virginia woolf essay mary wollstonecraft

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Two eras of feminism: mary wollstonecraft and virginia woolf, comparing and contrasting two books on women's rights.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf both focused their attention on the role of women in society, despite living in different historical and cultural contexts. While Wollstonecraft fought for the rights of women to have a national education, seeing it as among the universal and inalienable rights afforded to all of mankind, Woolf wanted instead to form a new cultural tradition of female writers.

"A Vindication of the Rights of Women" was a product of enlightenment philosophy, focusing on the rational basis for equality between men and women. "A Room of One’s Own," however was a product of post-WWI Britain and focused on appealing to the senses of the reader through stream-of-consciousness writing.

While they both differed in their approaches and their interpretations of the needs of women as individuals, they both fought for the rights of women in a time where they were heavily and overtly marginalized and oppressed.

Wollstonecraft was truly a child of the enlightenment. Writing in 1792, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" was a direct response to the philosophies of the French Revolution. She believed wholeheartedly in the concept of universal rights as endowed by a god, and that enlightenment thought could improve society and the world by making the people more rational, and therefore more virtuous.

Universal rights were commonly accepted in enlightened circles, and her notion of a liberating deity was similar to John Locke’s philosophy of inalienable rights as given by a creator. Further, the idea that reason could benefit society as a whole was embraced by enlightenment philosophers like Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Cesare Beccaria. Those who were most likely to be literate at this time were middle and upper-class men and women. Most importantly, they were generally men who imbibed enlightenment philosophy. As such, her work was written for an audience of philosophes. Yet, over a century later, another feminist writer rocked the world with her critique of women in fiction.

Virginia Woolf made a much more radical argument, in many respects than Wollstonecraft. A product of the post-WWI culture, at least upon writing "A Room of One’s Own," she approached society in a much more pragmatic way, using a strange combination of scientism and romanticism to appeal to the reader.

People found her work entertaining to read and she was relatively popular, already having been a successful novelist, by the time she published the book. On top of that, the British population was more literate and women had more educational opportunities than ever before. These facts made "A Room of One’s Own" more accessible to the average citizen.

To Mary Wollstonecraft, men and women needed to share these rights equally in order for women to “emulate the virtues of man . . .” 1 because women were just as capable of reason as a man. In her mind, virtue, having one eternal standard (that is, from Providence), could not be different for men as it is for women. That would suggest different standards of virtue. As such, their morality was grounded in the same concepts as men’s morality, or else morality was subjective. Virtue, then, was founded in truth and fortitude – that is, reason and rationality – just as it was founded for men. 2 In this endeavor, Virginia Woolf agreed with Wollstonecraft, although not as extremely. Woolf believed that truth could not be objectively determined through emotion. In her examination of the science of sex, she concluded that “[t]hey had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth,” and were therefore “worthless for my purposes” and “worthless scientifically.” 3

While both agreed on the role of non-fiction, however, it is Mary Wollstonecraft's analysis of fiction that showed the most striking difference between the two women in their approach.

To her, focusing on culture, as opposed to education, made women slaves to sensation; particularly, novels captured women's attentions and distracted them, which “prevents intellect from attaining that sovereignty which it ought to attain to render a rational creature useful to others, . . .” 4

Novels, in her mind, were useless in the endeavor for truth and rationality because they distracted women from learning and from understanding the world around them, making them unfit members of society. Virginia Woolf vehemently disagreed with this assessment. Woolf saw fiction as a means of conveying the truth of one's day-to-day life. 5 Novels served as a means of delivering a message in a logical progression, which explained why much of A Room of One's Own was written as through it were fiction. It shined a light on the thought processes of the author while maintaining the author's integrity, provided that the reality of their lives shined through their work. Otherwise, those works lacked integrity and hindered the pursuit of truth in fiction. It was once emotion superseded reason, or once masculine values plagued feminine work, that the work lost its integrity. 6 The sexist belief that the works of women were naturally inferior was internalized by many women, lowering their mental vigor simply “by the need of opposing this, or disproving that.” 7 In reality, then, it was not novels that distracted women and made them slaves to their sensations in Woolf’s mind, but the sexist view of their work.

Wollstonecraft continued by stating that women were caged, in a sort, by a forced sense of “innocence,” (which was, in her mind, synonymous with ignorance) to make them more obedient and accepting of societal oppression and the oppression thrust upon them by despots and tyrants. Women were made not only weaker mentally, but weaker physically, by being expected to maintain certain sensibilities. 8 Woolf concurred that the stereotypes thrust upon women caused a detriment to their health. She recognized the effects these standards had mentally and physically, and expressed them in her analysis of women like the hypothetical sister of William Shakespeare, Judith:

For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. 9

Femininity and the standards that came with it created many problems for the best and brightest among women in England during their respect times, an important similarity between them.

While both women accepted that stereotypes affected women in a detrimental way, they differed as to why. Woolf believed women functioned in society as a “looking glass . . . reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size;” by criticizing and demonstrating critical thought, they shrunk the reflection, making men feel small as women showed themselves as, in many respects, almost equal. 10 As such, feminine stereotypes were designed specifically to make women internalize a feeling of inferiority to men so that they may continue to serve as a suitable human self-esteem booster. Wollstonecraft saw these stereotypes as detrimental, not because of the internalized inferiority of women on its own, but because of the lack of education given to women as a result of those stereotypes. Particularly in response to Rousseau's characterization of the ideal woman, Sophie in Emile, she concluded that, logically, either women were moral beings or women were weak characters subject to the “superior faculties of men;” Wollstonecraft concluded the former to be true. 11 It was arguments like these that justified preventing women from receiving equal education. However, individual education provided a sense of virtue and wisdom agreed upon by society to be that of Providence to grant independence and to enforce the morality of society. Virtue not based on reason was “a farce,” and anyone who acted without reason could not be virtuous. Yet, the education of women in the late 1700s provided a disorderly and chaotic outlook on life where women relied heavily on tradition and observation instead of on reason to understand the world. This left them understanding simplicity without knowledge of the complexities of life that could help them adjust behavior in a virtuous way. Consequently, women became victims to the prejudices they formed in their day-to-day lives and became blind slaves to authority, making them victims of the absolutism, tyranny, and despotism so despised by enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau; they further left them acting in indecent and immoral ways. These values were passed on to children, perpetuating the system further. 12

To Wollstonecraft, women needed to prove their place as rational creatures. If acceptance showed their inferiority to men, then women would be inferior with a new instilled sense of virtue. 13 To prove their place in society, they needed national, equal education. 14 If their rationality were to be proven, then they needed to be given access to political independence, more employment opportunities to maintain a sense of financial independence, and autonomy from their husbands, who should “generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, . . .” 15 Virginia Woolf agreed with Wollstonecraft’s assessment of the need for equal opportunity, especially in employment. As she related the story of “Mary” in A Room of One’s Own , she accounted seeing several men and women working in their day-to-day lives as she walked down the streets of Oxbridge. She pondered on why it was that the women who saved lives and took care of children earned less than, or were seen as less important than, the coal-heavers, the lawyer, or the barristers; in truth, she longed for a day when women stopped begin the protected sex and took on male work roles. 16 While Woolf only argued explicitly for financial independence and privacy for women, she advocated for a sense of androgyny in one’s work, especially in fiction. She believed perfect clarity of experience in writing required that “one must be woman-manly or man-wonanly” and not be wholly male or female when conveying thoughts and opinions. Otherwise, these thoughts became riddled with biases and half-truths that muddied the message of the work. 17 She further lamented at the lack of intellectual freedom women had throughout most of their history, pointing out that the poor lacked the means to learn and had no way to travel and contemplate the world around them. This, alongside the societal standard for women to remain in the house left them unable to produce works of literary genius. “Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady ‘cut off from what is called the world,’ however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written War and Peace .” 18 However, it was perhaps the degree to which each woman emphasized their respect points that created the most remarkable contrast.

The most striking difference between Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf was what they considered to be the most important emancipator for women in society. Wollstonecraft saw education as the ultimate liberator for women, while Woolf believed that privacy and financial independence would naturally change their status. While Wollstonecraft touched on numerous topics in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , she focused most of her attention on education. She believed education was at the root of virtue, and so women needed to be educated to act in moral ways and to teach their children right from wrong. Through virtue, all things became possible. These virtues would make women better wives, better role models for their children, and more effective educators. Political participation, which needed righteous thought and the ability to reason, would become feasible. Workplace inequity would be a thing of the past. 19 Virtue could improve society drastically. It was, as such, the greatest emancipator. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, took a different approach to life. She saw education as a necessary step to the progress of women, to be sure, but she believed that the true emancipator for women started at home. By 1929, the year A Room of One’s Own was published, women already had greater opportunities than women in 1792. Woolf chastised women for not taking advantage of their new-found privileges to go to college, own their own property, save money, and vote. Judith Shakespeare, to Woolf, lived in every woman. If women would use these advantages to improve themselves, she would “walk among us in the flesh.” 20 While women had these new privileges, they still were not free from the stereotypes thrust upon them. They were clearly important to Virginia Woolf, but not what would liberate women from these societal standards. In truth, “freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art [of writing]; . . .” in short, women needed the freedom to express themselves. In order to accomplish that, they needed the privacy and financial support to free themselves of the responsibilities of life and produce great works. 21 In essence, women needed to escape the looking glass role thrust upon them by men by seizing their financial independence, privacy, and education, which decreased the sense of male superiority in society. Only by doing that could progress be made for women.

Two women, both writing in completely different historical and cultural contexts, wrote profound works that championed feminist causes. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a product of enlightenment philosophy, a testament, in the minds of women like Mary Wollstonecraft, to the empowering nature of reason. However, A Room of One’s Own sprung for post-WWI Britain, where romanticism and positivism had gained more of a foothold in the minds of the average person. That work was a true testament to the power of fiction in conveying truth. While both women differed in approach, largely due to their philosophical and cultural differences, they both fought for the rights of women in a time when men would not, a fact that made their works truly profound

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25 beatles lyrics: your go-to guide for every situation, the best lines from the fab four.

For as long as I can remember, I have been listening to The Beatles. Every year, my mom would appropriately blast “Birthday” on anyone’s birthday. I knew all of the words to “Back In The U.S.S.R” by the time I was 5 (Even though I had no idea what or where the U.S.S.R was). I grew up with John, Paul, George, and Ringo instead Justin, JC, Joey, Chris and Lance (I had to google N*SYNC to remember their names). The highlight of my short life was Paul McCartney in concert twice. I’m not someone to “fangirl” but those days I fangirled hard. The music of The Beatles has gotten me through everything. Their songs have brought me more joy, peace, and comfort. I can listen to them in any situation and find what I need. Here are the best lyrics from The Beatles for every and any occasion.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make

The End- Abbey Road, 1969

The sun is up, the sky is blue, it's beautiful and so are you

Dear Prudence- The White Album, 1968

Love is old, love is new, love is all, love is you

Because- Abbey Road, 1969

There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be

All You Need Is Love, 1967

Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend

We Can Work It Out- Rubber Soul, 1965

He say, "I know you, you know me", One thing I can tell you is you got to be free

Come Together- Abbey Road, 1969

Oh please, say to me, You'll let me be your man. And please say to me, You'll let me hold your hand

I Wanna Hold Your Hand- Meet The Beatles!, 1964

It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. They've been going in and out of style, but they're guaranteed to raise a smile

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-1967

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see

Strawberry Fields Forever- Magical Mystery Tour, 1967

Can you hear me? When it rains and shine, it's just a state of mind

Rain- Paperback Writer "B" side, 1966

Little darling, it's been long cold lonely winter. Little darling, it feels like years since it' s been here. Here comes the sun, Here comes the sun, and I say it's alright

Here Comes The Sun- Abbey Road, 1969

We danced through the night and we held each other tight, and before too long I fell in love with her. Now, I'll never dance with another when I saw her standing there

Saw Her Standing There- Please Please Me, 1963

I love you, I love you, I love you, that's all I want to say

Michelle- Rubber Soul, 1965

You say you want a revolution. Well you know, we all want to change the world

Revolution- The Beatles, 1968

All the lonely people, where do they all come from. All the lonely people, where do they all belong

Eleanor Rigby- Revolver, 1966

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends

With A Little Help From My Friends- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967

Hey Jude, don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better

Hey Jude, 1968

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday

Yesterday- Help!, 1965

And when the brokenhearted people, living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.

Let It Be- Let It Be, 1970

And anytime you feel the pain, Hey Jude, refrain. Don't carry the world upon your shoulders

I'll give you all i got to give if you say you'll love me too. i may not have a lot to give but what i got i'll give to you. i don't care too much for money. money can't buy me love.

Can't Buy Me Love- A Hard Day's Night, 1964

All you need is love, love is all you need

All You Need Is Love- Magical Mystery Tour, 1967

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be

Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird- The White Album, 1968

Though I know I'll never lose affection, for people and things that went before. I know I'll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more

In My Life- Rubber Soul, 1965

While these are my 25 favorites, there are quite literally 1000s that could have been included. The Beatles' body of work is massive and there is something for everyone. If you have been living under a rock and haven't discovered the Fab Four, you have to get musically educated. Stream them on Spotify, find them on iTunes or even buy a CD or record (Yes, those still exist!). I would suggest starting with 1, which is a collection of most of their #1 songs, or the 1968 White Album. Give them chance and you'll never look back.

14 Invisible Activities: Unleash Your Inner Ghost!

Obviously the best superpower..

The best superpower ever? Being invisible of course. Imagine just being able to go from seen to unseen on a dime. Who wouldn't want to have the opportunity to be invisible? Superman and Batman have nothing on being invisible with their superhero abilities. Here are some things that you could do while being invisible, because being invisible can benefit your social life too.

1. "Haunt" your friends.

Follow them into their house and cause a ruckus.

2. Sneak into movie theaters.

Going to the cinema alone is good for your mental health , says science

Considering that the monthly cost of subscribing to a media-streaming service like Netflix is oft...

Free movies...what else to I have to say?

3. Sneak into the pantry and grab a snack without judgment.

Late night snacks all you want? Duh.

4. Reenact "Hollow Man" and play Kevin Bacon.

America's favorite son? And feel what it's like to be in a MTV Movie Award nominated film? Sign me up.

5. Wear a mask and pretend to be a floating head.

Just another way to spook your friends in case you wanted to.

6. Hold objects so they'll "float."

"Oh no! A floating jar of peanut butter."

7. Win every game of hide-and-seek.

Just stand out in the open and you'll win.

8. Eat some food as people will watch it disappear.

Even everyday activities can be funny.

9. Go around pantsing your friends.

Even pranks can be done; not everything can be good.

10. Not have perfect attendance.

You'll say here, but they won't see you...

11. Avoid anyone you don't want to see.

Whether it's an ex or someone you hate, just use your invisibility to slip out of the situation.

12. Avoid responsibilities.

Chores? Invisible. People asking about social life? Invisible. Family being rude? Boom, invisible.

13. Be an expert on ding-dong-ditch.

Never get caught and have the adrenaline rush? I'm down.

14. Brag about being invisible.

Be the envy of the town.

But don't, I repeat, don't go in a locker room. Don't be a pervert with your power. No one likes a Peeping Tom.

Good luck, folks.

19 Lessons I'll Never Forget from Growing Up In a Small Town

There have been many lessons learned..

Small towns certainly have their pros and cons. Many people who grow up in small towns find themselves counting the days until they get to escape their roots and plant new ones in bigger, "better" places. And that's fine. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought those same thoughts before too. We all have, but they say it's important to remember where you came from. When I think about where I come from, I can't help having an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for my roots. Being from a small town has taught me so many important lessons that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

1. The importance of traditions.

Sometimes traditions seem like a silly thing, but the fact of it is that it's part of who you are. You grew up this way and, more than likely, so did your parents. It is something that is part of your family history and that is more important than anything.

2. How to be thankful for family and friends.

No matter how many times they get on your nerves or make you mad, they are the ones who will always be there and you should never take that for granted.

3. How to give back.

When tragedy strikes in a small town, everyone feels obligated to help out because, whether directly or indirectly, it affects you too. It is easy in a bigger city to be able to disconnect from certain problems. But in a small town those problems affect everyone.

