Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was born April 27 1759 in London, the second of seven children by Edward
John and Elizabeth Wollstonecraft. Her grandfather had been a prosperous master weaver, who
left the family a sizable fortune that her father squandered through gambling, alcoholism, and an
ill-advised effort to establish himself as a country gentleman. By all accounts Wollstonecraft's
childhood was a deeply unhappy one, marked by declining social status and frequent moves, as
well as financial and emotional instability. Her father was an abusive man, both verbally and
physically, which caused his wife, in turn, to withdraw emotionally from family life. From an
early age, Wollstonecraft became the protector of her sisters.

Wollstonecraft’s early career, starting in 1778, was typical for an impoverished gentlewoman; it
included periods as a lady’s companion, owner of a school, and finally as a governess. Two
significant events punctuated this period. First, in a brief break from work, she moved in with
her sister Eliza to help care for her newborn in 1784. For reasons that remain unclear,
Wollstonecraft quickly helped her sister escape her husband, leaving Eliza’s infant daughter
behind, where she eventually died a year later.

The second significant event was Wollstonecraft’s introduction to Richard Price, head of the
Dissenting community in Newington Green, where she, two of her sisters, and her close friend
established their school. A group of Christians who had seceded from the Church of England,
the Dissenters protested state interference in faith by founding their own religious and
educational communities. Though Wollstonecraft seemed to believe in a more natural, deistic
religion, she found the Dissenters congenial, and Price to be a true friend. To defend Price from
Edmund Burke’s attacks in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Wollstonecraft
would write Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), the text that established her as a political
writer.

Through Price, Wollstonecraft met Joseph Johnson, a Jacobin bookseller in London who hired
her to write for his journal, Analytical Review, after she lost her job as a governess. The period
proved to be one of the most intellectually influential and productive of her life. She met leading
radical thinkers of the period, such as Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and William Blake. She
also published her most famous work, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in 1792, as, in part,
an effort to imagine how to educate equal rational citizens for the new republic.

In December 1792, Wollstonecraft left for Paris, arriving just weeks before Louis XVI was
guillotined. During her stay there she met, fell in love with, and had a child by Gilbert Imlay, an
American businessman. Imlay was ultimately uninterested in marriage and unfaithful, leading
Wollstonecraft to attempt suicide twice in the year after she gave birth to her daughter Fanny.
Finally breaking from Imlay in 1796, Wollstonecraft returned to England, where she became
lovers with William Godwin, the premier philosophical anarchist and radical in England.
Initially refusing to marry out of principle, the two eventually wed when Wollstonecraft became
pregnant. In 1797 she gave birth to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Mary Shelley, author of
Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft died shortly thereafter from an infection she contracted during
childbirth.

As an act of love, Godwin published Wollstonecraft’s letters and manuscripts posthumously. Her
unconventional lifestyle destroyed her reputation for a century and discredited her most famous
feminist text. Only with the suffragist movement was her thought rehabilitated and seriously
read again.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman should be understood within the context of the
Enlightenment as a movement containing complex and often contradictory political, religious,
and philosophical implications. The most famous definition of the Enlightenment, though very
late in the movement, comes in Immanuel Kant’s essay, “What is Enlightenment?”:
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the
inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another” (Kant, 54). For Kant,
whose work Wollstonecraft very likely knew through her continental friends and translation
work from German, the Enlightenment rested on a belief in the power of reason to discover
binding moral, scientific, and philosophical truths that trumped the authority of old prejudices
and traditions. Reason was above all universal; everyone had access to it and, consequently,
everyone should choose to be bound by its decrees. In insisting on the rationality of women,
Wollstonecraft drew out the radically egalitarian implications behind the Enlightenment project.

The Enlightenment's emphasis on reason created in turn a lively conversation about its apparent
opposite: emotion. By the time Wollstonecraft wrote, the idea that emotion belonged to the
private sphere of women and reason to the public realm of men had become fairly common, if
still controversial. Rousseau’s depiction of Sophie, the ideal woman in his educational novel
Émile, who is raised to be sweet, docile, and interested only in pleasing her husband, is
Wollstonecraft’s most explicit target when critiquing this prejudice, but by no means her only
one. Yet most major thinkers of the Enlightenment, from Spinoza, to Hobbes, to Hume, were
centrally concerned with the study of the passions or affections, the vast majority of which were
not explicitly tied to gender roles. In emphasizing the role of the affections in creating new
social relations, particularly through the family, Wollstonecraft is situating herself in a tradition
of thinkers who see the passions as intimately tied to the public sphere. Her most obvious
precursor in this is Adam Smith’s 1759 text, Theory of Moral Sentiments, which sees
compassion as the basis of all social relations. Rousseau, too, in his less sexist moments in The
Second Discourse, argues something very similar using the concept of amour-propre and the role
of pity.

Politically, the revolutionary dimension to Wollstonecraft’s argument places her in the company
of a loose group of thinkers now often termed “the Radical Enlightenment.” As opposed to more
conservative thinkers, such as Locke, who sought to realize Enlightenment ideals through
gradual reform, members of the Radical Enlightenment thought that progress could only occur
by sweeping away past social structures and institutions. Like most radical thinkers of the time,
many of Wollstonecraft’s hopes for a more egalitarian future centered on the French Revolution.
As a result, when the French minister of education proposed in 1791 a national system of schools
that gave boys a comprehensive education in the humanities, social, and natural sciences, while
only teaching girls sewing and home economics, Wollstonecraft was outraged. A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman was her response, offering an alternative mode of educating women to be
full citizens in a revolutionary state.

The complicated role of religion in Wollstonecraft’s work and time are noteworthy: her own
beliefs were, put simply, that all people could pursue virtue, a divine gift, through use of reason.
Yet her arguments also drew on more traditionally Christian thinkers, such as Dr. Richard Price,
a leader of the Dissenter community, who argued that all souls were equal before God and,
consequently, needed equal education in order to avoid becoming overly dependent on the
esteem of others.