Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the founding text of English feminism and died at thirty-eight of an infection contracted giving birth to the author of Frankenstein. Born in London in 1759, she watched her father drink away an inheritance and beat her mother, and slept outside her mother's door to intervene. She worked in the few occupations open to an educated woman without money — companion, schoolmistress, governess — and hated each, which supplied the argument of her later work. She joined the London circle of the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, who employed her as a translator and reviewer, and met Paine, Godwin, Blake and Priestley. In 1790 she answered Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, the first published reply to it. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman followed in 1792. Its argument is that women appear frivolous and weak because they are educated to be ornamental and denied any serious training in reason, and that a society which does this corrupts marriage, motherhood and itself. She asked for education, economic independence and civil existence, not for a natural superiority. She went to Paris to observe the Revolution, had a daughter by the American Gilbert Imlay, and attempted suicide twice when he abandoned her, once by jumping from Putney Bridge in soaked clothes. She married William Godwin in 1797 and died eleven days after their daughter Mary was born. Godwin's frank memoir of her affairs destroyed her reputation for a century, and her work was recovered by the twentieth-century women's movement.

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