Mary Wollstonecraft

Based on Wikipedia: Mary Wollstonecraft

The Woman Who Invented Feminism (And Whose Daughter Invented Science Fiction)

Here's a strange piece of literary history: the woman who wrote the founding text of feminist philosophy died giving birth to the woman who would write Frankenstein. Mary Wollstonecraft never got to meet her daughter Mary Shelley, dying just eleven days after her birth in 1797. She was thirty-eight years old.

But in her brief life, Wollstonecraft managed to scandalize Georgian England, survive the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, and write a book that would take nearly two centuries to receive the recognition it deserved.

A Childhood of Chaos

Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in Spitalfields, a neighborhood in London's East End. Her family started with money. They didn't keep it.

Her father, Edward, had a gift for losing fortunes. He squandered the family's comfortable income on one speculative project after another, dragging his wife and seven children through a series of increasingly desperate relocations. Things got so bad that he eventually forced Mary to hand over her inheritance early—money that should have been hers when she came of age.

Edward was also violent. Drunk and rageful, he beat his wife regularly. As a teenager, Mary took to sleeping outside her mother's bedroom door, positioning herself as a human shield between her parents.

This instinct to protect would define her life. She spent years looking after her younger sisters, Everina and Eliza. In 1784, when Eliza fell into what was almost certainly postpartum depression after giving birth, Mary did something radical: she helped her sister escape.

She planned everything—the flight, the hiding, the new life. But the cost was brutal. In eighteenth-century England, a woman who left her husband was ruined. Eliza couldn't remarry. She spent the rest of her life in poverty, working jobs that respectable women weren't supposed to need. Mary had freed her sister from one cage and delivered her into another.

Friendships That Shaped Everything

Two women changed Mary Wollstonecraft's life before she ever published a word.

The first was Jane Arden, whom she met in Beverley, a market town in Yorkshire. Jane's father styled himself a philosopher and scientist, hosting lectures in their home. Mary devoured the intellectual atmosphere like someone who had been starving. She and Jane read books together, attended lectures together, thought together.

Mary's letters to Jane reveal something intense, almost desperate. "I have formed romantic notions of friendship," she wrote. "I must have the first place or none." This emotional volatility—the soaring highs and crushing lows—would haunt her for the rest of her life.

The second friendship was more transformative. Fanny Blood came into Mary's life through the Clares, a couple in Hoxton who became surrogate parents to the young woman with the chaotic home life. Mary credited Fanny with opening her mind.

The two women dreamed of living together. They would rent rooms, support each other emotionally and financially, build a life free from the men who had disappointed them both. It was a utopia of two.

Reality intervened, as it does.

They needed money. Mary, her sisters, and Fanny opened a school together in Newington Green, a community of religious dissenters. But Fanny's health had always been fragile. When she fell in love and married Hugh Skeys, she moved to Lisbon, Portugal, hoping the warmer climate might help her breathe easier.

It didn't. When Fanny became pregnant, her health collapsed entirely. Mary abandoned the school and rushed to Portugal to nurse her friend.

She arrived too late. Or perhaps just in time—in time to watch Fanny die.

The school failed without her. Fanny's death shattered something in Mary. Years later, she would channel that grief into her first novel, Mary: A Fiction, published in 1788.

The Impossible Job Market

What could a respectable but poor woman do for money in the 1780s?

Almost nothing.

Wollstonecraft tried being a lady's companion first—essentially a paid friend to a wealthy widow named Sarah Dawson in Bath. Sarah was, by all accounts, terrible to work for. Mary lasted about two years before her mother's failing health called her home.

After her mother died, Mary moved in with Fanny Blood's family. She spent two years there and slowly realized that she had idealized her friend. Fanny turned out to be more conventional than Mary had imagined, more invested in traditional feminine values. But Mary stayed loyal to the Blood family for the rest of her life, sending money to Fanny's brother whenever she could.

After the school collapsed, friends helped Mary find work as a governess for the Kingsborough family in Ireland. She couldn't stand Lady Kingsborough. But the children loved her—one daughter, Margaret King, later said that Mary "had freed her mind from all superstitions." Some of those teaching experiences ended up in Mary's only children's book, Original Stories from Real Life.

But governess work felt like a dead end. In the chapter of her book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters titled "Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, and Left Without a Fortune," Mary laid out the problem with devastating clarity: women like her had almost no options.

So she chose the one path that seemed impossible.

Becoming a Writer

In 1787, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to her sister Everina that she was trying to become "the first of a new genus."