4. What the word "community" really means.

Along the same lines as #3, everyone is always ready and willing to lend a helping hand when you need one in a small town and to me that is the true meaning of community. It's working together to build a better atmosphere, being there to raise each other up, build each other up, and pick each other up when someone is in need. A small town community is full of endless support whether it be after a tragedy or at a hometown sports game. Everyone shows up to show their support.

5. That it isn't about the destination, but the journey.

People say this to others all the time, but it takes on a whole new meaning in a small town. It is true that life is about the journey, but when you're from a small town, you know it's about the journey because the journey probably takes longer than you spend at the destination. Everything is so far away that it is totally normal to spend a couple hours in the car on your way to some form of entertainment. And most of the time, you're gonna have as many, if not more, memories and laughs on the journey than at the destination.

6. The consequences of making bad choices.

Word travels fast in a small town, so don't think you're gonna get away with anything. In fact, your parents probably know what you did before you even have a chance to get home and tell them. And forget about being scared of what your teacher, principle, or other authority figure is going to do, you're more afraid of what your parents are gonna do when you get home.

7. To trust people, until you have a reason not to.

Everyone deserves a chance. Most people don't have ill-intentions and you can't live your life guarding against every one else just because a few people in your life have betrayed your trust.

8. To be welcoming and accepting of everyone.

While small towns are not always extremely diverse, they do contain people with a lot of different stories, struggle, and backgrounds. In a small town, it is pretty hard to exclude anyone because of who they are or what they come from because there aren't many people to choose from. A small town teaches you that just because someone isn't the same as you, doesn't mean you can't be great friends.

9. How to be my own, individual person.

In a small town, you learn that it's okay to be who you are and do your own thing. You learn that confidence isn't how beautiful you are or how much money you have, it's who you are on the inside.

10. How to work for what I want.

Nothing comes easy in life. They always say "gardens don't grow overnight" and if you're from a small town you know this both figuratively and literally. You certainly know gardens don't grow overnight because you've worked in a garden or two. But you also know that to get to the place you want to be in life it takes work and effort. It doesn't just happen because you want it to.

11. How to be great at giving directions.

If you're from a small town, you know that you will probably only meet a handful of people in your life who ACTUALLY know where your town is. And forget about the people who accidentally enter into your town because of google maps. You've gotten really good at giving them directions right back to the interstate.

12. How to be humble .

My small town has definitely taught me how to be humble. It isn't always about you, and anyone who grows up in a small town knows that. Everyone gets their moment in the spotlight, and since there's so few of us, we're probably best friends with everyone so we are as excited when they get their moment of fame as we are when we get ours.

13. To be well-rounded.

Going to a small town high school definitely made me well-rounded. There isn't enough kids in the school to fill up all the clubs and sports teams individually so be ready to be a part of them all.

14. How to be great at conflict resolution.

In a small town, good luck holding a grudge. In a bigger city you can just avoid a person you don't like or who you've had problems with. But not in a small town. You better resolve the issue fast because you're bound to see them at least 5 times a week.

15. The beauty of getting outside and exploring.

One of my favorite things about growing up in a rural area was being able to go outside and go exploring and not have to worry about being in danger. There is nothing more exciting then finding a new place somewhere in town or in the woods and just spending time there enjoying the natural beauty around you.

16. To be prepared for anything.

You never know what may happen. If you get a flat tire, you better know how to change it yourself because you never know if you will be able to get ahold of someone else to come fix it. Mechanics might be too busy , or more than likely you won't even have enough cell service to call one.

17. That you don't always have to do it alone.

It's okay to ask for help. One thing I realized when I moved away from my town for college, was how much my town has taught me that I could ask for help is I needed it. I got into a couple situations outside of my town where I couldn't find anyone to help me and found myself thinking, if I was in my town there would be tons of people ready to help me. And even though I couldn't find anyone to help, you better believe I wasn't afraid to ask.

18. How to be creative.

When you're at least an hour away from normal forms of entertainment such as movie theaters and malls, you learn to get real creative in entertaining yourself. Whether it be a night looking at the stars in the bed of a pickup truck or having a movie marathon in a blanket fort at home, you know how to make your own good time.

19. To brush off gossip.

It's all about knowing the person you are and not letting others influence your opinion of yourself. In small towns, there is plenty of gossip. But as long as you know who you really are, it will always blow over.

Grateful Beyond Words: A Letter to My Inspiration

I have never been so thankful to know you..

I can't say "thank you" enough to express how grateful I am for you coming into my life. You have made such a huge impact on my life. I would not be the person I am today without you and I know that you will keep inspiring me to become an even better version of myself.

You have taught me that you don't always have to strong. You are allowed to break down as long as you pick yourself back up and keep moving forward. When life had you at your worst moments, you allowed your friends to be there for you and to help you. You let them in and they helped pick you up. Even in your darkest hour you showed so much strength. I know that you don't believe in yourself as much as you should but you are unbelievably strong and capable of anything you set your mind to.

Your passion to make a difference in the world is unbelievable. You put your heart and soul into your endeavors and surpass any personal goal you could have set. Watching you do what you love and watching you make a difference in the lives of others is an incredible experience. The way your face lights up when you finally realize what you have accomplished is breathtaking and I hope that one day I can have just as much passion you have.

SEE MORE: A Letter To My Best Friend On Her Birthday

The love you have for your family is outstanding. Watching you interact with loved ones just makes me smile . You are so comfortable and you are yourself. I see the way you smile when you are around family and I wish I could see you smile like this everyday. You love with all your heart and this quality is something I wished I possessed.

You inspire me to be the best version of myself. I look up to you. I feel that more people should strive to have the strength and passion that you exemplify in everyday life.You may be stubborn at points but when you really need help you let others in, which shows strength in itself. I have never been more proud to know someone and to call someone my role model. You have taught me so many things and I want to thank you. Thank you for inspiring me in life. Thank you for making me want to be a better person.

Waitlisted for a College Class? Here's What to Do!

Dealing with the inevitable realities of college life..

Course registration at college can be a big hassle and is almost never talked about. Classes you want to take fill up before you get a chance to register. You might change your mind about a class you want to take and must struggle to find another class to fit in the same time period. You also have to make sure no classes clash by time. Like I said, it's a big hassle.

This semester, I was waitlisted for two classes. Most people in this situation, especially first years, freak out because they don't know what to do. Here is what you should do when this happens.

Don't freak out

This is a rule you should continue to follow no matter what you do in life, but is especially helpful in this situation.

Email the professor

Around this time, professors are getting flooded with requests from students wanting to get into full classes. This doesn't mean you shouldn't burden them with your email; it means they are expecting interested students to email them. Send a short, concise message telling them that you are interested in the class and ask if there would be any chance for you to get in.

Attend the first class

Often, the advice professors will give you when they reply to your email is to attend the first class. The first class isn't the most important class in terms of what will be taught. However, attending the first class means you are serious about taking the course and aren't going to give up on it.

Keep attending class

Every student is in the same position as you are. They registered for more classes than they want to take and are "shopping." For the first couple of weeks, you can drop or add classes as you please, which means that classes that were once full will have spaces. If you keep attending class and keep up with assignments, odds are that you will have priority. Professors give preference to people who need the class for a major and then from higher to lower class year (senior to freshman).

Have a backup plan

For two weeks, or until I find out whether I get into my waitlisted class, I will be attending more than the usual number of classes. This is so that if I don't get into my waitlisted class, I won't have a credit shortage and I won't have to fall back in my backup class. Chances are that enough people will drop the class, especially if it is very difficult like computer science, and you will have a chance. In popular classes like art and psychology, odds are you probably won't get in, so prepare for that.

Remember that everything works out at the end

Life is full of surprises. So what if you didn't get into the class you wanted? Your life obviously has something else in store for you. It's your job to make sure you make the best out of what you have.

Top Creators

1. Brittany Morgan, National Writer's Society 2. Radhi, SUNY Stony Brook 3. Kristen Haddox , Penn State University 4. Jennifer Kustanovich , SUNY Stony Brook 5. Clare Regelbrugge , University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

A Tale of Two Sculptures: Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf

Amidst the controversy over Maggi Hambling’s memorial sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft , a fundraiser for a statue in honor of another great British feminist, Virginia Woolf, has not coincidentally been “ flooded with donations .” In this tale of two sculptures, the outcry over one and the groundswell of support for the other raise important aesthetic and political questions about feminist representation and the representation of feminists.

By no means a likeness of Wollstonecraft, Hambling’s sculpture is nonetheless figurative. Rising from a swirling swath of silvered bronze, the tiny naked female body at the top has breasts every bit as taut as her abs. Significantly, the figure also sports what looks like a closely cropped coif and an unmistakably proud bush, two notable departures from the conventions of the female nude. Whatever is being birthed here, this is no Botticellian Venus on the clamshell.

By no means a likeness of Wollstonecraft, Hambling’s sculpture is nonetheless figurative.

Hambling’s effort to create an “ everywoman ,” her critics say, has not only captured no woman ever but reinforced the cultural power that the implicitly white feminine form continues to exercise on and against actual women. Here the aesthetic issue shades into a political one, for the gender and racial politics of the female nude remains an urgent issue within both art-historical and mass-media circles even as the public underrepresentation of women’s political and cultural achievements persists.

Feminist disappointment in Hambling’s work is thus at least twofold. Aiming at universalism, her “everywoman” turns out to be a very particular sort of woman after all, while the abstraction of the sculpture offends those who believe it ought to have more directly commemorated Wollstonecraft’s brilliant mind and brave life.

By contrast, the clay model of Laury Dizengremel’s Woolf statue is thoroughly representational. The author’s likeness sits on a bench along the Thames in suburban Richmond, where Woolf lived from 1914 to 1924. Fully clothed, of course, in period fashion, it has a book on its lap, a wide-brimmed hat at its side, and an arm companionably extended across the top of the bench. Turned towards the empty space beside it, this life-size replica of a writer who notoriously hated being photographed invites passers-by and literary tourists to sit down for a selfie or two.

By contrast, the clay model of Laury Dizengremel’s Woolf statue is thoroughly representational.

Given the iconic status she achieved even in her own lifetime—captured by no less than Man Ray for the cover of Time in 1937, for instance—Woolf would probably not be surprised at the public hunger for her likeness any more than at the apparent preference for the fully figurative over the abstract and the experimental. But she would not be edified by these developments, either.

In a commentary on the memorial that closes with a quotation from Woolf’s essay on Wollstonecraft in The Second Common Reader (1932), Eleanor Nairne poses a question about Hambling’s work very much in Woolf’s spirit: “Might the statue’s unusual form be understood as a refusal to participate in monument-making?” Monumentality has an undeniable connection, historically speaking, to the “great man” view of things that Woolf took as a chief target for many years of her career. Extending the same treatment to “great women” held no appeal for her.

Extending the same treatment to “great women” held no appeal for her.

Most memorably, Orlando (1928) sends up the statue of Queen Victoria that still stands in front of Buckingham Palace by adorning it with all manner of Victorian bric-a-brac. The monument in Trafalgar Square to the memory of the British nurse Edith Cavell, who died in World War I, reminds one character in The Years (1937) of nothing so much as “an advertisement for sanitary towels.”

Does the demand from feminists for heroic form in public monuments suggest that we are all still “under the rule of a patriarchy,” as Woolf wrote almost a century ago in A Room of One’s Own (1929)? Perhaps the moral to this tale of two sculptures, one provocative and one pedestrian, lies in rethinking the demand for representation itself.

*Featured image by Ioana Marinescu.

Mary Jean Corbett is University Distinguished Professor of English and an Affiliate of both Global and Intercultural Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Miami University. Her other books include Family Likeness . Follow her on Twitter.

See all books by this author .

Introduction: Mary Wollstonecraft Even Now

This collection of essays attests to Virginia Woolf’s claim in The Common Reader (1932) that Mary Wollstonecraft remains a vital presence “even now,” even in this, our (so-called) postmodern, postfeminist, or posthuman time (163). Wollstonecraft considered herself among “those who are bold enough to advance before the age they live in, and to throw off, by force of their own minds, the prejudices which the maturing reason of the world will in time disavow” ( Letters 410), and she has often been described as “visionary” (Sapiro 33) or “way ahead of her time” (Rushton). We could say that as much as her work evolves out of and in urgent response to her own era, she also wrote for an era beyond her own, projecting into an uncertain future, sending up flares for the generations to come. From the opening sentences of her first published book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), where she castigates mothers whose “thoughtless disregard of every thing, except the present indulgence” leads them to neglect their children (7), to the last sentences of the posthumously published Lessons (1798), in which she anticipates “another day” for the girl to learn “how to think . . . herself” (474), she was always taking a prospective view, looking ahead, if not always hopefully, at least with an eye fixed on the need for change.

Given her orientation towards a future time, it should not be surprising that Wollstonecraft is still felt to be “alive and active” among us in the current moment, a moment in the still incomplete transformation of the world she sought to argue or experiment into existence. Claudia Johnson has noted “her remarkable afterlife” (5), and in surveying her mixed reception and “mutable legacies” through the twentieth century, Cora Kaplan has concluded that Wollstonecraft persists as “a living presence in an on-going struggle . . . more complicated and unfinished than ever” (268–69). Though it has been objected that regarding Wollstonecraft as “our contemporary” distorts the historical record,

recent readers continue to hear her voice in current debates on a range of social and political issues or to trace her influence in their own critical or creative projects. For example, Catherine Packham has recently heard echoes of Wollstonecraft’s arguments in Oxfam’s 2017 report on global economic disparity ( “Mary Wollstonecraft, our Contemporary” ), and photographer Moyra Davey invokes Wollstonecraft’s life story as a touchstone in her own meditation on family and memory in her films Les Goddesses (2011) and Hemlock Forest (2016).

An Oxfam report and an autobiographical video project may sound like unlikely manifestations of what Kaplan calls Wollstonecraft’s “almost material presence” among us (260), but their very unlikelihood signals that her words, her ideas, and her life experience still live on in disparate and sometimes unexpected guises, transfigured in ways that may indeed reach “beyond what she might personally have imagined” (Reuter et al. 907). Indeed, as she sat for her portrait in 1790 and again in 1797, she is unlikely to have imagined that one of those portraits would be gigantically projected onto the Houses of Parliament in 2011 (to launch the Mary on the Green campaign) or that in 2013 her image would be stenciled on the wall of the Newington Green Unitarian Chapel by the street artist Stewy (reproduced on the cover page of this volume); such recent remediations illustrate that Wollstonecraft continues to appear in surprising forms among us, even now.

These essays consider in particular some of the figurations and transfigurations of Mary Wollstonecraft as they appear in various arguments, theories, or practices among those which constitute the ongoing history of feminism, or, we should say, of feminisms. They think with as well as about Wollstonecraft by thinking with and about that history as it continues to be formulated and reformulated in the present. They do not attempt to provide a definitive or comprehensive portrait of Wollstonecraft or of the ongoing feminist movement for which her work offered an early impetus; such a moving picture could hardly be drawn once and for all in any essay or even in six. Instead, they comprise a sort of album of sketches or snapshots, each one approaching its subject in a different setting, from a different angle, or with a different lens and focus. They move in some of the directions her work points and explore some of the paths she marks out, though they do not always follow her blazes without doubling back (for instance to Antigone ) or venturing into territory (such as cyberspace) that would not have appeared on any map Wollstonecraft might have used to plot her own revolutionary itinerary. These essays hear Wollstonecraft’s voice spoken with unexpected accents (for instance, in the misogyny of twentieth-century pop psychology or the poststructuralist philosophy of Jacques Rancière) and find traces of her influence in positions she apparently refuted (such as on exceptional women as a force for social change). In her essay in this volume, historian Arianne Chernock observes that feminism “never has been a linear development,” and the essays collected here demonstrate that Wollstonecraft’s impact on feminist thought and movement also registers in loops and swerves, indirectly, and in ways that are often contested. The volume takes up the question of Wollstonecraft’s continuing relevance to contemporary feminist thought and its wider cultural movements as unfinished business, not to finish it, but to open the question to new or revisionary modes of critical inquiry and new or newly resonant terms of critical engagement—for example, to Julie Carlson’s “passional” reading of Wollstonecraft, which engages contemporary debates about care work and itself involves a kind of giving (or taking) care. Criticism that is motivated by or responsive to the lived experience of the critic has long been deemed a crucial feature of feminism.

