Mary Wollstonecraft

Chapter 1 · The Daughter Who Was Not Educated

A violent house and an unequal inheritance

1759 – 1784 · London · Beverley · Newington Green

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, on 27 April 1759. Her father inherited money and drank his way through it, moving the family repeatedly as farming ventures failed. He was violent to her mother; Mary reportedly slept on the landing outside her parents' door to intervene. Her elder brother received a proper education and the bulk of the family's remaining money. She received neither.

That asymmetry was the seed of everything she later wrote. She saw, at first hand and in her own household, that the difference between her brother's prospects and her own had nothing to do with ability.

Friendship became her escape. Fanny Blood, whom she met at sixteen, taught her to write more carefully and gave her an intellectual companion. In 1784 Mary helped her sister Eliza leave a marriage in which she was miserable — effectively an abduction, since a wife had almost no legal right to leave — and then set up a school with Eliza and Fanny at Newington Green.

Newington Green mattered. It was a centre of Rational Dissent, where the minister Richard Price preached that reason, conscience and political liberty belonged together. In that community a woman running a school and arguing about politics was unusual but not impossible. When Fanny Blood died in childbirth in Lisbon in 1785, Mary was left with grief, debts and the conviction that she would have to write for a living.

Why this matters

Wollstonecraft's central claim — that apparent female inferiority is produced by education, not nature — came from watching an unequal education handed out inside her own family.

You have met the young woman denied what her brother was given. What would you ask her?

Ask Wollstonecraft

• “What did you learn from watching your brother's education and not receiving one?”
• “Why did you help your sister leave her marriage?”
• “What did the Dissenters at Newington Green believe?”
• “What did Fanny Blood's friendship give you?”
• “How hard was it for a woman to earn her own living in the 1780s?”

Chapter 2 · Becoming a Professional Author

Joseph Johnson's circle and a reply to Edmund Burke

1786 – 1791 · Ireland · London

A year as governess to the aristocratic Kingsborough family in Ireland gave her material and a grievance: she watched wealthy women trained into idleness and ornament, and was dismissed, family tradition says, partly because the daughters preferred her to their mother.

Back in London in 1787 she made an extraordinary decision, telling her sister she intended to become the first of a new genus — a woman living by her writing. The radical publisher Joseph Johnson made it possible, giving her translation work, reviewing for his *Analytical Review*, and a place at his dinner table alongside Thomas Paine, William Blake, the painter Henry Fuseli and, eventually, William Godwin.

Her breakthrough came from speed. When Edmund Burke published *Reflections on the Revolution in France* in November 1790, attacking the Revolution and defending inherited hierarchy, Wollstonecraft answered within weeks with *A Vindication of the Rights of Men* — the first substantial published reply, out before Paine's *Rights of Man*. She accused Burke of caring more for the beauty of aristocratic tradition than for the poor it crushed, and pointed out that his sentimental picture of chivalry left real women without rights, property or protection.

The first edition was anonymous. The second carried her name, and she became, overnight, a public political writer — which for a woman meant becoming a public target.

Why this matters

Wollstonecraft entered political argument through the most prestigious door available — a direct rebuttal of Britain's leading conservative thinker — and proved a woman could hold her own in it.

You have watched her become a professional writer. What would you ask her about that world?

Ask Wollstonecraft

• “What did you mean by becoming 'the first of a new genus'?”
• “What was wrong with Burke's defence of tradition?”
• “What did being a governess teach you about aristocratic women?”
• “How important was Joseph Johnson to your career?”
• “What changed when you put your name on the second edition?”

Chapter 3 · A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The argument, in 1792

1792 · London

The book was written in about six weeks and published in 1792. Its trigger was practical: the French revolutionary politician Talleyrand had proposed a national education system for France in which girls would be taught only domestic skills. Wollstonecraft dedicated her book to him and demolished the plan.

Her argument runs in stages. Reason is what makes human beings capable of virtue. Virtue cannot be different for men and women, because there is only one standard of right conduct. Therefore women must be given the same rational education as men — otherwise society is deliberately producing creatures incapable of real virtue and then blaming them for it.

She was scathing about what passed for female accomplishment: girls trained to be pleasing, taught sensibility instead of thought, dressed as ornaments and then mocked for frivolity. She called such women slaves in one sense and tyrants in another, exercising the only power left to them through manipulation. She attacked Rousseau directly for arguing in *Émile* that a girl's education should be shaped entirely around pleasing men.

Her demands were, by later standards, moderate: co-educational day schools, training that would let women earn independent livings, marriage as friendship between equals. She mentions parliamentary representation for women only in passing. But the foundation she laid — that inequality is manufactured by education and custom, not given by nature — is the one nearly every later feminist argument builds on.

“I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”

— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792

Why this matters

The Vindication is the first sustained argument in English that female inferiority is an artefact of upbringing, and it set the terms for two centuries of debate about education and equality.

You have the argument in front of you. What would you ask her about it?

