Self-Made in a Century of Dependence
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London in 1759 to a violent, drunken father who squandered the family money; as a girl she sometimes slept across her mother's door to shield her from his rages. Denied the education lavished on her brother, she built her own from borrowed books and, with her sisters and her beloved friend Fanny Blood, opened a school at Newington Green. There the dissenting minister Richard Price drew her into a circle where religious outsiders debated liberty, and where a clever woman was, unusually, listened to.
After the school failed and a miserable year as a governess in Ireland, she made a nearly unheard-of decision: to live by her pen. The radical publisher Joseph Johnson hired her as reviewer and translator, and she taught herself French and German to survive. When Edmund Burke attacked the French Revolution in 1790, her Vindication of the Rights of Men was among the first replies in print, published anonymously at speed. The second edition carried her name, and London learned that one of Burke's fiercest critics was a woman.
The Rights of Woman
In 1792, in about three months of furious work, she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Its argument was disarmingly simple: if reason is the human birthright, women possess it, and what passes for feminine nature, the softness, the cunning, the obsession with pleasing, is manufactured by an education designed to produce agreeable dependents. She called marriage without equality legal prostitution, demanded coeducational public schooling, and insisted women be trained for medicine, business, and politics. Nations, she wrote, could not be free while half their members were bred to servitude.
The book is uneven, hasty, and bounded by its moment; it says little of working women and shares the era's moralism. But its core claim was radical enough to wait generations for company. Wollstonecraft went to Paris in 1792 to watch the Revolution and saw the Terror instead; her history of the Revolution's origins defended its principles while condemning its cruelties. An affair with the American speculator Gilbert Imlay left her with a daughter and, after his desertion, two suicide attempts. Her travel book from Scandinavia, luminous and grieving, became her most beloved work in her lifetime.
Buried by a Love Letter
In 1796 she began, cautiously, a partnership of equals with the philosopher William Godwin; both had written against marriage and married anyway when she became pregnant. On September 10, 1797, eleven days after giving birth to the daughter who would write Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft died of septicemia at thirty-eight. Godwin, deranged by grief and principle, published a memoir disclosing everything: the affairs, the child, the suicide attempts. The candor was fatal. For a century her name meant scandal, and even campaigners for women's rights kept a careful distance.
The rehabilitation came slowly, then completely. Suffragists reclaimed her; Virginia Woolf wrote that her life and writing were experiments of the same kind; the movements of the twentieth century installed her as a founder. In 2020 a contested silver sculpture finally marked her at Newington Green, still generating argument, which she would likely have preferred to reverence. Her wager, that women's supposed inferiority was an artifact of injustice rather than nature, has been vindicated on a scale even she did not predict.
