Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an English writer and philosopher, most famous for arguing that women deserved equal rights. For much of history after her death, people paid more attention to her unusual personal life than to her ideas. Today, she is considered a key early feminist thinker, and her life and work are often pointed to as major influences.

In her short career, Wollstonecraft wrote novels, essays, a travel book, a history of the French Revolution, a guide to behavior, and a children's book. Her most famous work, *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* (1792), makes the case that women only seem less capable than men because they are denied education. She believed both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagined a society built on reason.

After two unhappy relationships—with the artist Henry Fuseli and the American Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had a daughter, Fanny Imlay—Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, a founder of anarchist thought. She died at age 38, just eleven days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who would go on to write *Frankenstein*. Wollstonecraft left several unfinished manuscripts behind.

After her death, her husband published a *Memoir* (1798) that revealed her unconventional lifestyle. This disclosure ruined her reputation for nearly a hundred years. But with the rise of the feminist movement in the early twentieth century, her arguments for women's equality and her criticism of traditional femininity became increasingly influential.

**Biography**

**Early life**

Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London, the second of seven children born to Elizabeth Dixon and Edward John Wollstonecraft. Though the family was comfortable when she was young, her father wasted the money on risky ventures. The family became financially unstable and moved often. Things got so bad that her father forced her to give up money she was due to inherit. He was also violent, often beating his wife when drunk. As a teenager, Wollstonecraft would sleep outside her mother’s bedroom door to protect her. She played a similar protective role for her sisters, Everina and Eliza, throughout her life. In a key moment in 1784, she convinced Eliza—who was likely suffering from postpartum depression—to leave her husband and baby. Wollstonecraft arranged the escape, showing her willingness to defy social rules. But the cost was high: Eliza faced public shame and, unable to remarry, was condemned to a life of poverty and hard work.

Two early friendships shaped her. The first was with Jane Arden in Beverley. They read together and attended lectures by Jane’s father, a self-styled philosopher and scientist. Wollstonecraft loved the intellectual atmosphere of the Arden home and was sometimes emotionally possessive of Jane, writing: "I have formed romantic notions of friendship… I must have the first place or none." Some of her letters to Jane reveal the volatile, depressive moods that would follow her through life. The second, more important friendship was with Fanny (Frances) Blood, whom she met through the Clares, a couple in Hoxton who became like parents to her. Wollstonecraft said Fanny opened her mind.

Unhappy at home, Wollstonecraft left in 1778 to work as a lady’s companion to Sarah Dawson, a widow in Bath. She struggled with the irritable woman—an experience she later used in her book *Thoughts on the Education of Daughters* (1787). In 1780 she returned home to care for her dying mother. After her mother’s death, she moved in with the Blood family instead of going back to work for Dawson. During those two years, she realized she had idealized Fanny, who was more attached to traditional feminine values than Wollstonecraft was. Still, she remained loyal to Fanny and her family, often giving money to Fanny’s brother.

Wollstonecraft had dreamed of living in a female utopia with Fanny, renting rooms together and supporting each other. That dream failed due to money problems. To earn a living, Wollstonecraft, her sisters, and Fanny started a school in Newington Green, a Dissenting community. Fanny soon got engaged and moved to Lisbon, Portugal, with her husband, Hugh Skeys, hoping the climate would improve her fragile health. Instead, pregnancy made her worse. In 1785, Wollstonecraft left the school to nurse Fanny, but Fanny died. The school collapsed without her. Fanny’s death devastated Wollstonecraft and partly inspired her first novel, *Mary: A Fiction* (1788).