Whether openly acknowledged as a contextual element or embedded as subtext, such “intimate critique” is at issue in more than one essay among those gathered here;

that the personal and the political are engaged in deep and often difficult conversation in a number of these essays surely owes something to Mary Wollstonecraft’s example.

Making connections between Wollstonecraft’s efforts to think and live both within and beyond Enlightenment principles of liberal humanism and various ongoing issues and debates in contemporary culture, from the political efficacy of social media to the impasses in theories and practices of social justice (including the impasses in our own critical theories and pedagogical practices), these essays not only ask how Wollstonecraft’s pioneering arguments live on after her in feminist thought, theory, and practice now, but they also collectively raise questions about how feminist thought, theory, and practice live on; together, they query how, what, or for whom feminism argues now.

If today we can recognize the gender trouble A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) brews in Wollstonecraft’s rhetorical question, “Where is then the sexual difference, when the education has been the same?” or in her “wild wish . . . to see the distinction of sex confounded in society,” what might further consideration of her arguments about the condition of women based on their shared experience of oppression provide to current thinking about the social construction of sex or the fluidity of gender identity or the differences and complexities in the experience of oppression which are obfuscated in assertions of a universal womanhood (92, 126)? Wollstonecraft argued for the rights of “woman” as a specific social category of bodies for whom biology constituted an essential if not an absolutely delimiting circumstance. But as her earlier A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) also shows, that argument was pitched as part of a much larger set of concerns: the “revolution in female manners” for which she calls in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was integral to a wider call “to reform the world,” and she saw the liberation of women from the conventions that kept them physically and intellectually weak and dependent as a necessary step in the effort to dismantle the “despotism” that more broadly constrained the lives of humans in the material realm of the social, the political, and the economic (114). The vocabulary with which she took up these issues has changed in current discourse—we are less likely to employ the language of reason or virtue to talk about the fundamental principles of human rights or social justice—but this volume revisits and revitalizes in modern terms some aspects of what Wollstonecraft herself called “my old argument,” which was, simply put, that women, however constituted as such, are people with minds as well as bodies, that women’s rights are human rights ( Vindication of the Rights of Woman 132). As Lynn Festa’s rigorous scrutiny of this claim in her essay demonstrates, the different ways old arguments inform or impel new ones is part of what this collection seeks to explore.

The contributors gathered here work in three different disciplines—literature, history, and political science—though each of their essays crosses disciplinary borders strictly construed; each brings a multivalent perspective to the topic of how Wollstonecraft’s arguments and experiments continue to inflect feminist theories and practices today. Their essays are layered and adventurous; a few of them extend the dimensions of the essay form, taking advantage of the opportunities technology affords to incorporate other media, as Eileen Hunt Botting does, or to suggest other lines of thought in the margins, as Mary Favret does. The writer they are addressing—at once political philosopher and author of tales for children—may indeed demand such a hybrid and genre-stretching critical methodology, but we can also say that as a collection these essays themselves exemplify Wollstonecraft’s lively presence among us, taking up her challenge of writing as a form of political praxis, a mode of doing one’s work that tests conventional boundaries with the aim of pushing for systemic change going forward.

That all the contributors to this volume are white, cis-women may be one among many indications that even here, even now, the radical change to which Wollstonecraft looked forward is yet to be realized. The challenge is still on.

Julie Carlson explicitly confronts that challenge by considering the ascription of Wollstonecraft’s feminism as straight, white, and middle class. Framing her reading within current debates about the ethics of care, Carlson explores the possibilities of a less normative, more intersectional feminism emerging in Wollstonecraft’s work. Proposing that humans are interdependent rather than autonomous, the care movement redraws the boundaries between public and private, institutional structures and individuals, the social and the psychological, much as Wollstonecraft did in her political polemic, her attempts at philosophical fiction, and her struggle to live a life of the mind as a kind of activism or revisionary practice. Carlson sees Wollstonecraft elaborating an ethics of care especially in Mary: A Fiction and Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman , where stories of women’s disparate yet linked caregiving activities dramatize the risky process of establishing relationships through acknowledging and working across difference. Seeing this dynamic shifts Carlson’s critical focus from the much-discussed limitations of Wollstonecraft’s feminist legacy to the potential insight inadequacy or failure offers into complex systems of exploitation and injustice, including those operating at the ground of (inter)personal relations.

Approaching Wollstonecraft through Jacques Rancière’s ideas about the exclusions that structure the very logic of the political order, Lynn Festa addresses a contradiction that arises in Wollstonecraft’s argument that women’s rights are human rights. And not unlike Carlson, Festa ultimately reclaims the contradiction as the dispute or “dissensus” that creates space for reconstituting the political order at its foundation rather than merely expanding its boundaries. For the revolutionary philosopher of A Vindication of the Rights of Man and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , Festa contends, the discourse of rights develops “not as the corrective of localized wrongs (and thus the obverse or mirror image of the dominant order), but as the necessary correlative of duties.” Proposing duties as the basis for rights allows Wollstonecraft to conceive political subjectivity as the capacity for action rather than a possession that some people have and others do not. Festa thus sees Wollstonecraft strategically turning “from the disempowering binary of right and wrong to the empowering reciprocity of rights and duties” in order to argue that fulfilling domestic duties in itself constitutes women’s political participation. Admitting that an exclusionary division of labor inevitably haunts this stance, Festa nonetheless finds that in compelling the reader to confront the stark choice between seeing women as humans or seeing them as brute beasts, the text performs the dissensus Rancière proposes as crucial to revolutionary change.

In her essay, Julie Murray discerns a shadowy figure of Wollstonecraft cast in Sara Ahmed’s recent characterization of the feminist killjoy, though she focuses on a text from the mid-twentieth century to examine the force of seeing Wollstonecraft in Ahmed’s terms. In its “cartoonish depiction of Wollstonecraft” as a penis-envying neurotic, the authors of the pop psychology best-seller, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947), trace what they regard as the world-destroying ideology of feminism directly back to Wollstonecraft’s “twisted personality.” Yet, as Murray reveals, their scathing critique at times appears to speak in a voice not so unlike Wollstonecraft’s own, absorbing her “withering tone” or adopting the technique of ironic mimicry she uses in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman . And the book written so passionately (or perhaps we could say, hysterically) against her inadvertently works to bolster her reputation, exaggerating her importance, at least relative to more recent accounts which dismiss her work for its complicity in liberal feminism’s normative prescriptions and progressive historiography. Murray returns to Ahmed at the end of her essay to suggest that in closely attending to the complicated and often conflicted affects involved in living a feminist life—especially negativity or ambivalence—we may discover not so much a particular path forward as a different mode of being in or of (re)making the world.

Eileen Hunt Botting’s contribution updates Murray’s interest in the caricature of Wollstonecraft’s arguments in twentieth-century popular discourse by considering the significant social and political reverberations of memes that get reproduced and disseminated through twenty-first-century social media as widely visible, as well as endlessly malleable, symbols of ideas. Looking at how Wollstonecraft herself was fashioned and also fashioned herself as a meme well before the invention of the World Wide Web, Hunt Botting advises that feminism needs to learn how to deploy these arguably superficial but nonetheless powerful symbols “for successful political action in the present and future.” For Hunt Botting, Hillary Clinton (or her campaign machine), along with Malala Yousafzai and Emma Watson, represent those who have begun to realize the feminist potential within the global circulation of memes; they also represent how high the stakes are in “the risky and virulent politics” of meme warfare. In the currency of Hunt Botting’s discussion, as well as in how quickly current circumstances turn into past history in the age of the internet, we can appreciate in a particularly striking way that what Woolf called Wollstonecraft’s immortality is sustained more by transformation or adaptation than by mere reiteration in the ongoing present.

Arianne Chernock detects the tones of Wollstonecraft’s voice submerged in the history of opinion about the role that queens and other royal women could play in feminist critique. If Wollstonecraft’s reflections on this issue were indirect or “more muted” than those of her peers Mary Hays or Mary Robinson, it is nonetheless important to be more attuned to this aspect of her thinking “both for our understanding of Wollstonecraft herself and for the broader feminist conversation in which she was, and indeed remains, a central participant.” Even when narrowly construed, the broader conversations of Western feminism or liberal feminism or white, middle-class feminism should be seen as more nuanced and multifaceted, interwoven with more divergent strands of thought and building their claims on more varied foundations than has typically been recognized. In the present moment, Chernock proposes, feminist scholars might look with more careful attention at the continuing appeal of “princess culture” among little girls and others in the West, which, though apparently so invested in perpetuating gender and race stereotypes, could also provide opportunities for revising those stereotypes as well as reimagining the structures of power they subtend.

Reaching farthest into the past of the essays included here, Mary Favret addresses the question of how Wollstonecraft lives among us even now by approaching Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) through Antigone and recent revisionary accounts of Sophocles’ tragedy. In the resonant echoes produced by what we might call a form of strategic anachronism (whereby Wollstonecraft is seen to anticipate modern feminist readings of Antigone ), Favret elicits the unvoiced or unheard affects which register in Wollstonecraft’s work, especially the rage which accompanies sorrow and which turns what can sound like melodramatic excess into “a vital and timely feminist poetics.” Timely, but also in Favret’s terms, crucially time less —that is, unending, not yet or possibly ever over. In elaborating the ways Antigone’s cry of aei (always) reverberates in Letters Written During a Short Residence , Favret makes the force of feminist complaint audible as the “lyric potential” of Wollstonecraft’s prose. Lyric may be a particularly Romantic modality, like melancholy or the sentimental, but it also articulates more public feelings; amplifying in her own prose style what she calls the “sonic undercurrent” of Wollstonecraft’s writing, Favret makes us hear Wollstonecraft’s expressions of private grief as “her grievance against the state of the oppressed.”

As Wollstonecraft looked forward to a future time when the world will have disavowed its prejudices, so these essays contemplate the problems feminism has sought to address as still unresolved. If this album of sketches or snapshots presents six different views of how Wollstonecraft appears “even now among the living,” it necessarily remains an open book, with many pages still blank and ready to be filled with other perspectives and other outlooks on both the past and the future.

Works Cited

Mary wollstonecraft even now.

Sonia Hofkosh

Julie a. carlson, julie murray, eileen hunt botting, arianne chernock, mary a. favret.

On mary wollstonecraft.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Detail from John Opie’s portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1790–1. Public domain.

Around the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. I’d known it was there, behind King’s Cross railway station, for at least a decade. I had read her protofeminist tract from 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , at university, and I knew Saint Pancras Churchyard was where Wollstonecraft’s daughter, also Mary, had taken the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when they were falling in love. When I thought about the place, I thought of death and sex and possibility. I ﬁrst visited at thirty-four, newly separated, on a cold gray day with a lover, daﬀodils rising around the squat cubic pillar. “MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN,” the stone reads. “Author of A Vindication of the rights of Woman. Born 27th April, 1759. Died 10th September, 1797.” I didn’t tell him why I wanted to go there; I had a sense that Wollstonecraft would understand, and I often felt so lost that I didn’t want to talk to real people, people I wanted to love me rather than pity me, people I didn’t want to scare. I was often scared. I was frequently surprised by my emotions, by the things I suddenly needed to do or say that surged up out of nowhere.

Unexpected events had brought me graveside: when I was thirty-two, my fifty-seven-year-old mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t genetic; no one knew why she got it. We would, the doctors said, have three to nine more years with her. Everything wobbled. This knowledge raised questions against every part of my life: Was this worth it? And this? And this? I was heading for children in the suburbs with the husband I’d met at nineteen, but that life, the one that so many people want, I doubted was right for me. I was trying to ﬁnd my way as a writer, but I was jumping from genre to genre, not working out what I most wanted to say, and not taking myself seriously enough to discover it, even. Who do you tell when you start to feel these things? Everything seemed immovable. Everything seemed impossible. And yet I knew I had to change my life.

There were a string of discussions with my husband, threading from morning argument to online chat to text to phone to therapy session to dinner, where we ﬂoated ideas about open marriage and relationship breaks and moving countries and changing careers and dirty weekends. But we couldn’t agree on what was important, and I began to peel my life away from his. We decided that we could see other people. We were as honest and kind and open as we could manage as we did this, which sometimes wasn’t much. The spring I began visiting Wollstonecraft’s grave, he moved out, dismantling our bed by taking the mattress and leaving me with the frame. I took oﬀ my wedding ring—a gold band with half a line of “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath etched on the inside—and for weeks afterward, my thumb would involuntarily reach across my palm for the warm bright circle that had gone. I didn’t throw the ring into the long grass, like women do in the movies, but a feeling began bubbling up nevertheless, from my stomach to my throat: it could ﬂing my arms out. I was free.

At ﬁrst, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild. I was thirty-four and I wanted so much out of this new phase of my life: intense sexual attraction; soulmate-feeling love that would force my life into new shapes; work that felt joyous like play but meaningful like religion; friendships with women that were fusional and sisterly; talk with anyone and everyone about what was worth living for; books that felt like mountains to climb; attempts at writing ﬁction and poetry and memoir. I wanted to create a life I would be proud of, that I could stand behind. I didn’t want to be ten years down the wrong path before I discovered once more that it was wrong. While I was a girl, waiting for my life to begin, my mother gave me books: The Mill on the Floss when I was ill; Ballet Shoes when I demanded dance lessons; A Little Princess when I felt overlooked. How could I ﬁnd the books I needed now? I had so many questions: Could you be a feminist and be in love? Did the search for independence mean I would never be at home with anyone, anywhere? Was domesticity a trap? What was worth living for if you lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman’s life? What was worth living for at all—what degree of unhappiness, lostness, chaos was bearable? Could I even do this without my mother beside me? Or approach any of these questions if she was already fading from my life? And if I wanted to write about all this, how could I do it? What forms would I need? What genre could I be most truthful in? How would this not be seen as a problem of privilege, a childish demand for deﬁnition, narcissistic self-involvement, when the world was burning? Wouldn’t I be better oﬀ giving away all I have and putting down my books, my movies, my headphones, and my pen? When would I get sick of myself?

The questions felt urgent as well as overwhelming. At times I couldn’t face the page—printed or blank—at all. I needed to remind myself that starting out on my own again halfway through life is possible, has been possible for others—and that this sort of life can have beauty in it. And so I went back to the writers I’d loved when I was younger—the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the thought of Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Wollstonecraft, the novels of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot. I read other writers—Elena Ferrante, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison—for the ﬁrst time. I watched them try to answer some of the questions I myself had. This book bears the traces of the struggles they had, as well as my own—and some of the things we all found that help. Not all of the solutions they (and I) found worked, and even when they did, they didn’t work all the time: if I’d thought life was a puzzle I could solve once and for all when I was younger, I couldn’t believe that any longer. But the answers might come in time if I could only stay with the questions, as the lover who came with me to Wollstonecraft’s grave would keep reminding me.

A Vindication was written in six weeks. On January 3, 1792, the day she gave the last sheet to the printer, Wollstonecraft wrote to Roscoe: “I am dissatisﬁed with myself for not having done justice to the subject.—Do not suspect me of false modesty—I mean to say that had I allowed myself more time I could have written a better book, in every sense of the word.” Wollstonecraft isn’t in fact being coy: her book isn’t well-made. Her main arguments about education are at the back, the middle is a sarcastic roasting of male conduct-book writers in the style of her attack on Burke, and the parts about marriage and friendship are scattered throughout when they would have more impact in one place. There is a moralizing, bossy tone, noticeably when Wollstonecraft writes about the sorts of women she doesn’t like (ﬂirts and rich women: take a deep breath). It ends with a plea to men, in a faux-religious style that doesn’t play to her strengths as a writer. In this, her book is like many landmark feminist books— The Second Sex , The Feminine Mystique —that are part essay, part argument, part memoir, held together by some force, it seems, that is attributable solely to its writer. It’s as if these books, to be written at all, have to be brought into being by autodidacts who don’t know for sure what they’re doing—just that they have to do it.

