Mary Wollstonecraft

Their life

English writer and philosopher whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a founding text of feminist thought. She argued that women appear inferior only because they are denied education, and lived an independent, self-supporting intellectual life well ahead of her era.

Known for

• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
• Argument for women's education as equals
• A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
• Member of London's radical, Paineite circle
• Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
• Mother of Mary Shelley

The road they walked

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in Spitalfields, London, the second of seven children in a family sliding steadily downward. Her father drank, moved the household from town to town chasing failed farming schemes, and beat her mother; Mary later said she used to lie across her mother's bedroom threshold to protect her. There was no inheritance, no protection, and no real education on offer for a daughter — only the assumption that she would marry well or manage without. She did the latter: by her late teens she was already working, first as a lady's companion in Bath, then running a school at Newington Green with her sister and her closest friend, Fanny Blood, then as a governess to an aristocratic Irish family. Each job taught her something about the narrowness of the roles available to women of her class, and she began writing them down.

She came of age inside the ferment of 1780s and 1790s London radicalism. The publisher Joseph Johnson took her on as a translator, reviewer, and eventually one of his own authors, and through him she met Thomas Paine, William Blake, the scientist Joseph Priestley, and the philosopher William Godwin. When Edmund Burke attacked the French Revolution in 1790, Wollstonecraft answered him within weeks with A Vindication of the Rights of Men — one of the first published rebuttals — and used the same argument, that reason and rights belong to all people regardless of birth, as the foundation for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman two years later. She went to Paris in 1792 to see the Revolution firsthand, arriving just as the Terror began, and stayed through some of its worst violence. There she fell in love with the American speculator Gilbert Imlay, had a daughter, Fanny, with him out of wedlock, and traveled through Scandinavia on his business, turning the journey into a widely admired travel book. Imlay's betrayals drove her to two suicide attempts before she returned to London and, unexpectedly, to a settled domestic partnership with Godwin — a fellow believer in free union who nonetheless married her in 1797 once she was pregnant with their child.

Her intellectual project, radical for its moment, was simple in its logic and explosive in its implications: that women seemed weak-minded and vain only because society trained them to be ornaments rather than educating them as rational beings, and that a just society required treating female minds as the equal of male ones. That argument, made in plain, forceful prose rather than polite hedging, unsettled contemporaries far more than the later, sanitized image of her as a foremother of feminism suggests — and for a century after her death, it was overshadowed by the scandal of her private life.

How their story ended

Wollstonecraft died on 10 September 1797, eleven days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary — the future Mary Shelley. The birth had gone badly wrong: the placenta failed to deliver whole, and the infection that followed, puerperal fever, was essentially untreatable by the medicine of the day. She lingered for over a week, attended by her husband, William Godwin, before dying at 38. Godwin's grief-stricken memoir of her life, published soon after and startlingly candid about her love affairs and suicide attempts, scandalized readers of the time and cast a long shadow over her reputation — one that later generations of feminists worked to lift, restoring her as a founding voice of the argument for women's rights rather than a cautionary tale.

In their words

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