Dying Mothers, the Birth of Handwashing, and the Bittersweet True Love Story Behind ‘Frankenstein’

This essay is adapted from Traversal.

“Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the philosophical novel she wouldn’t live to finish, addressing a daughter she was yet to have. “Always appear what you are, and you will not pass through existence without enjoying its genuine blessings, love and respect.”

In late 1791, as important men were sitting down in America to make ten amendments to the young country’s constitution, which they called a Universal Bill of Rights, Wollstonecraft was sitting down in England to complete A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects — the beacon of political philosophy, inspired by Paine’s treatise, that would expand the universal to include all chromosomal arrangements, “demanding justice for one half of the human race” and laying the foundation of women’s political power, not by shaming and blaming the oppressor but by painting a passionate portrait of possibility.

When Wollstonecraft’s publisher invited her to a dinner celebrating one of those important men — Thomas Paine, whose landmark insistence on the right of the people to overthrow their rulers had inspired Wollstonecraft’s treatise — another of the publisher’s most successful and controversial authors was also there: the radical political philosopher William Godwin.

Both Wollstonecraft and Godwin, who had never before met, had made their reputations on the bold denunciation of institutions, including the institution of marriage: Wollstonecraft in her Vindication and Godwin in An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice, which issued a rigorously reasoned eight-book call for a society of equals, indicting government, religion, and marriage as oppressive forces that limit individual freedom and gape the abyss of inequality. Government and religion, Godwin argued, would be rendered obsolete with sufficient advancement of human knowledge and morality. “Marriage, as now understood,” he wrote, “is a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies. So long as two human beings are forbidden, by positive institution, to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice will be alive and vigorous.”

Wollstonecraft inveighed against marriage as the only means for women to “rise in the world,” which in turn reduced their aspirations to those of “mere animals” and made them act as children once they did enter this institution of wholesale dependency. What she called for instead ...