On my ﬁrst reading of A Vindication as a twenty-year-old undergraduate, I looked up the antique words and wrote down their deﬁnitions (to vindicate was to “argue by evidence or argument”). I followed Wollstonecraft’s arguments in favor of education. I knew she’d been a teacher, and saw how reasonable her main argument was: you had to educate women, because they have inﬂuence as mothers over infant men. I took these notes eighteen months into an undergraduate degree in English and French in the library of an Oxford college that had only begun admitting women twenty-one years before. I’d arrived from an ordinary school, had scraped by in my first-year exams, and barely felt I belonged. The idea that I could think of myself as an intellectual as Mary did was laughable. Yet halfway into my second year, I discovered early women’s writing. I was amazed that there was so much of it—by protonovelists such as Eliza Haywood, aristocratic poets like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and precursors of the Romantics like Anna Laetitia Barbauld—and I was angry, often, at the way they’d been forgotten, or, even worse, pushed out of the canon. Wollstonecraft stood out, as she’d never been forgotten, was patently unforgettable. I longed to keep up with her, even if I had to do it with the shorter OED at my elbow. I didn’t see myself in her at the time. It wasn’t clear to me when I was younger how hard she had pushed herself.

Later in her life, Wollstonecraft would defend her unlettered style to her more lettered husband:

I am compelled to think that there is something in my writings more valuable, than in the productions of some people on whom you bestow warm elogiums—I mean more mind—denominate it as you will—more of the observations of my own senses, more of the combining of my own imagination—the eﬀusions of my own feelings and passions than the cold workings of the brain on the materials procured by the senses and imagination of other writers—

I wish I had been able to marshal these types of arguments while I was at university. I remember one miserable lesson about Racine, just me and a male student who’d been to Eton. I was baﬄed by the tutor’s questions. We would notice some sort of pattern or eﬀect in the lines of verse—a character saying “Ô désespoir! Ô crime! Ô déplorable race!”—and the tutor would ask us what that eﬀect was called. Silence. And then the other student would speak up. “Anaphora,” he’d say. “Chiasmus. Zeugma.” I had no idea what he was talking about; I’d never heard these words before. I was relieved when the hour was over. When I asked him afterward how he knew those terms, he said he’d been given a handout at school and he invited me to his room so that I could borrow it and make a photocopy. I must still have it somewhere. I remember feeling a tinge of anger—I could see the patterns in Racine’s verse, I just didn’t know what they were called—but mostly I felt ashamed. I learned the terms on the photocopy by heart.

Mary knew instinctively that what she oﬀered was something more than technical accuracy, an unshakeable structure, or an even tone. Godwin eventually saw this too. “When tried by the hoary and long-established laws of literary composition, [ A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ] can scarcely maintain its claim to be placed in the ﬁrst class of human productions,” he wrote after her death. “But when we consider the importance of its doctrines, and the eminence of genius it displays, it seems not very improbable that it will be read as long as the English language endures.” Reading it again, older now, and having read many more of the feminist books that Wollstonecraft’s short one is the ancient foremother of, I can see what he means.

There are funny autobiographical sketches, as where Mary is having a moment of sublimity at a too-gorgeous sunset only to be interrupted by a fashionable lady asking for her gown to be admired. There is indelible phrasemaking, such as the moment when Mary counters the Margaret Thatcher fallacy—the idea that a woman in power is good in itself—by saying that “it is not empire, but equality” that women should contend for. She asked for things that are commonplace now but were unusual then: for women to be MPs, for girls and boys to be educated together, for friendship to be seen as the source and foundation of romantic love. She linked the way women were understood as property under patriarchy to the way enslaved people were treated, and demanded the abolition of both systems. She was also responding to an indisputably world-historical moment, with all the passion and hurry that that implies. Speciﬁcally, she addressed Talleyrand, who had written a pamphlet in support of women’s education, but generally, she applied herself to the ideas about women’s status and worth coming out of the brand-new French republic. In 1791, France gave equal rights to Black citizens, made nonreligious marriage and divorce possible, and emancipated the Jews. What would England give its women? (Wollstonecraft was right that the moment couldn’t wait: Olympe de Gouges, who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in October 1791 and ironically dedicated it to Marie-Antoinette, was guillotined within two years of its publication.)

And though I love the Vindication for its eccentricities, I also love it for its philosophy. It is philosophically substantial, even two centuries later. Wollstonecraft understood how political the personal was, and that between people was where the revolution of manners she called for could be eﬀected. “A man has been termed a microcosm,” she writes, “and every family might also be called a state.” The implications of this deceptively simple idea would echo down the centuries: what role should a woman occupy at home, and how does that aﬀect what she is encouraged to do in the wider world? Every woman in this book struggles with that idea, from Plath’s worry that becoming a mother would mean she could no longer write poetry to Woolf’s insecurity about her education coming from her father’s library rather than from an ancient university. Much of Wollstonecraft’s own thought had risen from her close reading of Rousseau, particularly from her engagement with Émile , his working-through of an ideal Enlightenment education for a boy. I didn’t ﬁnd as an undergraduate, and still don’t, her argument for women’s education, which is that women should be educated in order to be better wives and mothers, or in order to be able to cope when men leave them, to be feminist. But now I can see that Wollstonecraft was one of the ﬁrst to make the point that feminists have repeated in various formulations for two hundred years—though I hope not forever. If woman “has reason,” Mary says, then “she was not created merely to be the solace of man.” And so it follows that “the sexual should not destroy the human character.” That is to say, that women should above all be thought human, not other.

With so much of Wollstonecraft’s attention taken up by revolutionary France, perhaps it was inevitable that she would go there. She wrote to Everina that she and Johnson, along with Fuseli and his wife, were planning a six-week trip: “I shall be introduced to many people, my book has been translated and praised in some popular prints; and Fuseli, of course, is well known.” She didn’t say that she had fallen in love with Fuseli. The painter was forty-seven and the protofeminist twenty-nine. Mary hadn’t been without admirers—she met a clergyman she liked on the boat to Ireland; an MP who visited Lord Kingsborough seemed taken with her too—but marriage didn’t appeal. She joked with Roscoe (not just a fan but another admirer, surely) that she could get married in Paris, then get divorced when her “truant heart” demanded it: “I am still a Spinster on the wing.” But to Fuseli, she wrote that she’d never met anyone who had his “grandeur of soul,” a grandeur she thought essential to her happiness, and she was scared of falling “a sacriﬁce to a passion which may have a mixture of dross in it … If I thought my passion criminal, I would conquer it, or die in the attempt.” Mary suggested she live in a ménage à trois with Fuseli and his wife. He turned the idea down, the plan to go to Paris dissolved, and Mary left London on her own.

She arrived in the Marais in December 1792, when Louis XVI was on trial for high treason. On the morning he would mount his defense, the king “passed by my window,” Mary wrote to Johnson. “I can scarcely tell you why, but an association of ideas made the tears ﬂow insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach, going to meet death.” Mary was spooked: she wished for the cat she had left in London, and couldn’t blow out her candle that night. The easy radicalism she had adopted in England came under pressure. Though she waited until her French was better before calling on Francophone contacts, she began to meet other expatriates in Paris, such as Helen Maria Williams, the British poet Wordsworth would praise. In spring 1793, she was invited to the house of Thomas Christie, a Scottish essayist who had cofounded the Analytical Review with Johnson. There she met Gilbert Imlay, an American, and fell deeply in love.

Imlay was born in New Jersey and had fought in the War of Independence; he was writing a novel, The Emigrants , and made money in Paris by acting as a go-between for Europeans who wanted to buy land in the U.S. and the Americans who wanted to sell it to them. It is as if all Mary’s intensity throughout her life so far—the letters to Jane Arden, her devotion to Fanny Blood, her passion for Fuseli—crests in her aﬀair with this one man, whom she disliked on their ﬁrst meeting and decided to avoid. Imlay said he thought marriage corrupt; he talked about the women he’d had aﬀairs with; he described his travels through the rugged West of America. After the disappointment with Fuseli, she oﬀered up her heart ecstatically, carelessly: “Whilst you love me,” Mary told him, making a man she’d known for months the architect and guardian of her happiness, “I cannot again fall into the miserable state, which rendered life a burthen almost too heavy to be borne.” And yet she also noticed she couldn’t make him stay: “Of late, we are always separating—Crack!—crack!—and away you go.”

When my husband and I agreed we could see other people, he created a Tinder proﬁle, using a photo I’d taken of him against a clear blue sky on the balcony of one of our last apartments together. He wanted to fall in love again and have children: pretty quickly he found someone who wanted that too. I met someone at a party who intrigued me, another writer visiting from another city, and I began spending more time with him: in front of paintings, at Wollstonecraft’s grave, on long walks, at the movies, talking for hours in and out of bed. After being married for so long, it was strange and wonderful to fall in love again; I felt illuminated, sexually free, emotionally rich, intellectually alive. I liked myself again. But I fought my feelings for him, reasoning that it was too soon after my husband, that sentiments this strong were somehow wrong in themselves, that he would go back to his own city soon and so I must give him up no matter what I felt. When he was gone, though, I saw I had found that untameable thing, a mysterious recognition, everything the poets mean by love. I wrote him email after email, sending him thoughts and feelings and provocations, trying out ideas for my new life, which I hoped would include him. Sometimes I must have sounded like Wollstonecraft writing to Imlay.

Mary moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, a leafy village on the edge of Paris, and began writing a history of the revolution; throughout that summer of 1793, she and Imlay would meet at the gates, les barrières , in the Paris city wall. (Bring your “barrier-face,” she would ask him when the aﬀair began to turn cold, and she wanted to go back to the start.) “I do not want to be loved like a goddess; but I wish to be necessary to you,” she wrote. Perhaps there was something in her conception of herself that made her think she could handle a ﬂirt like Imlay. “Women who have gone to great lengths to raise themselves above the ordinary level of their sex,” Mary’s biographer Claire Tomalin comments, “are likely to believe, for a while at any rate, that they will be loved the more ardently and faithfully for their pains.” Mary perhaps believed she was owed a great love, and Imlay was made to ﬁt. “By tickling minnows,” as Virginia Woolf put it in a short essay about Wollstonecraft, Imlay “had hooked a dolphin.” By the end of the year, Mary was pregnant.

Françoise Imlay (always Fanny, after Fanny Blood) was born at Le Havre in May 1794, and Mary wrote home that “I feel great pleasure at being a mother,” and boasted that she hadn’t “clogged her soul by promising obedience” in marriage. Imlay stayed away a lot; in one letter, Mary tells him of tears coming to her eyes at picking up the carving knife to slice the meat herself, because it brought back memories of him being at home with her. As she becomes disillusioned by degrees with Imlay, whose letters don’t arrive as expected, she falls in love with their daughter. At three months, she talks of Fanny getting into her “heart and imagination”; at four months, she notices with pleasure that the baby “does not promise to be a beauty, but appears wonderfully intelligent”; at six months, she tells Imlay that though she loved being pregnant and breastfeeding (nursing your own child was radical in itself then), those sensations “do not deserve to be compared to the emotions I feel, when she stops to smile upon me, or laughs outright on meeting me unexpectedly in the street, or after a short absence.”

Imlay’s return keeps being delayed, and Wollstonecraft uses her intellect to protest, arguing against the commercial forces that keep him from “observing with me how her mind unfolds.” Isn’t the point, as Imlay once claimed, to live in the present moment? Hasn’t Mary already shown that she can earn enough by her writing to keep them? “Stay, for God’s sake,” she writes, “let me not be always vainly looking for you, till I grow sick at heart.” Still he does not come, and her letters reach a pitch of emotion when she starts to suspect he’s met someone else. “I do not choose to be a secondary object,” she spits. She already knew that men were “systematic tyrants.” “My head turns giddy, when I think that all the conﬁdence I have had in the aﬀection of others is come to this—I did not expect this blow from you.” She starts signing oﬀ each letter with the threat that it could be the last he receives from her.

In April 1795, she decided to join him in London if he would not come to her. “I have been so unhappy this winter,” Mary wrote. “I ﬁnd it as diﬃcult to acquire fresh hopes, as to regain tranquility.” Fanny was nearly a year old, and Imlay had set up home for them in Soho. She attempted to seduce him; he recoiled. (He had been seeing someone, an actress.) She took the losses—of her imagined domestic idyll, of requited love, of a fond father for her daughter—hard, and planned to take a huge dose of laudanum, which Imlay discovered just in time. I ﬁnd it unbearable that Mary, like Plath, would think that dying is better for her own children than living, but neither Mary nor Sylvia were well when they thought that, I tell myself.

Imlay suggested that Mary go away for the summer—he had some business that needed attention in Scandinavia. A shipment of silver had gone missing, and he could do with someone going there in person to investigate. She could take Fanny, and a maid. The letters Mary wrote to him while waiting in Hull for good sailing weather show that she had not yet recovered: she looks at the sea “hardly daring to own to myself the secret wish, that it might become our tombs”; she is scared to sleep because Imlay appears in her dreams with “diﬀerent casts of countenance”; she mocks the idea that she’ll revive at all. “Now I am going towards the north in search of sunbeams!—Will any ever warm this desolated heart? All nature seems to frown—or rather mourn with me.” But she had an infant on her hip, a business venture to rescue that might also bring back her errant lover, and from the letters she wrote home, she’d mold a book that would unwittingly create a future for herself, even when she was not entirely sure she wanted one.

An adapted excerpt of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again , to be published by Ecco/HarperCollins this May.

Joanna Biggs is the author of All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work and a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine. In 2017, she cofounded Silver Press, a feminist publishing house.

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'Vindication': Mary Wollstonecraft's Sense and Sensibility

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By Toni Bentley

May 29, 2005

VINDICATION A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. By Lyndall Gordon. Illustrated. 562 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $29.95.

IN 1915 Virginia Woolf predicted it would take women another six generations to come into their own. We should be approaching the finish line if Woolf's math was as good as her English. A little over a century before her, another Englishwoman, Mary Wollstonecraft, declared in her revolutionary book of 1792, "The Vindication of the Rights of Woman," that not only had the time come to begin the long slog to selfdom, freedom, empowerment -- or whatever current feminist term serves -- but that she would be the first of what she called, using the language of taxonomy, "a new genus."

It took the renegade second child (of seven) -- and first daughter -- of Edward John Wollstonecraft, a drinker, and the unhappy Elizabeth Dickson, to take this virtually unimaginable plunge into uncharted waters. And she took this leap while displaying the full measure of female unpredictablity, while the world watched, astounded, dismayed and outraged. This Mary was quite contrary, and her reputation over time, unsurprisingly, has suffered from this complexity. Surely we women have a gene -- in addition to those saucy, but ill-mannered, hormones -- for theatrics, so frequently do they puncture our inner lives and decorate our outer ones in operatic robes. But occasionally high drama is the most efficient way to break through the status quo, and Mary Wollstonecraft's radical mission called for extreme measures.

In her wonderful, and deeply sobering, new book, Lyndall Gordon, the distinguished biographer of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë and Henry James, tackles this formidable woman with grace, clarity and much new research. Despite occasional slips into strangely purple prose (when she reproaches her lover, "retorts -- great sprays of indignant eloquence -- would fountain from her opening throat"), Gordon relates Wollstonecraft's story with the same potent mixture of passion and reason her subject personified.

Here's how things stood for women in the world Mary was born into, the England of 1759: your property and your children were the property of your husband, divorce was impossible, and if you dared to leave your horrid -- or abusive -- husband you had to desert your children in the process and become an outlaw. Marital rape was perfectly legal, and probably frequent. (In all fairness, a new law in 1782 stated that a husband should not beat his wife with a stick wider than his thumb.)

Samuel Johnson identified the real issue: "The chastity of women is of all importance, as all property depends on it." While women were not admitted to universities for another hundred years, the education they did receive was about conduct and little else. One Mrs. Barbauld, a well-known writer and former boarding-school mistress, summarized this teaching when she explained to young ladies, "Your BEST, your SWEETEST empire is -- TO PLEASE."

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To Each One’s Own Room: Examining the Feminisms of Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft

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Virginia Woolf was a prominent feminist writer of the early 20th century, who addressed various issues related to gender inequality and gender roles in her literary works. Her books, A Room of One's Own and Orlando, are considered significant contributions to feminist thought. A Room of One's Own, published in 1929, is one of Woolf's most famous books, which explores the theme of women and literature. The book argues that women writers have been historically marginalized and oppressed due to various societal and institutional barriers, such as lack of access to education, financial independence, and opportunities for creative expression. She emphasizes the importance of women having their own space and resources to pursue their literary ambitions and asserts that women need "a room of one's own and five hundred a year" to write freely and independently. This study is prepared to present pearls and pitfalls of the feminist thought and explains Virginia Woolf's ideas of equality between sexes.

