Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and philosopher of the late eighteenth century, best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman of 1792, one of the founding texts of feminism. Writing in the excitement of the French Revolution, she argued that women were not naturally inferior to men but were made to seem so by a lack of education, and that a society built on reason and rights could not leave half of humanity out. Her short, turbulent life, ended by childbirth at thirty-eight, was for a long time better known than her ideas.

Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London, the second of seven children. Her father inherited money and spent it, moving the family from farm to farm in Essex, Yorkshire and Wales as his attempts at gentleman farming failed. He drank and was violent, and Mary later recalled lying across the door of her mother's bedroom to protect her. She received little formal schooling and educated herself through reading and friendships.

The most important of these was with Fanny Blood, a gifted young woman she met in her teens. Unmarried women of her class had few ways to earn a living, and Wollstonecraft tried most of them: she was a lady's companion, and in 1784, with Fanny and her own sisters, she opened a school at Newington Green, north of London. There she came to know the Dissenting minister Richard Price, a defender of liberty whose circle shaped her politics. The school failed after she sailed to Lisbon to nurse Fanny, who died there in 1785 after childbirth.

In 1786 and 1787 she worked as governess to the daughters of Lord and Lady Kingsborough at Mitchelstown in Ireland, an experience that sharpened her dislike of aristocratic idleness and of the way upper-class girls were trained to please. Her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, came out in 1787, followed by a novel, Mary: A Fiction, in 1788.

Back in London she was taken on by the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, who gave her lodgings and regular work as a translator and reviewer for his Analytical Review. Through him she met writers and artists including the painter Henry Fuseli, the poet William Blake, the reformer Thomas Paine and the philosopher William Godwin. She resolved, as she told her sister, to be the first of a new kind of woman who lived by her pen.

When Edmund Burke attacked the French Revolution and Richard Price in his Reflections of 1790, Wollstonecraft was the first to reply. Her Vindication of the Rights of Men, written in a few weeks, accused Burke of defending inherited privilege and of caring more for the fallen queen of France than for the poor. It made her name.

Two years later she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Its argument was that reason is the same in all human beings and that virtue grows only from its exercise. Women had been denied this chance: brought up to value beauty, delicacy and the art of pleasing, they were kept in a state of dependence and then blamed for being frivolous. She singled out Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose influential Emile proposed an education for girls designed entirely around serving men. Wollstonecraft called instead for girls and boys to be educated together in state day schools, for women to be able to support themselves in trades and professions, and for marriage to become a partnership of friends rather than a form of ownership. She hinted that women should have political representation, though she did not campaign for it.

The book was well received at first and quickly translated into French and German. It was not a call for women to abandon family life; she saw a properly educated woman as a better citizen, wife and mother. Its importance lay in applying the Enlightenment language of rights and reason to the relations between the sexes, insisting that if rights were natural they could not belong to men alone.

In December 1792 she went to Paris to see the Revolution for herself and stayed through the Terror, during which several of her Girondin friends were guillotined. There she fell in love with Gilbert Imlay, an American adventurer and businessman. To protect her as a British subject when Britain and France went to war, he registered her at the American embassy as his wife, though they never married. Their daughter Fanny was born in Le Havre in 1794. She also published An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution that year.

Imlay soon drifted away. In 1795, after returning to London and discovering his unfaithfulness, Wollstonecraft tried to kill herself. She then travelled to Scandinavia on his business, recovering a lost ship's cargo, and turned the journey into Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, published in 1796, a vivid and personal travel book that influenced the Romantic poets. After a second suicide attempt, when she jumped from Putney Bridge into the Thames, the relationship ended.

In 1796 she renewed her acquaintance with William Godwin, author of the radical Political Justice. Their friendship became a love affair, and when she became pregnant they married in March 1797, despite both having written against marriage, while keeping separate homes nearby. On 30 August 1797 she gave birth to a daughter, Mary. The placenta did not come away cleanly, an infection followed, and she died on 10 September 1797. She left an unfinished novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman.

In 1798 the grieving Godwin published a frank memoir of her, describing her affairs, her illegitimate child and her suicide attempts. Meant as a tribute, it gave her enemies ammunition, and for much of the nineteenth century she was remembered more as a scandal than as a thinker. Her daughter became Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

Later campaigners rediscovered her. John Stuart Mill, whose The Subjection of Women of 1869 made similar arguments, and the suffrage movements of Britain and America treated her as a pioneer, and in the twentieth century she was established as a major figure of Enlightenment philosophy and political theory. Scholars continue to debate how radical she was, but her claim that the rights of humanity must include women has become a basic assumption of modern democracies.