Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher and advocate of women's rights.
Background
Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London, United Kingdom. Her mother, Elizabeth Dixon, was Irish, and of good family. Her father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, after dissipating the greater part of his patrimony, tried to earn a living by farming, which only plunged him into deeper difficulties, and he led a wandering, shifty life.
Mary was their second born but first daughter. Her childhood was unhappy as her father was a drank who was unsteady and hot tempered and her mother was too weak and unsympathetic. Her parents loved and doted on her brother but often ignored her.
Education
Mary received her formal education in Beverley where she attended a day school. Here she learnt skills like arithmetic, geography, French, music and dance. This is the only formal education she received as opposed to her brother, Ned, who went to a better grammar school which had a library.
Career
At the age of 19, she ventured out on her own to earn a livelihood and in 1783 helped Eliza, her sister, escape an abusive marriage. She was 24 at the time. She founded a school in 1784 in Newington Green with her sister, Eliza, and Fanny Blood in a bid to give women an opportunity in education. In 1785, Fanny Blood got married in Portugal and left the school. Mary went to visit her when she was pregnant to witness the birth of her child and when she returned to England, her school was in dire financial strain and she had to close it down.
Having closed her school, she turned to writing for income and wrote a book based on her experiences in teaching and titled it ‘Thoughts on the Education of Daughters’. It was published in 1787 by Joseph Johnson. In1786 she got employed as a governess in Ireland in the household of Viscount Kingsborough in order to raise an income to support herself. She held the position for a year and used the experience to write ‘Original Stories from Real Life: with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections and form the Mind to Truth and Goodness’ a book that was published in 1788 by Johnson.
In 1787, she moved back to London and worked with Joseph Johnson a publisher. She spent many hours in the publishing shop writing and translating. She also wrote articles for the magazine ‘Analytical Review’ which was published regularly by John. She met many radical intellectuals and progressive thinkers and made a number of friends who constantly discussed the politics of the day. In 1788, she published a controversial novel titled ‘Mary: A Fiction’ which expressed her disapproval of patriarchal marriage and what the marriage did to women. This book was one of her most radical pieces and setthe pace for feminism.
The start of the French Revolution in 1789 shone the spotlight on her. She started writing controversial pieces that were beyond the range expected in a female writer. She wrote ‘A Vindication of the Rights of man” in 1790 and it was the first book to be published in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France’.
Mary Wollstonecraft not being one to shy away from confrontation, flew to France to experience the French revolution in person and it was while on this visit that she collected the material she needed to put together the ‘ Historical and Moral view of the French revolution’. This book was published in 1794 by Johnson. Mary suffered an infection while giving birth to her child and passed away eleven days after her daughter’s birth, 10 September 1797.
She thought, that God created all human beings equal and did not agree with the Judeo-Christian teaching where women were expected to go through their husbands to have a spiritual relationship with God. She faulted the doctrine of original sin where everyone is inclined to sin. She said she sensed God in nature and believed grace would only arise from having an independent mind.
Politics
Mary Wollstonecraft believed that the society needed equality and this could only be achieved if there were no monarchies in the military.
Views
Wollstonecraft criticized the patriarchal institution of marriage and its deleterious effects on women. She believed that women and men were equal and thus girls ought to have the same education opportunities. She opposed the discourse of sensibility, a moral philosophy and aesthetic that had become popular at the end of the eighteenth century. Female friendships were central to her.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
By 1929 Virginia Woolf described Wollstonecraft - "her writing, arguments, and experiments in living - as immortal: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living".
Connections
She met and fell passionately in love with Gilbert Imlay. Whether or not she was interested in marriage, he was not, and she appears to have fallen in love with an idealized portrait of the man. On 14 May 1794 she gave birth to her first child, Fanny, naming her after perhaps her closest friend. After their marriage on 29 March 1797, they moved into two adjoining houses, known as The Polygon, so that they could both still retain their independence; they often communicated by letter.
Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement. Wollstonecraft gave birth to her second daughter, Mary.