Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft an English writer, philosopher and advocate of women's rights (1759-1797), best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the founding texts of feminist thought. She argued that women appear inferior to men only because they are denied education, and she demanded that they be treated as rational creatures capable of citizenship.

Early Life and Formation

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in Spitalfields, London, the second of seven children of a weaver who tried and failed to make a living from farming. The family moved frequently as her father squandered his inheritance, and she grew up in conditions of declining gentility that gave her an early acquaintance with hardship and with the dependence of women on unreliable men.

She received little formal schooling, but she read widely and made friends among radical dissenters and intellectuals. She worked as a lady's companion, as a schoolteacher and as a governess, experiences that shaped her views on the education and condition of women. Her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, appeared in 1787.

Her friendship with the publisher Joseph Johnson brought her into the intellectual circles of London and introduced her to writers such as Thomas Paine and William Godwin. Johnson published her works and gave her the independence she had long sought. Partly self-taught, she established herself as a translator, reviewer and author.

A Vindication of the Rights of Men

In 1790 she entered the great political controversy aroused by the French Revolution with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, an answer to Edmund Burke's attack on the revolution and on its English sympathisers. Defending the principles of liberty and equality, she exposed what she saw as Burke's sentimental defence of inherited privilege, rank and property, and his disregard for ordinary people.

The pamphlet made her famous and placed her among the leading radical writers of the day. She argued for reason against custom and for the natural rights of all people, repeating the charge that a society built on hereditary distinction violates the rational order that should govern human affairs. Her plain and forceful prose marked her as a writer of independent judgement.

The controversy over the revolution divided English opinion and gave born to a great body of reformist writing. Wollstonecraft's contribution was distinguished by her insistence that the rights of men must include, by the same logic, the rights of women, a conclusion she developed at length in her next and greatest work.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared in 1792 and is her principal claim to fame. She argued that women are made to appear weak, frivolous and dependent not by nature but by a defective education that trains them only to please men. Give them a rational education, she contended, and they will show themselves the equals of men in understanding and virtue.

She attacked the prevailing ideal of the accomplished woman and the notion that female virtue consists chiefly in modesty and submission. Women, she wrote, should be prepared to be companions to their husbands and citizens of their country, not merely ornaments or playthings. She called for co-education, for economic independence and for women's participation in public life.

The book was widely read and quickly translated, and it became a landmark in the history of political thought. Her argument that the subjection of women is a product of social arrangement rather than natural inferiority gave later advocates a powerful set of ideas and a vocabulary of rights on which generations of reformers would build.

Travels, Revolution and Personal Life

In 1792 Wollstonecraft travelled to France to observe the revolution at first hand, arriving as the country moved toward war and the terror. She lived in Paris and then in the north of France, where she formed a passionate attachment to the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay and bore a daughter, Fanny. Abandoned by Imlay, she attempted suicide twice and travelled to Scandinavia on his business.

Her letters from the north were published in 1796 as Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, a work that combined travel observation with intense personal reflection and won her wide admiration. She returned to London and renewed her acquaintance with the philosopher William Godwin, whom she married in 1797.

She died in September 1797, ten days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary, who would become Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Her death was followed by Godwin's candid memoir of her life, which for a time damaged her reputation by revealing her unconventional loves and her attempts at suicide.

Ideas, Influence and Legacy

Wollstonecraft's thought rests on the conviction that reason and virtue are the same in both sexes and that the moral and intellectual character of women is formed by their circumstances. She drew on the rationalism of the Enlightenment, on dissenting religion and on the radical politics of her time, and she applied them with unusual consistency to the condition of half the human race.

Her reputation rose and fell with the changing temper of the nineteenth century, and for a long period her personal life obscured her arguments. In the twentieth century she was rediscovered as a founder of feminist thought, and her demand for equal education and civic standing was acknowledged as a foundation of the movement for women's rights.

She is remembered as a moralist and a prophet of equality whose work anticipated much later debate. Her vision of women as rational and independent beings, entitled to education, work and a voice in public affairs, has proved remarkably durable. Her life and writings together form one of the most influential legacies in the history of political argument.

See also

• Feminism
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• William Godwin
• Mary Shelley