Life

Wollstonecraft’s tumultuous life overshadowed her work for centuries before her writing was recovered by modern scholars such as Virginia Woolf and recognized as vibrant pre-feminist philosophy. Her widower, political philosopher William Godwin, published a memoir four months after her death, and despite its sympathetic treatment of her life, her critics wielded it savagely against her posthumous reputation because of its frank treatment of her multiple affairs and suicide attempts.

The Wollstonecraft family’s fortunes were unstable, and she was left poor when her volatile father passed away. Mary Wollstonecraft was industrious and taught herself French and German in order to travel England, Scandinavia, and France—where she arrived in the first year of the French Revolution—often alone, with other women, or with her illegitimate daughter. The father of this child left her alone in war-torn France with her infant. She made it back to London where he formally rejected her, but then attempted suicide twice in two years.

She married William Godwin, a long-time acquaintance, in March of 1797. Their courtship was fuelled by his admiration of her writing. They both decried the institution of marriage and made their own arrangements once the legal matter was settled, living in separate, neighbouring houses. Only six months later, in August 1797, she gave birth (to Mary Shelley, the eventual author of Frankenstein) and succumbed to puerperal fever.

Works

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is Wollstonecraft’s most important work of philosophy. Wollstonecraft’s primary thesis is that women deserve education and have the same natural rights as men, and that the lack of women in politics was due to men’s refusal to educate them, rather than innate incompetence. She viewed women and men as political equals and is often referred to as one of the first Feminist Liberals (see pages 32–33, Chapter 1).

Wollstonecraft doesn’t entirely leave the beliefs of her era behind: she derides other contemporary women as shallow and silly and retreats from the claim that women are the complete rational equals of men. Yet her pamphlet is also presciently anti-patriarchal. She lays the blame for the “silliness” of women at the feet of men who deny them education, while railing against their domination of women with caustic and stupendous rhetoric: “Probably the prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man, may have taken its rise from Moses’s poetical story; yet, as very few, it is presumed, who have bestowed any serious thought on the subject, ever supposed that Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam’s ribs…it proves that man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and…that she ought have her neck bent under the yoke, because the whole creation was only created for his convenience or pleasure.” (49) She insists women should have options to better themselves rather than being doomed to becoming a “governess or a harlot” (a sex trade worker). Later scholars as prominent as Simone de Beauvoir would take up the subject, echoed in these statements, of feminized labour and the treatment of women under patriarchy as an element present “from the remotest antiquity” and explore how the restricted options of women have historically limited them.

In addition to this most famous work, she published in political science around the French Revolution, including the not-to-be-confused A Vindication of the Rights of Men—a ruthless argument against contemporary conservative Edward Burke, which was considered excellent until she published a second edition with her name on it—and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, as well as several novels and a travelogue of Scandinavia. Modern thinkers have written admiringly of the autodidactic nature of her philosophy, and the story of her fluctuating reputation has been of interest to feminist historians. However, her clarity of rhetoric and the daring and passion of her writing are remarkable even without the backdrop of her dramatic lifestyle, and she is considered the precursor of many important modern thinkers and perhaps the first Feminist Liberal. She lived a colourful life!

Further Reading

Wollstonecraft, M. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. London, 1792

Godwin, W. Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London, 1798