Mary Wollstonecraft said women only seemed inferior because nobody educated them
In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women looked weaker than men only because they were denied schooling, and that both sexes should be treated as rational beings. She died at 38, days after giving birth to the future author of Frankenstein, and her husband's frank memoir buried her reputation for nearly a century.
Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, on 27 April 1759, the second of seven children. Her father frittered away a comfortable income on speculation, moved the family repeatedly, took money she would have inherited, and beat his wife when drunk; as a teenager Mary slept outside her mother's door to guard her. In 1784 she organised her sister Eliza's escape from a marriage, a defiant act that left Eliza unable to remarry and poor for life.
Work options for poor but respectable women were grim. She was a lady's companion in Bath, ran a school at Newington Green with her sisters and her close friend Fanny Blood, and then spent a year as governess to the Kingsborough family in Ireland, where one pupil later credited her with freeing her mind from superstition. Blood's death in Lisbon in 1785 fed into her first novel. Around 1787 she resolved to live by her pen, then a radical plan, and the publisher Joseph Johnson found her lodgings, translation work and reviewing.
Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution appeared on 1 November 1790, and she spent the rest of that month writing a rebuttal, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, which made her famous almost at once. Two years later came A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, imagining a society ordered by reason. When Talleyrand visited London in 1792 she pressed him to give French girls the schooling offered to boys. That December she went to Paris, arriving about a month before Louis XVI was executed, and moved among the moderate Girondins.
Her private life drew more attention than her books for generations: an unrequited passion for the married painter Henry Fuseli, a daughter, Fanny, with Gilbert Imlay, and finally marriage to the philosopher William Godwin. She died on 10 September 1797, eleven days after Mary Shelley was born. Feminists of the early twentieth century revived her ideas, and she is now counted among the founders of feminist philosophy.
Source: Mary Wollstonecraft
