Mary Wollstonecraft

Early Advocate for Women’s Rights and Education

“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”  –A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792

Who Was Mary Wollstonecraft?

Wollstonecraft portrait
Mary Wollstonecraft by John Keenan (c. 1787)

An English woman born in 1759, Mary Wollstonecraft was many things: a moral and political philosopher, a novelist, a travel writer, an educational theorist, and a reformer. A radical, an early feminist, and an iconoclast. While she is best remembered for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft was a prolific writer on a variety of topics and in several different genres. She is also the mother of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley (though Wollstonecraft died from childbirth complications not long after her daughter was born in 1797). For more on Wollstonecraft’s biography, here is a good place to start.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Wollstonecraft’s most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is often considered the first major English-language feminist treatise. Wollstonecraft explains her purpose for writing it in the text:

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their FASCINATING graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body…

Other Works

While Maria, or, The Wrongs of Woman is unfinished, it’s in some sense Wollstonecraft’s most radical work. In it, she addresses many of the themes from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as well as female sexuality, in a fictional format.

If you are looking for something a little shorter, we suggest Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. “Letter 19” is a particular favorite.

In addition, we recommend “Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” a short biography of Wollstonecraft written by her husband, the philosophical anarchist William Godwin, shortly after her death.

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