, damaged her reputation for much of the nineteenth century, and her arguments were often dismissed alongside her private life. [3] Feminist scholarship from the twentieth century onward restored her standing, and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is now a standard text in political philosophy and women's history. [1] A memorial sculpture to her was unveiled at Newington Green in London in 2020.
