Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer, philosopher and advocate of Women’s rights.
Wollstonecraft was brought up by an abusive father whom she left at age 17 when her mother died. She set up a school in Newington Green with her sister, who had fled an abusive marriage. She used this experience to write the pamphlet ‘Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (1787)’. In this she spoke of the the horror of intelligent women being subject to the rich fools they were forced to marry. Her time working as a governess only cemented these feelings, confirming to her that women were forced into a life of exaggerated weakness, manipulation and dependence on their men.
During the French Revolution in 1789 Wollstonecraft was brought into the public eye after writing a response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France which attacked the revolution. Her work was entitled ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790)’ and defended the Revolution and its principles.
In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft produced A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a text that pushed for womens equality and has since become a feminist classic. The writing is an attack on the lack of education for women and a response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s educational work ‘Emile’ in which he proposed that women be educated only in being useful and supportive to men. Wollstonecraft used the women she worked for as a governess in her arguement, specfically the Lady Kingsborough. She paints her as a wife, mother, and human creature who was all swallowed up by the factitious character which an improper education and the selfish vanity of beauty had produced. She argued that only proper education would produce rational, intelligent and independent thinking women and that equal education should be a right. Wollstonecraft also wrote Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, which asserted that women had strong sexual desires and that it was degrading and immoral to pretend otherwise. This was the beginning of critics at the time disregarding her work.
After Wollstonecraft’s death ten days after the birth of her daughter Mary Shelley (who would go on to write Frankenstein) her husband William Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This work, detailing her illegitimate children and suicide attempts tarnished Wollstonecraft’s reputation. It wasn’t until the rise of 20th century feminism that her work came to be thought of as important.