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This study attemps to compare the meaning and importance of feminism and similarities of the ways in which Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft’s description feminism in their books. The reason this topic was chosen in the study is to investigate the importance of feminism and how it happened in past times. The main reason these two writers were chosen is because they were two very important and powerful women writers for feminism. According to the results of the study, women and men were expected to be in separate areas in society during the time the authors lived. Men were expected to go to work, while women were expected to be at home and take care of household chores. These two powerful women writers have argued in their works of feminism: men and women are equal and women's place is not just home.

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PDF-PowerPoint presentation of the talk I gave on Sunday, 26th August 2018 at the 2018 Societas Ethica Annual Conference, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 23th – 26th August 2018. Abstract In the first chapter of her “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, Mary Wollstonecraft defines human degrees of reason, virtue and knowledge as the instruments for measurement of human nature’s perfection. Reason, virtue and knowledge constitute, in Wollstonecraft’s intents, the new values that ought to promote a radical change, in general, in the whole human dimension and, in particular, in the woman’s sphere of life. In my contribution, I would like to analyse principles, contents and arguments present in Mary Wollstonecraft’s work “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” – published in 1792 –, which constitutes one of the first texts – probably the first “manifesto” – of the feminist movement. I will also take into consideration Wollstonecraft’s work “A Vindication of the Rights of Men” in order to investigate the main points of Wollstonecraft’s criticism of Burke’s “Reflections on Revolution in France”. An initial, rather short part of my contribution will be dedicated to the presentation of the main events in Wollstonecraft’s life, in order to reconstruct at least some of the cultural and intellectual environments with which Mary Wollstonecraft came in contact during her life: Wollstonecraft’s role and contribution in the Enlightenment will thereby be described. Furthermore, the exposition of some biographical facts regarding Mary Wollstonecraft will aim at illustrating the dimensions of the hostile political and intellectual groups against which Mary Wollstonecraft had to fight in her life, since Wollstonecraft’s positions apparently belonged to an absolute minority as regards the spectrum of ideas of her times. The main aim of my investigation will consist in showing that both “Vindications” are expressions of a programme of radical modification of the society: The subjection of women in the `community is, in Wollstonecraft’s view, a part of the greater problem of the subjugated social community. Wollstonecraft expresses in her works an absolute denial of the traditional education of women: Wollstonecraft’s principal purpose is to promote the change of female education and the reform the social and political institution oppressing women. Women’s inclusion into public life can be reached, in the opinion of Mary Wollstonecraft, only through a common education for men and women; reform of the education of women means reform of the society. We will see that one of the aims of Wollstonecraft lies in persuading women to abandon a false conception of the feminine nature in order to let them adopt the practical virtues of rationality, autonomy, and self-reliance. Wollstonecraft expresses her absolute denial of whichever categorization of women as creature of feeling rather than of reason. This point constitutes the first step, in Wollstonecraft meditation, towards a model and towards a proposal of a new education, in which women and men are given the same kind of education: education ought to produce in individual the attitudes to reason, to autonomy and to independence. The education to the attitude and the behaviour led by reason represents, in Wollstonecraft’s project, the opposition to the traditional cultivation, in the women’s sphere, of sensibility. The main principle of Wollstonecraft’s project of education consists in the persuasion that, without knowledge, there can be no morality: not sensibility, but reason ought to be the aim of the education itself. A method of education promoting sensibility in the individual can only produce mental instability in the individual; moreover, education tending to strengthening sensibility in women proves to be an agent in the diminution of value and in the consequent oppression of women. The duty of women consists, in Wollstonecraft’ view, in abandoning false femininity in order to reach the practical virtues of rationality, independence and self-reliance. The mind has no sex: There is no natural disposition because of which men are reason, and women are sensibility. This artificial distinction, which lies at the very origin of the oppression of women, is established only in the society: therefore, the society ought to be, in Wollstonecraft’s intents, profoundly reformed. I shall point out, furthermore, Wollstonecraft’s connections with the religious environment of her time. The religious roots of Mary Wollstonecraft’s thought will be, therefore, investigated in order to demonstrate that her thought was profoundly influenced by the religious background of that time: I will show that Wollstonecraft’s meditation cannot be interpreted without its connections with the positions of the radical dissenters. Moreover, utopian components are not extraneous to her theological conceptions. My analysis will, furthermore, concentrate on the reconstruction of Wollstonecraft’s polemical issues: therefore, I shall analyse Wollstonecraft’s criticism of, for instance, Rousseau’s and of Milton’s conception of the woman. As regards the connections of Mary Wollstonecraft with the feminist movement, the main question I shall propose in my contribution will consist in analysing whether the feminism model of Mary Wollstonecraft does or does not contain in itself a tension or even a contradiction between a possible radical feminism component and a more traditional component. Through her radical feminist component, Wollstonecraft undoubtedly denounces many forms of oppression of women. On the other hand, due to her traditional component, Wollstonecraft apparently binds the role of women, for instance, to the role of mothers, thus reaffirming the diversity, as to social duties and social self-realization, between men and women. In other words, the question will be whether Mary Wollstonecraft oscillates between models of radical, anti-patriarchal feminism and models of acceptance of separate spheres for male and women. The bibliographical studies on Mary Wollstonecraft will help in the analysis of the presence (or not) of this dilemma in her works.

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Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an Enlightenment philosopher who, as author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , is widely credited as the founder of feminism. Wollstonecraft called for equal education opportunities for men and women , and she stressed the benefits to society as a whole of improving the situation of women in this and other areas of daily life.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in London into a farming family suffering difficult circumstances, largely due to her father's actions. Mary's father was a brutal man, and Mary was essentially self-taught. To make her own way in life, Mary faced the significant challenge that the possibilities were severely limited due to the social conventions of the period. Mary was determined to improve the fortunes of her family, and so she found work as a companion to a wealthy lady who lived in Bath and as a governess for the children of another wealthy patron, Mr Kingsborough, an Irish landowner. More ambitiously, in 1784, Mary created and managed her own nonconformist school. This enterprise, located in Newington Green (then outside London), also involved Mary's sisters, but unfortunately, it was not a lasting success.

A Successful Author

Wollstonecraft was keen to challenge the social conventions of her day, which resulted in young women not having the same educational, work, and social opportunities as men. She wrote her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in 1787, which was published by Joseph Johnson, who became her long-time publisher. The current situation was that girls were given a basic education, but there were no secondary schools since they did not need any preparation for colleges and universities because they were not permitted to enter higher education. The only girls who received an education anything like that open to boys were those whose wealthy fathers decided to employ private tutors for the purpose. Wollstonecraft proposed radically changing this situation.

Wollstonecraft was not the first author to demand better rights for women. Marie Le Jars de Gournay (1565-1645), known as an expert in alchemy , had written The Equality of Men and Women, which was published in 1622. François Poullain de la Barre (1647-1723) had proposed similar ideas in his The Equality of the Sexes , published in 1673 in French and then translated into English in 1677. Many of the ladies who managed the salons of Paris , where intellectuals of both sexes mingled in an informal setting, had made similar calls for greater equality. Education for women, in particular, had preoccupied many of the scientists of the Scientific Revolution , too. Bathsua Makin (c. 1612 to c. 1674) had proposed that women should be given access to a scientific education. Despite these calls by some intellectuals, not much had been achieved in practical terms. Further, women intellectuals still faced ridicule from many of their male counterparts, as can be seen in such satires as The Learned Ladies by the playwright Molière (1622-1673), first staged in 1672.

Women's March on Versailles, 5 October 1789

The fledgling feminist movement was gaining momentum, though, and Wollstonecraft gave it a tremendous new drive. She continued the battle , along with other female writers, against the male misogynistic view that women were intellectually inferior to men and less capable than males of maintaining good morals. This negative view of women was even expounded by such prominent thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).

Wollstonecraft moved to London in 1787 to further pursue her career as a writer. Johnson secured her a post as a permanent writer of reviews for the journal he ran, Analytical Review . Wollstonecraft also worked as a translator, published a text for education, Original Stories from Real Life , and wrote a novel, Mary, or the Wrongs of Women (aka Mary: A Fiction ), which was not published until 1798. Through Johnson, Wollstonecraft met other writers and artists, notably the Romantic poet William Blake (1757-1827), the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), the biblical scholar Alexander Geddes (1737-1802), and Thomas Paine (1737-1809), the philosopher, revolutionary, and Founding Father of the United States. One writer who caught more than Wollstonecraft's intellectual interest was the radical author William Godwin (1756-1836). Godwin was also a political philosopher, and the couple's mutual interest in reform blossomed into a romantic relationship; the couple married in 1797.

Given this circle of associates, it is not surprising that Wollstonecraft turned to political philosophy and revolutionary ideas. In 1790, Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Men , a critical response to Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke (1729-1797), which contained Burke's defence of institutions and time-tested traditions. Wollstonecraft ridiculed the veneration of precisely those institutions which were holding women back. She memorably describes the House of Commons as very often resembling a " beer -garden" (Robertson, 739) and the periodic elections to that house as "scenes of drunken riot and beastly gluttony" ( ibid ). Unimpressed with what she regarded as Burke's backward-looking stance, Wollstonecraft summarised his view as giving "reverence to the rust of antiquity" ( ibid ). Wollstonecraft maintained a much more positive attitude to progress than thinkers like Burke, and her chief interest remained the task of convincing men of the necessity for improving women's rights. Accordingly, she now set about writing her most famous work on that subject.

Title Page, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The Rights of Women

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792. Wollstonecraft here proposed again that men and women should receive the same educational opportunities. Further, she "criticized the formal and informal limitations imposed on women in contemporary society, and demanded that the rights being newly acquired by men be extended to women also" (Burns, 436). Wollstonecraft even went so far as to state that the current state of women's education was a deliberate attempt to reduce their capabilities, a policy of what we might describe as "keep them in their place". Women were being treated as mere decorative appendages to men's lives, and their value in society was far too dependent on their looks or on restricted roles such as motherhood, Wollstonecraft argued. Women were also, because they had only very limited educational and employment opportunities, being pushed by society into marriages in order to gain the financial support they needed to live, a situation Wollstonecraft describes as ‘legal prostitution'. Women needed more opportunities to be able to fulfill themselves, employ the reason they possessed (which was the same as any man possessed, she argued), and be happier in their lives in general. She also points out the advantages to society as a whole of not wasting the talents of half the population. Wollstonecraft argued that women should have some sort of political representation and that they should be allowed into what were then male-only professions such as medicine and commerce.

Wollstonecraft makes a powerful summary aimed at the ears of men in the final paragraph of chapter nine of her book:

Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship, instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers—in a word, better citizens. We should then love them with true affection, because we should learn to respect ourselves; and the peace of mind of a worthy man would not be interrupted by the idle vanity of his wife, nor his babes sent to nestle in a strange bosom, having never found a home in their mother's.

Wollstonecraft gives a final and succinct plea at the very end of the book:

Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man.

The book caused controversy since its ideas were radical indeed, but it sold very well. Alas, Wollstonecraft's ideas were not adopted by those with the power to make them a reality.

The Revolution in France

Wollstonecraft was keen to see for herself the tremendous upheaval going on in France, and so she went to live in Paris as 1792 came to a close. The result of her observations of the ongoing French Revolution (1789-1799), which witnessed the end of the French monarchy, were published in 1794 in her book An Historical and Moral View of Origins and Progress of the French Revolution .

While in Paris, Wollstonecraft conducted an affair with Gilbert Imlay, an American businessman. The couple had a daughter together (Fanny, b. 1794) and briefly travelled through various Scandinavian countries. Wollstonecraft wrote of her experience in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark , published in 1796. In the following passage, she describes in detail her thoughts on the sublime, then a growing concept in aesthetics where there is a blending of emotion and reason in a single experience:

Reaching the cascade, or rather cataract, the roaring of which had a long time announced its vicinity, my soul was hurried by the falls into a new train of reflections. The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited, were pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares – grasping at immortality – it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me – I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come. (Robertson, 510)

Wollstonecraft returned to London, but after the break-up with Imlay, she was driven to attempt suicide; she survived. All of these events caused a public scandal. A new relationship then began with William Godwin from 1796, as noted above. The couple married just before their child was born, a daughter who became better known as Mary Shelley (1797-1851) and who wrote the celebrated gothic novel Frankenstein (1818).

Major Works by Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft's most important works include:

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) Original Stories from Real Life (1788) Mary, or the Wrongs of Women (1788) A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) An Historical and Moral View of Origins and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)

Death & Legacy

Mary Wollstonecraft died in London on 10 September 1797, ten days after giving birth to her daughter. Wollstonecraft proved an inspiration, particularly from the mid-19th century in the United States, to later leaders of the women's rights movement such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and Margaret Fuller (1810-1850). Early biographies of Wollstonecraft tended to overemphasise her tumultuous non-marital relationships. A more balanced view was given in Godwin's biography of his wife which was first published in 1798. Thankfully, Wollstonecraft's ideas on equality rather than her personal life have been her lasting legacy. In 2006, the British cultural commentator Melvyn Bragg placed A Vindication of the Rights of Woman on his list of 12 books that changed the world.

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Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)

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This chapter introduces Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) as a woman, mother, scholar, writer, and wife/lover. The following entry describes how her tumultuous upbringing played a role in how she viewed society and how that influenced her later writings on rights for men and women. It then moves into her influences and motivations as an eighteenth-century English woman. From there, the authors analyze her key contributions to various disciplines such as education, feminism, politics, and philosophy. The new insights modern theorists gained from (re)analyzing her key works inform many current trends in those same disciplines and comprise the next section. But as with any prolific figure, her work and ideas are not without criticism, as the Legacies and Unfinished Business section delineate. The article concludes with references and a list for further reading.

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Mary Wollstonecraft: Advocate for Women’s Rights and Education

Mary Wollstonecraft has been widely taglined as the first feminist due to her early vocality about women’s rights in England. During her brief but remarkable career in the mid-18th century, Wollstonecraft produced work as an author, novelist, philosopher, and feminist activist while being undermined by society due to the social order she wrote against. Here, we will map a short history of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life and work and an overview of her powerful legacy, which persists to this day.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born on April 27, 1759, in Spitalfields, London, to aspiring businessman John Edward Wollstonecraft and his wife, Elizabeth Dixon. The second of seven children, young Wollstonecraft witnessed her abusive, alcoholic father lose all their money, (including Mary’s inheritance), and forcibly move to Yorkshire.

“Virtue can only flourish amongst equals” – Mary Wollstonecraft

Throughout her turbulent early years, Wollstonecraft witnessed her mother’s powerlessness at the hands of her reckless father and took on a protective role over her mother and sisters, undoubtedly shaping her views on womanhood in the 18th century.

One of the most formative experiences for Wollstonecraft’s subsequent work and activism was her close female friendships. Away from the biting masculinity at home, Wollstonecraft sought comfort in her close friends, explicitly citing Francis “Fanny” Blood as her closest friend. Her relationship with Blood and the devastating aftermath of her death inspired Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary: A Fiction . The book was published in 1788 and is Wollstonecraft’s only complete novel.

Mission of Education and Development of Writing and Feminism

After leaving home, developing a school in Newington Green in 1784 and leaving it due to financial struggles, Wollstonecraft relocated to Ireland to work as a governess in 1785. In this position, Wollstonecraft refined her approach to women’s education. Though she only spent a year with the children of the Kingsborough family, Wollstonecraft was able to understand further the problems with 18th-century education, which inspired her to write a children’s book, Original Stories from Real Life . Mary King, one of the children, went on to write about the positive impact of her governess in freeing her mind from the constrictions and superstitions set on her by society.

Soon after, Wollstonecraft moved to London to pursue an author career, a bold move for a woman at the time. While working in a liberal publishing house, she learned German and French. She familiarised herself with philosophical and politically activist writing, leading her to review books for The Analytical Review. The writer surrounded herself with thinkers, philosophers, and artists and greatly expanded her understanding of social issues and the world around her beyond the home and schoolhouse.

