Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (Spitalfields, London, 27 April 1759 – London, 10 September 1797) was an English writer and philosopher, regarded as one of the founding figures of feminist philosophy. Her best-known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), argues that women are not naturally inferior to men and only appear so because they receive little education. Her influence runs from the late Enlightenment to contemporary feminism, which is why her ideas and her unusual life still attract attention.

She was born into a family with a reasonable income, but her father, who squandered money on speculative ventures and was reportedly violent toward his wife when drinking, pushed the household into financial instability and frequent moves. Wollstonecraft took on a protective role toward her sisters Everina and Eliza. In 1784 she helped Eliza leave her husband, a step that brought Eliza social condemnation and a life of poverty. With her closest friend, Fanny Blood, she tried to run a school at Newington Green; the project collapsed after Blood died in childbirth in Lisbon in 1785. She worked as a governess in Ireland, an experience that fed into her only children's book, Original Stories from Real Life (1788), and then resolved to live by writing, a rare choice for a woman of her time.

In London she worked as a translator and reviewer of novels for the Analytical Review of the publisher Joseph Johnson, whose circle she joined. There she met Thomas Paine and William Godwin. Her affair with the painter Henry Fuseli ended when his wife objected to a proposed shared household. Spurred by the French Revolution, she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in reply to Edmund Burke, which brought her immediate fame. She travelled to Paris in December 1792, where she had an intense and unconventional relationship with the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, by whom she had a daughter, Fanny.

Her emotional life was as turbulent as her work was rigorous. After the break with Imlay she married William Godwin in 1797. She died eleven days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary, future author of Frankenstein, at the age of thirty-eight. Godwin soon published a memoir that disclosed her private life with unusual frankness, and this damaged her reputation for nearly a century. From the late nineteenth century, and especially in the twentieth, feminism rediscovered her work and her defence of equality between the sexes, and she is now read as a central figure in modern political philosophy.