A pioneering feminist philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) is best known for her groundbreaking 1792 treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The book offered an eloquent defense of sexual equality and has been cited by historians as one of the opening salvos of the feminist movement that emerged in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century. During her own lifetime, however, Wollstonecraft was better known for her tumultuous personal life, association with political radicals, and premature death.

Wollstonecraft was born in the East End of London, the second of seven children. She had little to no formal education, but read widely from Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible. She became a schoolteacher in 1784, an experience that helped shape her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life (1787). She wrote a novel the next year, Mary, A Fiction (1788), and published an anthology for women readers under a pseudonym.

Wollstonecraft’s first explicitly political book, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), was published in the midst of a raging debate in Britain over the French Revolution. Many Britons were horrified by the violence in Paris, but Wollstonecraft sided with radicals who supported the overthrow of the French monarchy. After publishing A Vindication of the Rights of Men, she began work on its sequel. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft criticized the institution of marriage and attacked the educational system for cheating women out of opportunities. Women had the same inherent capabilities as men, she argued, but had been denied the chance to use them.

Wollstonecraft traveled to Paris in 1792 and lived there during the height of the Great Terror. While in Paris, she began an affair with an American, Gilbert Imlay (c. 1754–1828). Because British citizens were at risk of persecution in revolutionary France, Wollstonecraft posed as Imlay’s wife to avoid imprisonment. The couple eventually had an illegitimate child before separating in 1796.

In the same year, she met the English radical William Godwin (1756–1836). They married the next year. She died at age thirty-nine from complications soon after giving birth to the couple’s only child.

ADDITIONAL FACTS

  1. Wollstonecraft’s younger daughter, Mary (1797–1851), married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) in 1816 and wrote the 1818 novel Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft’s older daughter, Fanny Imlay (1794–1816), committed suicide at age twenty-two.
  2. Godwin wrote a biography of his late wife, Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” which was published after her death. It was controversial for its frank depiction of her affairs and suicide attempts, but is the most thorough source of information about her life.
  3. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was dedicated sarcastically to one of Wollstonecraft’s critics, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), who would later become a famous French diplomat and, briefly, the prime minister of France.

alt