In 1790, Wollstonecraft wrote her first prominent political pamphlet, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Wollstonecraft wrote anonymously against Burke’s conservative view of the French Revolution and defence of the constitutional monarchy with her republican and anti-aristocratic views. The pamphlet was met with mixed reviews but undoubtedly established Wollstonecraft as a leader in 18th-century politics. Writing A Vindication of the Rights of Men led Wollstonecraft to follow her interest in the French Revolution, and she moved to Paris in 1792.

In France, Wollstonecraft witnessed the trial of King Louis XVI and the rise of Jacobin ideology, which she denounced as a result of the poor treatment of women as nothing more than helpers to men.

A Vindication of the Rights of Women

Her most well-known and influential work, Wollstonecraft, was inspired by witnessing firsthand the incongruence between the revolution’s mission for class equality and its unjust view of women to write A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

In this essay, Wollstonecraft responds to the general prejudiced notions of women’s education, potential, and social status while also addressing issues of republicanism and class, which she was very vocal about and passionate about.

A Vindication of the Rights of Women is a sprawling undertaking that examines the treatment of women through a philosophical lens, considering the notion of a woman from a scientific and theoretical perspective. Wollstonecraft addressed the ‘scientific’ beliefs of a woman’s fragile constitution. She advocated for a rational education for women, co-educational public schools, and equal opportunity for the sexes.

Unlike popular belief, the essay was well received upon its publication; it was, after all, a well-written, original piece of political-philosophical thought from a well-respected source. Immediately upon publication, it was sent to the United States and translated into French. It is considered one of the first works of feminist philosophy and the academic foundation of liberal feminism.

Between England and France

After the French Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft was deported back to England but spent the next two years travelling between the two countries. On one visit to France, she met American adventurer Gilbert Imlay and had her first daughter, Fanny (named after Frances Blood). Despite her disagreements with the Jacobin’s treatment of women, Mary Wollstonecraft held on to the hope that European society would improve following the revolution.

1793 saw a radical rise in Jacobin leadership throughout the country, and many of Mary Wollstonecraft’s friends were guillotined. Despite the pain and terror of that year, the author still expressed gratitude for the opportunity to be in France, bearing witness to a historical event and sharing her opinion on the proceedings in real time.

Mary Wollstonecraft returned to Paris in the summer of 1794 without Imlay. The Jacobin order was losing control, and Wollstonecraft was hopeful that a more egalitarian regime would proceed with it. This period saw the restoration of freedom of the press in France, which allowed Mary to write publicly once again.

First published in London in 1794, Wollstonecraft’s second most renowned work is An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. In the book, she took a historical and social approach to describing the French Revolution, disavowing the Jacobin regime but highlighting the movement’s positive aspects through her personal and philosophical opinions and conversations with French peasants.

In An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution , Mary Wollstonecraft stated that the aristocracy reduces a woman’s value to her childbearing abilities and corrupts them by forcing them to value their outward appearance more than their education, character, or morality. She combatted the notion of Marie Antoinette as an innocent victim by describing her as a dangerous and cunning woman.

Despite her wishes, Wollstonecraft officially left France in 1795 due to Imlay’s refusal to join her and Wollstonecraft’s denial to bestow illegitimacy on Fanny. They arrived in London, but Imlay rejected her, leading to the author committing an attempt on her life.

Travel Narrative and Return to London Society

Mary Wollstonecraft travelled to Scandinavia with Fanny, not wanting to remain in London without Imlay. There, she catalogued her travels in letters, published in 1796 under the title Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark .

It took Wollstonecraft many months and a second suicide attempt before she reacquainted herself with life in London, finding several great female thinkers, writers, and philosophers to surround herself with.

William Godwin, journalist, novelist, and political philosopher, read Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and became enamoured with its author. The pair soon began a relationship and married in 1797 despite his advocacy for the abolition of marriage and her vocality for women’s liberation from the institution. The choice came from Wollstonecraft’s adamance about legitimising their children.

They lived several flats apart and mainly communicated through letters, retaining their independence. In August 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to her second daughter, Mary. Unfortunately, she suffered from post-partum infection and passed away several days after Mary was born. Godwin was devastated but determined to continue Mary Wollstonecraft’s legacy, publishing in Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1798 and memorialising her grave with the words “Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman .”

He wanted people to remember her work- and remember we did.

Mary Wollstonecraft´s Legacy

In her 38 years, Mary Wollstonecraft achieved phenomenal success and made unprecedented strides for women’s rights and education in Europe. Her contemporaries tried to smear her memory, citing her illegitimate child, suicide attempts, and sexual promiscuity as condemnations of the author’s name. Jane Austen positively cited Wollstonecraft’s work in her novels; Virginia Woolf was a huge admirer of her writing, and many feminist scholars laud her for the groundbreaking ideas she boldly presented.

Wollstonecraft set a precedent for women worldwide and fueled the women’s suffrage movements in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Today, Mary Wollstonecraft is considered the foremost academic feminist and an invaluable foundational source for politics, social activism, class activism, feminism, and educational reform.

It is because of Wollstonecraft’s passion for widening education and women’s rights, constant curiosity, and outgoingness that she is the inspiring figure we know today. May we all use our talents to stand up for what’s right and forgo fear in the name of knowledge, just as Mary Wollstonecraft did.

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Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)

And how can woman be expected to co-operate unless she knows why she ought to be virtuous? Unless freedom strengthens her reason till she comprehend her duty, and see in what manner it is connected with her real good? Mary Wollstonecraft

Writer, teacher, philosopher, and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft was a prominent freethinker and notable influence on generations who came after her. The wife of William Godwin, the pair lived a self-determined and – for its time – radical existence, both producing works of lasting significance to humanists today. Best known for her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft was a passionate advocate of women’s rights, a bold and original thinker, and an example of how outspoken and unorthodox women could be pilloried for their acts and ideas.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London on 27 April 1759. Though previous generations of the family had enjoyed relatively prosperity, her father, Edward Wollstonecraft, proved inept at maintaining it, and the family’s fortunes suffered increasingly throughout Mary’s childhood. Her only formal education was some years at a day school in Yorkshire, at which she learned to read and write. All else, including an impressive array of languages, was self taught. The frustration with educational inequality between the sexes, to be excoriated in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, had its roots in this early hardship – her elder brother, and the favoured child, Ned, receiving the only ‘gentleman’s education’ among the Wollstonecraft children.

The family’s finances undermined Wollstonecraft’s marriageability, and the limited professional prospects for women (teaching, needlecraft, lady’s companion) were all tried and rejected. Writing, though, provided an avenue for self-support, as well as the opportunity to try out and establish her own ideas. Settling in London to pursue this new career, Wollstonecraft produced translations from French and German, read widely, and wrote reviews. She was also introduced to such radical freethinkers as Thomas Paine and William Godwin.

In 1790, enraged by Edmund Burke’s conservative critique of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Men , attacking the aristocracy and defending republicanism. The work made her instantly well-known, though her 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman secured her reputation today as a groundbreaking work in the tradition of women’s rights.

In it, Wollstonecraft applied ardent feminism to her calls for freedom, reason, and education, regardless of sex. It was, she argued, by ‘considering the moral and civil interest of mankind’ that a love of it could develop, ‘from which an orderly train of virtues spring’. Education was central to this, and vital for women: ‘but the education and situation of woman, at present, shuts her out from such investigations.’ Drawing, like many women writers before and since, on the responsibilities of motherhood in passing these values down through generations, A Vindication was a rallying cry for equality, rooted in civic duty and mutual responsibility in society.

Moralists have universally agreed that unless virtue be nursed by liberty, it can never attain due strength – and what they say of man I extend to mankind, insisting… that the being cannot be considered rational or virtuous who obeys any authority but that of reason.

In her emphasis on freedom and reason as the touchstones for virtue, Wollstonecraft’s ideas resonate strongly with the humanist approach today.

In May 1794, Wollstonecraft gave birth to a daughter, Fanny, conceived with American writer and adventurer Gilbert Imlay. In the same year, she published An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, which attempted to present a carefully constructed history of the events in France and their impact on a range of people.

Wollstonecraft returned from France to London in 1795, rejoining a circle of writers and radicals. Among these was William Godwin, with whom she embarked on a passionate love affair and partnership of equals. Despite Godwin’s own misgivings about the institution of marriage, when Wollstonecraft became pregnant the pair decided to marry in order to avoid scandal. The couple moved to Somers Town, London, where they lived separately, retaining their independence but maintaining a close and happy relationship.

Wollstonecraft gave birth on 30 August 1797 to Mary, the child who would go on to achieve fame as the writer of Frankenstein. Tragically, Wollstonecraft contracted septicaemia, and died on 10 September. She was buried in Old St Pancras Churchyard.

To a friend, Godwin wrote:

I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again.

Writing in The Secular Chronicle nearly a century after Wollstonecraft’s Vindication was published, secularist Harriet Law noted her predecessor’s bravery in writing as she did, when she did:

then it was a disagreeable novelty when a woman found courage to write anything; much more anything tending to undermine the power of the dominant and self-styled superior sex.

Freethinkers George Eliot , Barbara Bodichon, and Virginia Woolf were among the later feminists who championed Wollstonecraft against accusations of social and sexual impropriety, which lingered even 100 years on. Wollstonecraft remains an inspiring figure in the history of freethought and feminism, representing a devotion to values of freedom, reason, and equality, which remain at the heart of humanism today.

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Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary wollstonecraft (1759-1797).

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman British Romanticism More than any other woman in Britain, Mary Wollstonecraft represents the eighteenth-century movement in feminist thought. Wollstonecraft’s alcoholic and abusive father failed to provide a consistent living for his family, so her childhood was spent in the turmoil of poverty and violence, and she had to earn a living early in life as a lady’s companion, a teacher, a schoolmaster, a translator, and eventually a writer. Wollstonecraft’s writing reflects her belief in the education of women as a remedy for inequality. She abhorred the conditions of women of all classes and the limited opportunities afforded them. Socially and politically active, Wollstonecraft became part of a group of radical dissenters who questioned the role of the individual in all phases of human life and espoused revolution as a means of liberty. She spent two years in France during the latter stage of the French Revolution, known as the Reign of Terror, and she recorded her observations in An Historical and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect it Has Produced in Europe (1794). In the treatise, Wollstonecraft expresses her disillusionment with a revolution which, in spite of assurances for total equality, excluded women from the political arena. Wollstonecraft faced a lifetime of personal and relational challenges; she survived as a single mother, only to die during the birth of her second daughter. That daughter, Mary Shelley, went on to create the classic Romantic novel Frankenstein . Foremost in Wollstonecraft’s most famous and widely read work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is the call for equal rights for all human beings and equal education for men and women. Like her eighteenth-century predecessors, such as Mary Astell and Elizabeth Carter, Wollstonecraft admonishes her own sex against the frivolity that limits their ability to think rationally and weakens their characters. Her argument focuses on making women better wives and mothers through a combination of dignified treatment and intellectual encouragement. She also champions the right of women to participate in middle class work for financial security. The essay was well received in its initial publication, but its revolutionary ideas were not truly appreciated or realized until over one hundred years later, when the feminist movement revived Wollstonecraft’s work and named her as the one of the most influential voices in the fight for women’s rights. Consider while reading:

Name some of the causes of what Wollstonecraft calls “women’s degradation.”
What roles do women play in their own oppression?

Written by Karen Dodson

World Literature Copyright © by Anita Turlington; Rhonda Kelley; Matthew Horton; Laura Ng; Kyounghye Kwon; Laura Getty; Karen Dodson; and Douglas Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Common Reader

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Internet Archive - "The Common Reader"

The Common Reader , collection of essays by Virginia Woolf , published in two series, the first in 1925 and the second in 1932. Most of the essays appeared originally in such publications as the Times Literary Supplement , The Nation , Athenæum , New Statesman , Life and Letters , Dial , Vogue , and The Yale Review . The title indicates Woolf’s intention that her essays be read by the “common reader” who reads books for personal enjoyment.

Using the sympathetic persona of “the common reader,” Woolf treats literary topics. Woolf outlines her literary philosophy in the introductory essay to the first series, “The Common Reader,” and in the concluding essay to the second series, “How Should One Read a Book?” The first series includes essays on Geoffrey Chaucer , Michel de Montaigne , Jane Austen , George Eliot , and Joseph Conrad , as well as discussions of the Greek language and the modern essay . The second series features essays on John Donne , Daniel Defoe , Dorothy Osborne , Mary Wollstonecraft , and Thomas Hardy , among others.

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Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was a moral and political philosopher whose analysis of the condition of women in modern society retains much of its original radicalism. One of the reasons her pronouncements on the subject remain challenging is that her reflections on the status of the female sex were part of an attempt to come to a comprehensive understanding of human relations within a civilization increasingly governed by acquisitiveness and consumption. Her first publication was on the education of daughters; she went on to write about politics, history and various aspects of philosophy in a number of different genres that included critical reviews, translations, pamphlets, and novels. Best known for her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her influence went beyond the substantial contribution to feminism she is mostly remembered for and extended to shaping the art of travel writing as a literary genre and, through her account of her journey through Scandinavia, she had an impact on the Romantic movement.

1. Biography

2. pedagogical writings, 3. moral and political writings, 4. reputation, primary sources, bibliographies, other internet resources, related entries.

The second of seven children, Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, on 27 April 1759, in a house in Primrose Street. Her paternal grandfather was a successful master weaver who left a sizeable legacy, but her father, Edward John, mismanaged his share of the inheritance. He tried to establish himself as a gentleman farmer in Epping. This was the first of the family's several moves, each of which marked its financial and social decline. Only Mary's brother, Edward (Ned), was to receive a formal education; he became a lawyer. He had also inherited directly from his grandfather a substantial part of the latter's legacy.

Wollstonecraft's own somewhat haphazard education was, however, not entirely unusual for someone of her sex and position, nor was it particularly deficient. Her published writings show her to have acquired a true command of the Bible and a good knowledge of the works of several of the most famous Ancient philosophers. The latter is partly explained through her personal acquaintance with Thomas Taylor, famed for his translations of Plato. She also drew on a variety of early modern sources, such as Shakespeare and Milton's works. Through her own writing for the Analytical Review she was to become widely read in the literature of her period. Initially, the nature and extent of her reading was partly owed to the friendship shown to her in her youth by a retired clergyman and his wife. Nevertheless, as a woman from an impecunious family, her prospects were very limited. In relatively rapid succession, she was to enter the most likely occupations for someone of her sex and circumstances: a lady's companion, a schoolteacher, and a governess.

In 1778, she was engaged as a companion to a Mrs Dawson and lived at Bath. She returned home to nurse her ailing mother in the latter part of 1781. After Mrs Wollstonecraft's death, in the spring of 1782, Mary lived with the Bloods, the impoverished family of her dearest friend, Fanny. In the winter of 1783, Mary left them in order to attend to her sister Eliza and her newly born daughter. There followed the first of the emotionally very difficult episodes in Mary's life. What prompted Mary to intervene as decisively as she did in her sister's marriage remains somewhat of a mystery; but in the course of January 1784, Mary took her sister away, and the two women went into hiding, leaving Eliza's infant daughter behind; the baby died the following August.

By February of that year, the two sisters had already been planning to establish a school with Fanny Blood. Mary's other sister, Everina, joined in the project a little later. They first set their sights on Islington, then moved to Newington Green, where Mary met the moral and political thinker, the Reverend Richard Price, head of Newington's thriving Dissenting community, and heard him preach. This was a crucial encounter for Mary. Several years later, she was to rise to his defence in a Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and it was through her connections to members of this community that she was to gain an introduction to her future publisher, friend, and one might even say, patron, Joseph Johnson.

In November 1785, Wollstonecraft set off on a trip to Lisbon, where her friend Fanny, who had married that February, was expecting her first child. On board the ship, Mary met a man suffering from consumption; she nursed him for a fortnight, the length of the journey. This experience is related in her first novel, Mary, a Fiction (1788). She gained a very unfavourable opinion of Portuguese life and society, which seemed to her ruled by irrationality and superstitions. Mary's brief stay in Portugal was, furthermore, to be a profoundly unhappy one, for both Fanny and her baby died shortly after the delivery.

