Mary Wollstonecraft

English writer and philosopher (1759–1797), born in London into a family in economic decline marked by a violent, alcoholic father, a circumstance that permanently shaped her defence of women's economic independence. Self-taught, she worked successively as a lady's companion, governess and founder of a school before finding her true calling as a writer and translator in the radical circle of the publisher Joseph Johnson in London, where she mixed with thinkers such as William Godwin, whom she married shortly before dying giving birth to her daughter, the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Her first major political work, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), was one of the earliest responses to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, passionately defending revolutionary and republican ideals. But her fundamental work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), was the most influential feminist text of the eighteenth century and one of the founding texts of the entire subsequent feminist tradition: in it she argues that women's supposed intellectual and moral inferiority is not natural but the result of a deficient education, deliberately designed to turn them into weak, frivolous, dependent creatures, useful only as objects of sexual attraction for men; she demands an identical rational education for both sexes, and maintains that virtue has no gender: reason, chastity and moral fortitude are human, not masculine, qualities. Ridiculed and defamed for decades after her death because of the frank and scandalous biography her husband published, revealing her extramarital relationships, her reputation was not fully restored until the twentieth century, when the feminist movement reclaimed her as one of its essential intellectual founders.

What are Mary Wollstonecraft's main ideas?What is Mary Wollstonecraft's most important work?How would you summarize Mary Wollstonecraft's thought?

Mary Wollstonecraft

8 works

Themes addressed

Quotes