Ask Wollstonecraft

• “Why did you say you wanted women to have power over themselves, not over men?”
• “What was wrong with Rousseau's plan for girls' education?”
• “Why did you write the whole book in six weeks?”
• “Why did you say so little about women voting?”
• “How should a marriage between equals actually work?”

Chapter 4 · Paris, Imlay and the Journey North

Living the argument, at great cost

1792 – 1796 · Paris · Le Havre · Scandinavia

Wollstonecraft went to Paris in December 1792 to see the Revolution for herself and arrived in time to watch Louis XVI taken to trial. She stayed through the Terror, when being British made her liable to arrest, and wrote a history of the Revolution's early stages that tried to explain the violence without excusing it.

There she met Gilbert Imlay, an American speculator, and formed a relationship outside marriage — consistent with her published views and disastrous in practice. He registered her as his wife at the American embassy, which probably saved her from prison. Their daughter Fanny was born in 1794. Imlay lost interest and left.

She attempted suicide twice: once with laudanum, and once by walking in the rain to soak her clothes before jumping from Putney Bridge, from which she was pulled out unconscious by boatmen. The honest account of her life has to include this, and also has to resist turning her into a tragic heroine — it was one part of a decade in which she also worked continuously.

Between the two attempts she undertook something remarkable: a business journey through Sweden, Norway and Denmark on Imlay's behalf, travelling with a one-year-old and a maid to trace a stolen cargo ship. The book that came out of it, *Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark* (1796), blends landscape, social observation and open personal feeling. Godwin later said it was a book calculated to make a man fall in love with its author.

Why this matters

Wollstonecraft's Scandinavian letters influenced the Romantic writers who followed — and her life showed how far the social penalties for a woman living by her principles exceeded those for a man.

This chapter holds both her courage and her lowest points. What would you ask her?

Ask Wollstonecraft

• “What did you see in Paris that changed your view of revolution?”
• “Why did you refuse to marry Imlay at first?”
• “What did the journey through Scandinavia with a baby involve?”
• “Why were the social penalties so much harsher for you than for him?”
• “What did you observe about ordinary people in Norway and Denmark?”

Chapter 5 · A Death in Childbirth and a Ruined Reputation

How Godwin's honesty buried her for a century

1797 and after · London

In 1796 she began a relationship with William Godwin, the anarchist philosopher. Both had written against marriage; both married, in March 1797, when she became pregnant, to protect the child's status. They kept separate working lodgings and communicated by note — an experiment in partnership on the terms her book had described.

On 30 August 1797 she gave birth to a daughter, also Mary. The placenta did not deliver fully and was removed manually by a doctor, in conditions where nothing was sterilised. Infection followed. She died on 10 September 1797, aged thirty-eight. Her daughter would grow up to write *Frankenstein*.

Godwin, devastated, wrote a memoir of her within months. He told the truth as he understood it: the affair with Imlay, the illegitimate child, the suicide attempts, her religious doubts. He intended a tribute. The effect was catastrophic. Critics used the *Memoirs* to discredit everything she had argued, treating her ideas as the symptoms of a disordered life; one hostile index listed her under 'prostitution'. For most of the nineteenth century, respectable women's campaigners avoided naming her.

Recovery came slowly. Suffrage campaigners reclaimed her from the late nineteenth century; Virginia Woolf wrote about her in 1929; and since the 1970s she has been recognised as the starting point of modern feminist political thought. The reversal is itself an object lesson in how reputation is policed.

Why this matters

The reception of Wollstonecraft's Memoirs shows how effectively a woman's arguments could be dismissed by attacking her private life — a tactic that did not end in 1798.

You have seen the argument buried and then recovered. What would you ask her last?

Ask Wollstonecraft

• “Why did you marry Godwin when you had both argued against marriage?”
• “Was Godwin right to publish the truth about your life?”
• “Why did attacking your private life work so well against your ideas?”
• “What would you have wanted for the daughter you never knew?”
• “Which of your arguments do you think is still unfinished?”

What Wollstonecraft changed

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman established the argument that later campaigns for education, property rights, suffrage and equal pay all rested on: that women's apparent limitations were produced by how they were raised and what they were permitted to learn. Her Scandinavian letters also shaped Romantic travel writing, and her insistence on marriage as friendship between equals anticipated arguments made a century later.

A debate that continues

Scholars debate how radical Wollstonecraft actually was — whether her focus on middle-class education and rational virtue makes her a limited reformer, or whether the principle she established was always more far-reaching than the specific demands she made.

Keep exploring — ask Wollstonecraft

• “How did watching the French Revolution change what you thought reform required?”
• “What did you most want to see change in ordinary marriages?”
• “How would you answer critics who said your life disproved your ideas?”

Related lives

• Mary Shelley — Mother of Science Fiction
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — The Citizen · Father of Romanticism
• Emmeline Pankhurst — Deeds, Not Words

Related themes

The Enlightenment · The origins of feminism · Education and equality