On her return to England, Wollstonecraft found her school in a dire state. Far from providing her with a reliable income and some stability, it was to be a source of endless worries and a financial drain. Only Joseph Johnson's advance on her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct in the more important Duties of Life (1787) helped ease her considerable financial difficulties. It consists of brief discussions on such topics as ‘Moral Discipline’, ‘Artificial Manners’, ‘Boardings-Schools’, ‘The Benefits Which Arise From Disappointments’, ‘The Observance of Sunday’, and ‘On the Treatment of Servants’.

Following the collapse of her school, Wollstonecraft became a governess to the family of Lord Kingsborough for a brief and unsatisfactory period. The position took her to Ireland, where she completed Mary, A Fiction . On her return to London, Joseph Johnson came to the rescue once again by giving her some literary employment. In 1787, she also began, but never completed, The Cave of Fancy. A Tale . The same year, she wrote Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788); it appeared in two other London editions in her life time (1791 and 1796), the last of which illustrated by William Blake. Wollstonecraft's anthology, The Female Reader; Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse; Selected from the Best Writers and Disposed under Proper Heads; for the Improvement of Young Women (1789), was compiled in the same period and published under the name of ‘Mr. Cresswick, teacher of Elocution’; it pursues themes to be found in her previous works and contains excerpts mostly from the Bible and Shakespeare's plays, as well as many by various eighteenth-century authors, such as Voltaire, Hume, Steele, Charlotte Smith, and Madame de Genlis.

To understand the extent to which Wollstonecraft made up for the lack of a formal education, it is essential to appreciate fully that her talents were to extend to translating and reviewing, and that these two activities, quite apart from her own intellectual curiosity, acquainted her with a great many authors, including Leibniz and Kant. She translated into English Jacques Necker's Of the Importance of Religious Opinions (1788) from French, Rev. C. G. Salzmann's Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children; with an Introductory Address to Parents (1790) from German, and Madame de Cambon's Young Grandison (1790) from Dutch. In each case, the texts she produced were almost as if her own, not just because she was in agreement with their original authors, but because she more or less re-wrote them. The Reverend Salzmann is unlikely to have resented her for this, as he was to translate into German both A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798).

Throughout the period covered by these translations Wollstonecraft wrote for the Analytical Review , which her publisher, Joseph Johnson, together with Thomas Christie, started in May 1788. She was involved with this publication either as a reviewer or as editorial assistant for most of its relatively short life. Despite her own practice of the genre, her many reviews reveal the degree to which, she, like many other moralists in the eighteenth century, feared the moral consequences of reading novels. She believed that even those of a relatively superior quality encouraged vanity and selfishness. She was to concede, however, that reading such works might nonetheless be better than not reading at all. Besides novels, Wollstonecraft reviewed poetry, travel accounts, educational works, collected sermons, biographies, natural histories, and essays and treatises on subjects such as Shakespeare, happiness, theology, music, architecture and the awfulness of solitary confinement; the authors whose works she commented on, included Madame de Staël, Emanuel Swedenborg, Lord Kames, Rousseau, and William Smellie. Until the end of 1789, her articles were mostly of a moral and aesthetic nature. However in December 1789, she reviewed a speech by her old friend, Richard Price, entitled A Discourse on the Love of our Country, delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution of Great Britain. With an Appendix, containing the report of the Committee of the Society; and Account of the Population of France; and the Declarations of the Rights by the National Assembly of France (1789). This address to the Revolution Society in commemoration of the events of 1688 partly prompted Burke to compose his very famous Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (1790).

Burke's attack on Price in that work in turn led Wollstonecraft, egged on by her publisher, Johnson, to take up her pen in the aged Reverend's defence. A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) was almost certainly the first of many responses Burke's Reflections elicited . Initially published anonymously at the end of November, the second edition that quickly followed in mid-December bore its author's name and marked a turning point in her career; it established her a political writer. In September 1791, Wollstonecraft began A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, which elaborated a number of points made in the previous Vindication , namely, that in most cases, marriage was nothing but a property relation, and that the education women received ensured that they could not meet the expectations society had of them and almost certainly guaranteed them an unhappy life.

Following the publication of her second Vindication , Wollstonecraft was introduced to the French statesman and diplomat, Charles Talleyrand, on his mission to London on the part of the Constituent Assembly in February 1792. She dedicated the second edition of the A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to him. In December 1792, she travelled to France where she met Gilbert Imlay, an American merchant and author of A Topographical Descriptions of the Western Territory of North America (1792) and The Emigrants (1793). As British subjects were increasingly at risk under the Terror, Wollstonecraft passed as Imlay's wife so as to benefit from the security enjoyed at the time by American citizens. They never married. Imlay was probably the source of Wollstonecraft's greatest unhappiness, first through his lack of ardour for her, then because of his infidelity, and finally because of his complete rejection of her. Most of all, her love of Imlay brought Wollstonecraft to the realisation that the passions are not so easily brought to heel by reason.

Wollstonecraft had a girl by Imlay. She was born at Le Havre in May 1794 and named Fanny, after Wollstonecraft's friend, Fanny Blood. A year after Fanny's birth, Wollstonecraft twice attempted suicide, first in May, then in October 1795. She broke with Imlay finally in March 1796. In April of the same year, she renewed her acquaintance with William Godwin and they became lovers that summer. They were married at St Pancras church in March 1797. On the 30 th August, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, future author of Frankenstein and wife of Shelley, was born.

Apart from Mary, a Fiction and The Cave of Fancy Wollstonecraft's early writings were of a pedagogical nature. These reveal the profound influence John Locke had on Wollstonecraft's thought, and several of the arguments of his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) are echoed in Wollstonecraft's conception of morality and the best manner to inculcate it in individuals at the earliest possible age. The opening paragraph of her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters speaks of the duty parents have to ensure that ‘reason should cultivate and govern those instincts which are implanted in us to render the path of duty pleasant—for if they are not governed they will run wild; and strengthen the passions which are ever endeavouring to obtain dominion—I mean vanity and self-love.’ Similarly, the beginning of her Original Stories from Real Life stated its author's intent, namely to seek ‘to cure those faults by reason, which ought never to have taken root in the infant mind. Good habits, imperceptibly fixed, are far preferable to the precepts of reason; but as this task requires more judgement than generally falls to the lot of parents, substitutes must be sought for, and medicines given, when regimen would have answered the purpose better’. Wollstonecraft's prescriptions to counter the deplorable education she thought her contemporaries were inflicting on their children takes the form of a tale about two girls, Mary and Caroline. At the beginning of the story, the reader finds the girls left to the management of ignorant servants (one of Locke's great bugbears), but they are eventually placed under the tuition of a woman of tenderness and discernment. The book shows how the latter succeeds in teaching contemptuous Mary and vain Caroline to avoid anger, exercise compassion, love truth and virtue, and respect the whole of God's creation.

That reason must rule supreme is a running theme of Wollstonecraft's works written prior to her sojourn in Revolutionary France and, all the more, prior to her travels through Scandinavia. It is stressed in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Other continuities between her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and the Vindication include her preference for an education conducted at home, and her insistence that girls and young women be made to acquire ‘inner resources’ so as to make them as psychologically independent as possible. The Thoughts also reveals Wollstonecraft's conviction that universal benevolence is the first virtue, as well as her faith in a providentially ordained universe. She enjoined her readers to prepare their children for ‘the main business of our lives’, namely, the acquisition of virtue, and, unsurprisingly given her own history, she urged parents to strengthen their children's characters so as to enhance their capacity to survive personal tragedies. Self-mastery was thus the aim of education and it was the duty of parents to ensure that their children received it. That mind and body needed to be exercised and shaped so as to face the hardships of life is a running theme in much of her writings.

When Wollstonecraft began to engage in political commentary in reviewing Price's A Discourse on the Love of our Country , she praised him for his account of true patriotism as ‘the result of reason, not the undirected impulse of nature, ever tending to selfish extremes’ as well as his defence of Christianity's prescription of universal benevolence against those who argued such sentiment to be incompatible with the love of one's country. She endorsed his view of liberty of conscience as a sacred right and wrote sympathetically about his plea for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which imposed civil disabilities on Dissenters. She also seemed to support his claim that the political Settlement of 1689 was wanting in that it did not make for full representation of the people and hence made only for partial liberty. Finally, Wollstonecraft reproduced the passage in which Price linked the American and French revolutions and clamoured for the end of despotism throughout Europe.

When not so long thereafter she came to write her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft attacked Edmund Burke for having set upon an harmless elderly preacher in his Reflections ; yet her own review justifies Burke's depiction of Price's sermon as inflammatory. Far from thinking that the events taking place in France gave grounds for rejoicing, Burke feared their consequences from the very start. The National Assembly's confiscation of the Church's property, he predicted, would lead to further confiscations, undermine the fundamental right to property, and result in anarchy, which only the rise of a charismatic figure could bring to an end.

Of the many disagreements between Price and Wollstonecraft, on the one hand, and Burke, on the other, one of the deepest was over their respective view of the nature of civil society and of political power in general. The two friends believed that government, the rule of law, and all human relations could be simplified, explicated, and rendered transparent, and both were convinced that this was the task ahead for all lovers of liberty. For Burke, on the contrary, civil society consisted of countless ineffable links between individuals. The latter's relationship to authority was for the most part no less ineffable; moreover, he believed sound political judgement to be the product of experience, and he cautioned prudence. To sweep away established practices and institutions and think of politics as a mere matter of administrating in accordance with a set of abstract rules or rights uninformed by the customs and culture, and hence the national character, of a people was, in his view, to demonstrate a crass disregard for the most obvious facts of human nature and history. Burke's argument led him to dwell on France's financial position in some detail, and he defended its royal family and its Church; he insisted, moreover, that it was already benefiting from a policy of gradual reform. The over-all effect he sought to achieve was to depict his opponent as theoretically confused, politically naive, generally misinformed, and, most damnable of all, his sermon on the Love of our Country with all its affirmation of feelings for humanity proved him to be unpatriotic.

Wollstonecraft's Vindication was the first of many replies. Amongst those that followed was one by Catherine Macaulay, who had influenced Wollstonecraft's pedagogy and was much admired by her. Wollstonecraft's riposte is an interesting and rhetorically powerful work in its own right as well as a necessary introduction to the Vindication of the Rights of Woman . It consists mostly of a sustained attack on Burke rather than a defence of the rights of man. This is partly because Wollstonecraft took for granted a Lockean conception of God-given rights discoverable by reason, except when the latter was warped by self-love. Wollstonecraft further believed that God made all things right and that the cause of all evil was man. In her view, Burke's Reflections showed its author to be blind to man-made poverty and injustice; this she attributed to his infatuation with rank, Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the English Constitution. Demonstrating her familiarity with Burke's other works and speeches, especially A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and the Speech on Conciliation with America (1775), she also argued that he was inconsistent, if only because of the impossibility, as she saw it, of reconciling his sympathy for the American cause with his reaction to events in France. In this, Wollstonecraft was far from alone and many who had followed Burke's parliamentary career and heard his Speeches to the House of Commons were astonished by what they thought was a radical and inexplicable change of position.

As she was to do in her next and more famous Vindication , Wollstonecraft did not simply clamour for rights, but emphasised that these entail duties; but she also insisted that none could be expected to perform duties whose natural rights were not respected. Furthermore she used David Hume's History of England (1754–62) to contend that England's laws were the product of historical contingency and insisted that only those institutions that could withstand the scrutiny of reason and be shown to be in conformity with natural rights and God's justice merited respect and obedience. There was no question of blanket reverence for the past and its juridical legacy. As for civilization, she thought its progress very uneven and dismissed the culture of politeness and polish as nothing but a screen behind which hypocrisy, egotism and greed festered unchecked. Finally, opposing nature and reason to artifice and politeness, she made herself the true patriot and Burke the fickle Francophile. She was the clear-headed independent thinker, he the emotive creature of a system of patronage. She exhibited manly virtues, he effeminacy.

In the midst of her tirade she turned, rather unexpectedly, to the subject of family life and the limits of parental authority, especially in relation to arranged marriages. She condemned marriages of convenience together with late marriages: both fostered immorality in her view. Indeed, from her perspective, nearly every aspect of the prevailing culture had that consequence, for, in bringing girls up to be nothing but empty headed play-things, parents made for a morally bankrupt society. Such beings could never make dutiful mothers, as they took the horizon to be the eyes of the men they flirted with. The moral depravity of a society devoted to the acquisition of property and its conspicuous display rather than to the pursuit of reason and the protection of natural rights found the means of its reproduction in the family, she contended. Here her dispute was not just with Burke, but implicitly also with Price. In his sermon, he had deplored the sexual depravity of the times that he saw embodied even in those he considered patriots. But to seek only to vindicate the rights of men, as Price had done, was insufficient and misconceived, according to Wollstonecraft. If one sought a truly moral society, the family had to be changed and this, in turn, required a complete change in the nature of the relationship between men and women before, and within, marriage. Only a sound upbringing of both the sexes could secure that. This was the nub of her attack on political theorists and educationalists alike.

When Wollstonecraft came to write The Vindication of the Rights of Woman , which she did within a matter of months following the publication of her first overtly political work, the moral rejuvenation of society and the happiness of individual women were woven together. Women were ill-prepared for their duties as social beings and imprisoned in a web of false expectations that would inevitably make them miserable. She wanted women to be transformed into rational and independent beings whose sense of worth came, not from their appearance, but from their inner perception of self-command and knowledge. Women had to be educated; their minds and bodies had to be trained. This would make them good companions, wives, mothers and citizens. Above all it would make them fully human, that is, beings ruled by reason and characterised by self-command. Besides criticisms of existing pedagogical practices and theories, most notably Rousseau's Emile (1762), the Vindication contains many social and political proposals which range from a detailed outline of necessary changes in school curriculum to the suggestion that women be granted not only civil and political rights, but have elected representatives of their own. It argues that women should be taught skills so as to be able to support themselves and their children in widowhood, and never have to marry or remarry out of financial necessity. It seeks to reclaim midwifery for women, against the encroachment of men into this profession, and contends that women could be physicians just as well as nurses. It urges women to extend their interests to encompass politics and the concerns of the whole of humanity. It also contains advice on how to make marriages last. In Wollstonecraft's view, marriages ought to have friendship rather than physical attraction as their basis. Husbands and wives ought not, moreover, to be overly intimate and should maintain a degree of reserve towards each other.

Wollstonecraft wanted women to aspire to full citizenship, to be worthy of it, and this necessitated the development of reason. Rational women would perceive their real duties. They would forgo the world of mere appearances, the world of insatiable needs on which eighteenth-century society was based, as Adam Smith had explained more lucidly than anyone, and of which France was the embodiment, in Wollstonecraft's conception.

That she embraced the social and economic consequences of her vision of happy marriages, based on friendship and producing the next moral generation was spelled out further in her subsequent work, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (1794). In that work, she endeavoured, amongst other things, to assess the merits and demerits of the progress of humanity and establish the causes of French despotism. The picture she drew of ancien régime France was of a country ruled by superstition, and morally and politically degenerate. Borrowing from Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) she had drawn on previously, she sketched a possible future society in which the division of labour would be kept to a minimum and the sexes would be not only educated together but encouraged to work in family units. Single sex institutions and, for instance, all-male workshops encouraged lasciviousness in her view. She thus looked forward to a society in which small businesses and farms would provide basic, instead of superfluous, needs.

Only the combination of her experience of her unrequited love for Imlay, the dictates of her own emotions, and the tribulations of a trip in Northern Europe led her to reconsider her views of reason. Indeed, she was to review her opinion of France, polite culture and manners, even Catholicism which she had abhorred, a loathing that her stay in Portugal had done much to strengthen. The Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), whose influence on travel literature as well as the Romantic movement was by no means negligible, show Wollstonecraft to have begun to espouse a more nuanced view of the world, and to have sought to develop a more fluid account of the relationship between reason and passion, as well as of modernity. Thus she grew a little closer to Burke in that she came to think that the tyranny of commercial wealth might be worse than that of rank and privilege. Whilst in France, she had already begun to write less critically of the English system of government. She had witnessed the Terror, fallen in love, born a child out of wedlock, been rejected, and attempted suicide. A second suicide attempt lay ahead. So did the prospect of happiness with William Godwin, a prospect cut short by her death in childbirth. Posthumous notoriety was to follow as Wollstonecraft became identified only with the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and that work was ironically, in turn, equated with a flouting of social conventions, principally in relation to marriage.

