Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was an English writer and philosopher, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the founding texts of feminism. She argued that women are not naturally inferior to men but are made so by a lack of education. She was the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.
Works
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A hard youth
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London in 1759. Her father, who wasted the family fortune, was violent towards her mother, and Mary would sleep outside her mother's door to protect her. She left home at nineteen to work as a lady's companion.
With her sisters and her friend Fanny Blood she opened a school at Newington Green, a centre of religious dissent and radical thought. After Fanny's death and the failure of the school, she became a governess in Ireland, an experience she disliked.
The Vindications
Back in London, the radical publisher Joseph Johnson employed her as a reader and translator. In 1790 she replied to Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, one of the first responses to his book.
In 1792 she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argued that women should receive the same education as men and be treated as rational beings, not as ornaments. The book caused a sensation and made her both famous and attacked.
France and Godwin
In December 1792 she went to Paris to observe the Revolution. There she fell in love with an American, Gilbert Imlay, and had a daughter, Fanny. Imlay abandoned her, and she twice attempted to end her life. A journey to Scandinavia on his business produced a beautiful travel book, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
In 1797 she married the philosopher William Godwin. On 30 August she gave birth to a daughter, Mary, the future Mary Shelley, but died of an infection eleven days later, at thirty-eight. Godwin's memoir of her life, published the following year, shocked readers by its frankness.
Anecdotes
A daughter's lessons
Mary Shelley never knew her mother, who died when she was eleven days old, but she grew up reading her books and is said to have learned to read her name by tracing the letters on her mother's gravestone in St Pancras churchyard.
Married in secret
Wollstonecraft and Godwin, both critics of marriage, married only when she became pregnant, and kept separate homes a few doors apart, exchanging notes during the day. Godwin said they had found a way to combine the novelty of a lover with the comforts of domestic life.
Frequently asked questions
What is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman about?
It argues that women are rational beings who deserve the same education and moral consideration as men, and that their apparent inferiority comes from their upbringing.
Who was Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter?
Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, born in 1797, whose father was the philosopher William Godwin. She also had an elder daughter, Fanny Imlay.
How did Mary Wollstonecraft die?
Of puerperal fever, an infection after childbirth, eleven days after the birth of Mary Shelley, in September 1797.