Although she was very much encouraged by her publisher, Joseph Johnson, she received little support from fellow intellectuals in her lifetime. Even Godwin did not take to her on their first meeting. Very few of the foremost women writers gave Wollstonecraft their wholehearted support in the eighteenth century. Many mocked her, but only very rarely were her ideas genuinely assessed in the way they have come to be since the second half of the twentieth century. The leading poet, Anna Barbauld (1743–1825) was one of the few members of the radical intelligentsia of the time whose opposition to Wollstonecraft was the product of a real engagement with her views on women. By the end of the 1790s and for most of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft was derided by many, if only because of what was deemed to have been a scandalous personal life. There were, to be sure, important exceptions, especially in America. Such praise as she did receive on both sides of the Atlantic came, however, from arguably limited acquaintance with her ideas or her intellectual persona.

And so it seemed that from the end of the century and throughout the next, she who had endeavoured to place marriage on a solid foundation by providing an account of the education that would prepare spouses for it would be primarily thought of as someone who had sought to pass as married when she wasn't and as the mother of an illegitimate child. Much of this reputation was owed to Godwin's frank, arguably unnecessarily frank, account of Wollstonecraft's life, in Memoirs of the Author of a ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1798). It revealed, amongst other personal details, her relationship with Imlay and thereby cast a deep shadow over her reputation. In any event, John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women (1869) was to eclipse most other contributions to feminist debates of the period.

In the twentieth century, and especially following the growth of feminism in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1960s, scholars disregarded the vicissitudes of Wollstonecraft's private life and heralded her as the first English feminist. She came to be read principally within the context of the history of the women's movement. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, however, a growing number of commentators have looked at A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in its historical and intellectual context rather than in isolation or in relation to subsequent feminist theories. This has led to renewed interest in her other political writings, including her Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark . Wollstonecraft has now long ceased to be seen as just a scandalous literary figure, or just the embodiment of a nascent feminism which only reached maturity two hundred years later, but as an Enlightenment moral and political thinker whose works present a self-contained argument about the kind of change society would need to undergo for men and women to be virtuous in both the private and the public sphere and thereby secure the chance of a measure of happiness.

What is more, with growing interest in reception history, the extent of her influence in Europe and beyond as been the subject of reassessments (Botting 2013). It is becoming increasingly evident that Wollstonecraft was widely read and respected as a pioneer of woman's rights in America as well as many other parts of the world (Botting 2016).

Her reference to slavery and the slave trade as “an atrocious insult to humanity” in Vindication of the Rights of Men , and her call for social justice more generally, has been noted by Amartya Sen in his The Idea of Justice (2009). Often seen as a proponent of liberal values (Sapiro 1992), Wollstonecraft continues also to placed within a republican tradition, most recently by Sandrine Berges (2013), Alan Coffee (2014), and Lena Halldenius (2015), who have analysed her view of freedom in terms of independence and the absence of subordination to the arbitrary power of others.

Whether Wollstonecraft is best seen as belonging to one tradition or any other will remain a matter of dispute. What is important to remember is that she responded to a fast changing political situation and that she continued to engage critically with public opinion, the leading intellectual and political figures of her age, and most remarkably, her own views in the light of her experiences in France, Northern Europe and Great Britain. Her critique of Burke, the English political system, even the aristocracy, became more muted as she found the continued expansion of commerce and growth of the luxury economy to lead to even greater inequities than the world it was replacing.

Listed below are the earliest editions of Wollstonecraft's works, followed by the dates of other editions published in her lifetime, and some later editions of each of the texts. All appear in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft , Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, eds., London, Pickering and Chatto, 1989, 7 vols (thereafter cited as Works)

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life . London: Joseph Johnson, 1787.
With an introduction by Gina Luria, New York: Garland, 1974.
Original Stories from Real Life: with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness , London: Joseph Johnson, 1788; 1791; 1796. With illustrations by William Blake.
Edited by Moira Ferguson, Delmar, N.Y.: Scholar's Facsimiles, 1979.
Edited by Eleanor Louise Nicholes, Gainesville, Florida: Scholar's Facsimiles & Reprints, 1960.
Edited by Janet Todd, in Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and An historical and Moral View of the French Revolution , London: Pickering; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 1994.
Edited by Sylvana Tomaselli, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Edited by Miriam Brody Kramnick, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Edited by Carol H. Poston with reprints of interpretative articles, New York: Norton, 1988.
Edited by Barbara Taylor. London: Everyman, 1992.
Edited by Janet Todd, in Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, An historical and Moral View of the French Revolution , London: Pickering; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 1994.
Edited by Janet Todd, in Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A vindication of the Rights of Woman, An historical and Moral View of the French Revolution , London: Pickering; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 1994.
Edited by Carol H. Poston, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976.
Edited by Richard Holmes, in Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of “The Rights of Woman” , London: Penguin, 1987.

Translations by Mary Wollstonecraft

All three works are included in Works .

Of the Importance of Religious Opinions. Translated from the French of Mr . (Jacques) Necker . London: Joseph Johnson, 1788; Dublin, 1788; Philadelphia, 1791.
Elements of Morality for the use of children; with an Introductory Address to Parents. Translated from the German of the Rev. C(hristian) G(otthilf) Salzmann . 2 vols., London: Joseph Johnson, 1790; 3 vols., 1792 with illustrations; first edition reprinted, 1793.
Young Grandison. A Series of Letters from Young Persons to their friends>. Translated from the Dutch of Madame (Maria Geertruida van de Werken) de Cambon. With Alterations and Improvements . 2 vols. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790; Dublin, 1790.

Other works

All included in Works .

Reviews in Analytical Review , 1788–1792, 1796–1797.
“On Poetry and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature”, Monthly Magazine , April, 1797, pp. 279–82.
Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman , William Godwin ed., London: Joseph Johnson, 1798.

Posthumous publications

All incomplete and in Works

The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. A Fragment . Begun in 1796.
Extract from the Cave of Fancy . A Tale. Written in 1787.
Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation . Dated 1793.
Fragment of Letters on the Management of Infants.
Edited by Sylvana Tomaselli in <A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Other Primary Works of Relevance

Edited by Robert R. Hare as Traditionally ascribed to Gilbert Imlay but, more probably, by MW . Gainesville, Florida: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1964.

Other Collections of Wollstonecraft's works

Gina Luria, ed., (1974) New York: Garlan Press.
A Wollstonecraft Anthology , Janet Todd (ed.), Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1977, 1989.

A selection:

Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler, eds., Works , cited above.
Wardle, Ralph, M, ed. 1979, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Sapiro, Virginia, 1992, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft . Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Todd, Janet, 1976a, “The biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft”, Signs I (1976), 721–34.
Todd, Janet, 1976b, Mary Wollstonecraft: An Annotated Bibliography , New York and London: Garland.

The following is a selection. Note also, the introductions to the various editions of Wollstonecraft's works listed above.

Abbey, Ruth, 1999, “Back to the Future: Marriage as Friendship in the Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft”, Hypatia , 14(3): 78-95.
Bahar, Saba, 2002, Mary Wollstonecraft's Social and Aethetic Philosophy: ‘An Eve to Please me’ , Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave.
Botting, Eileen Hunt, 2006, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family , New York: State University Press.
–––, 2013, “Wollstonecraft in Europe, 1792-1904: A Revisionist Reception History”, History of European Ideas , 39(4): 503–527.
–––, 2016, Wollstonecraft, Mill & Women's Human Rights , New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Botting, Eileen Hunt, and Carey, Christine (eds.), 2004, “Wollstonecraft's Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women's Rights Advocates”, American Journal of Political Science , 48(4): 707–722.
Bergès, Sandrine, 2013, The Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , London and New York: Routledge.
Clemit, Pamela, 2002, “The Different Faces of Mary Wollstonecraft”, Enlightenment and Dissent , 21:163–169.
Coffee, Alan, 2013, “Mary Wollstonecraft, Freedom and the Enduring Power of Social Domination”, European Journal of Political Theory , 12(2): 116–135.
–––, 2014, “Freedom as Independence: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Grand Blessing of Life”, Hypathia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy , 29(4): 116–924.
Conniff, James, 1999, “Edmund Burke and His Critics: The case of Mary Wollstonecraft”, Journal of the History of Ideas , 60(2): 299–318.
Falco, Maria J. (ed.), 1996, Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft , University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Gordon, Lyndall, 2005, Mary Wollstonecraft: A new genus , New York: HarperCollins.
Guest, Harriet, 2000, Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Gunther-Canada, Wendy, 2001, “The politics of sense and sensibility: Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay Graham on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France ”, Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition , Hilds L. Smith (ed), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 126–147.
–––, 2001, Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics DeKlab, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press.
Halldenius, Lena, 2007, “The Primacy of Right. On the Triad of Liberty, Equality and Virtue in Wollstonecraft's Political Thought”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy , 15(1): 75–99.
–––, 2015, Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism: Independence, Rights and the Experience of Unfreedom , London: Pickering & Chatto.
Johnson, Claudia (ed.), 2002, Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kelly, Gary, 1992, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft , London: MacMillan.
Kitts, S., 1994, “Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman : A Judicious Response from Eighteenth-Century Spain,”, Modern Language Review , 89(2): 351–59.
Knott, Sarah, and Barbara Taylor eds., 2005, Women, Gender and Enlightenment , Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave.
Landes, Joan B., 1988, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution , Ithaca and London: Cornell University. Press
Modugno, Roberta A., 2002, Mary Wollstonecraft: Diritti unami e Rivoluzione francese , Rome: Rubbettino Editore Srl.
Offen, Karen, 1999, European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History , Stanford: Stanford University Press.
O'Neill, Daniel I., 2007, The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press.
–––, 2007, John Adams versus Mary Wollstonecraft on the French Revolution and Democracy Journal of the History of Ideas , 68, (3): 451 –476.
O'Brien, Karen, 2009, Women and Enlighthenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sapiro, Virginia, 1992, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft , Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Taylor, Barbara, 1983, Eve and The New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century , London: Virago Press.
–––, 2003, Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Todd, Janet, 2000, Mary Wollstonecraft: a revolutionary life , London: Weidenfel and Nicholson.
Tomalin, Claire, 1992, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft , revised edition, London: Penguin Books.
Tomaselli, Sylvana, 1997, “The Death and Rebirth of Character in the Eighteenth Century” in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self , London: Routledge: 84–96.
–––, 2001, “The Most Public Sphere of all; the family”, in E. Eger, C. Grant, C. Gallchoir, and P. Warburton (eds.), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere 1700–1830 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 239–256.
Verhoeven, Wil, 2008, Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the world , London: Pickering and Chatto.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up this entry topic at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

A Vindication of the Rights of Women , at bartleby.com.

Burke, Edmund | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | Godwin, William | Locke, John

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Two Eras Of Feminism: Mary Wollstonecraft And Virginia Woolf
Travis John Welty. Apr 25, 2016. University of Virginia's College at Wise. Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf both focused their attention on the role of women in society, despite living in different historical and cultural contexts. While Wollstonecraft fought for the rights of women to have a national education, seeing it as among the ...
Mary Wollstonecraft, 'Ithuriel,' and the Rise of the Feminist Author-Ghost
In 1929, Virginia Woolf published an influential essay on Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), later anthologized in her Second Common Reader (193 2 J.1 Woolf concludes by lamenting that Wollstonecraft died in childbirth at age thirty-eight, in what has since been characterized as a "madly idealized portrayal."2 The essay also envisions ...
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"By tickling minnows," as Virginia Woolf put it in a short essay about Wollstonecraft, Imlay "had hooked a dolphin." By the end of the year, Mary was pregnant. Françoise Imlay (always Fanny, after Fanny Blood) was born at Le Havre in May 1794, and Mary wrote home that "I feel great pleasure at being a mother," and boasted that she ...
The Psychology of Tyranny: Wollstonecraft and Woolf on the Gendered
In this essay, by fixing initially on the critiques of war provided by Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf, I examine how gender constructs promote and participate in the psychological conditions necessary for war. Wollstone-craft and Woolf focus not on the standard, macho image of the soldier, but on the effeminacy of the soldier.
'Vindication': Mary Wollstonecraft's Sense and Sensibility
May 29, 2005. VINDICATION A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. By Lyndall Gordon. Illustrated. 562 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $29.95. IN 1915 Virginia Woolf predicted it would take women another six ...
A Feminist Vindication of Mary Wollstonecraft
The middle-class woman began to write."1 Mary Wollstonecraft is exemplary of those history-making women. Her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, was the first truly feminist treatise acknowledged by the English public. Its continuing literary and historical importance is demon strated by the many recent critics who ...
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Mary Wollstonecraft
First published Wed Apr 16, 2008; substantive revision Thu Dec 3, 2020. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was a moral and political philosopher whose analysis of the condition of women in modern society retains much of its original radicalism. One of the reasons her pronouncements on the subject remain challenging is that her reflections on the ...
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Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
This chapter introduces Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) as a woman, mother, scholar, writer, and wife/lover. ... in this case, in a novel format rather than as an essay. ... Wollstonecraft's radical views on women and education influenced famous writer Virginia Woolf who "reflected that Wollstonecraft's political thought had permeated ...
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Virginia Woolf gave voice to that uneasiness as early as 1919, when she contrasted the fates of Eliot's heroines ... Her 1855 essay on Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft liberally quotes both feminists, and sympathetically reviews their respective ... Eliot's essay, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," has become, of course, a
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The history of the reception and interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a complex and ... of the most interesting recent essays on Wollstonecraft is by Cora Kaplan. S Kaplan' s critique concentrates on the text of ... Virginia Woolf wrote of Wollstonecraft: Every day ... something was born in her that thrust
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Mary Wollstonecraft: Advocate for Women's Rights and Education
María Luisa Cicala (Author) May 20, 2024. Mary Wollstonecraft has been widely taglined as the first feminist due to her early vocality about women's rights in England. During her brief but remarkable career in the mid-18th century, Wollstonecraft produced work as an author, novelist, philosopher, and feminist activist while being undermined ...
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Freethinkers George Eliot, Barbara Bodichon, and Virginia Woolf were among the later feminists who championed Wollstonecraft against accusations of social and sexual impropriety, which lingered even 100 years on. Wollstonecraft remains an inspiring figure in the history of freethought and feminism, representing a devotion to values of freedom ...
Mary Wollstonecraft
Virginia Woolf. A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf. James Joyce. The Dead - James Joyce. Franz Kafka. ... Mary Wollstonecraft Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) ... The essay was well received in its initial publication, but its revolutionary ideas were not truly appreciated or realized until over one hundred ...
Mary Wollstonecraft Critical Essays
In Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Vol. 4, edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, pp. 25-7. New York: New York University Press, 1989. In the following essay, from her 1787 publication Thoughts on ...
The Common Reader
The Common Reader, collection of essays by Virginia Woolf, published in two series, the first in 1925 and the second in 1932.Most of the essays appeared originally in such publications as the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Athenæum, New Statesman, Life and Letters, Dial, Vogue, and The Yale Review.The title indicates Woolf's intention that her essays be read by the "common reader ...
Mary Wollstonecraft
First published Wed Apr 16, 2008; substantive revision Fri Aug 19, 2016. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was a moral and political philosopher whose analysis of the condition of women in modern society retains much of its original radicalism. One of the reasons her pronouncements on the subject remain challenging is that her reflections on ...
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft ( ... comme les appelle Virginia Woolf dans un essai devenu célèbre [56]. Nombreux sont ceux, cependant, qui continuent à décrier le mode de vie de Mary Wollstonecraft, dont les œuvres restent négligées. ... Sea Changes : Essays on Culture and Feminism, Londres, Verso, 1986, 232 ...
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft (engelskt uttal: ... Kvinnor i den nyväckta feministiska rörelsen, från Virginia Woolf till Emma Goldman, omfamnade Wollstonecrafts öde och hyllade hennes vågade "livsexperiment", ... Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism. London: Verso, 1986. ISBN -86091-151-9.

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