She meant it literally. Almost no women supported themselves through writing. The few who did were considered oddities, eccentrics, or worse. Mary didn't care. She moved to London and found a patron in Joseph Johnson, a liberal publisher who became something more than an employer—she called him both a father and a brother in her letters.

Johnson gave her work. She learned French and German, translating books. She wrote reviews for his periodical, the Analytical Review, mostly covering novels. She attended his famous dinner parties, where the guest list read like a who's who of radical thought: Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer whose Common Sense had helped ignite the American Revolution, and William Godwin, the philosopher who would later become an intellectual godfather of anarchism.

That first meeting with Godwin went badly. He had come to hear Paine speak. Instead, Mary argued with him all night, disagreeing on nearly every subject. Neither was impressed.

They would meet again.

A Vindication

In November 1790, the conservative politician Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke looked at the upheaval across the English Channel and saw chaos, destruction, the trampling of tradition and order. He mourned for Marie Antoinette, praising the queen as a symbol of elegant civilization surrounded by "furies from hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women."

Mary Wollstonecraft was furious.

She spent the rest of November writing her response. A Vindication of the Rights of Men appeared on November 29th, just four weeks after Burke's book. The first edition was anonymous. By the time the second edition came out in December, her name was on the cover.

She was famous overnight.

Where Burke saw the October Days of 1789—when a crowd of Parisian women marched to Versailles and forced the royal family back to Paris—as a violation of everything sacred, Mary saw something else entirely. Those "furies from hell"? They were working women, she wrote. "Probably you mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had any advantages of education."

She was just getting started.

In 1792, she published the book that would define her legacy: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

The argument was simple and revolutionary. Women were not naturally inferior to men. They only appeared inferior because they were denied education. If you teach only men to think and reason, only men will be capable of thought and reason. The solution wasn't to accept this as nature—it was to educate women the same way you educated men.

"I do not wish them to have power over men," she wrote, "but over themselves."

The book made her famous across Europe. When the French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord visited London that year, he made a point of calling on her. She asked him directly: would France's revolutionary government give girls the same education it was giving boys?

Into the Terror

In December 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft left for Paris.

Everyone told her not to go. Britain and France were about to go to war. The revolution had entered its most violent phase. But Mary had just finished celebrating the revolution in her book, and she wanted to see it for herself.

She arrived about a month before Louis XVI lost his head.

On December 26th, she watched from the streets as the former king was transported to stand trial before the National Assembly. She expected to feel triumphant. She had argued for this revolution, defended it against Burke's attacks, believed in its promise of a new world.

Instead, she found tears streaming down her face.

"I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach going to meet death," she wrote. The reality of revolution was messier than the theory.

France declared war on Britain in February 1793. Mary tried to leave for Switzerland. Permission denied.

The situation deteriorated rapidly. The moderate Girondins, the faction Mary had associated with, lost power to the radical Jacobins. The Committee of Public Safety was formed. The Revolutionary Tribunal began its work. Friends of Mary's were guillotined as the Jacobins eliminated their enemies.

Foreigners came under police surveillance. To get a residency permit, Mary needed six French citizens to vouch for her loyalty in writing. Then, in April, all foreigners were forbidden to leave France entirely.

She was trapped in the Terror.

An American Adventurer

Somewhere in this chaos, Mary Wollstonecraft fell in love.

His name was Gilbert Imlay. He was American, an adventurer and businessman, and almost certainly not the man Mary imagined him to be. Having just written a treatise arguing that women should be treated as rational beings, Mary decided to test her own principles. She slept with Imlay without marrying him—an act that would have destroyed her reputation had it become known.

Whether she wanted marriage is unclear. What's clear is that he didn't.

There's an irony here that Mary herself might have appreciated. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she had been skeptical of sexual passion, viewing it as a distraction from the life of the mind. But Imlay, whatever his flaws, awakened something in her she hadn't expected.

She had a daughter by him: Fanny, named after the friend she had lost in Lisbon.

The relationship with Imlay eventually collapsed. He was unfaithful, absent, ultimately indifferent. Mary attempted suicide—twice. She survived, barely.

A Different Kind of Marriage

Remember William Godwin? The philosopher Mary had argued with at Joseph Johnson's dinner party, the one she couldn't stand?

They met again. And this time, something shifted.

Godwin was a radical thinker who had written against the institution of marriage as a form of property ownership. Mary had just emerged from a devastating affair with a man who had refused to marry her. Neither of them believed in traditional marriage.

They got married anyway, in 1797, when Mary became pregnant. It was a compromise with social reality, not a change in philosophy. They didn't even live together full-time, maintaining separate households to preserve their independence.

On August 30th, 1797, Mary gave birth to a daughter. They named her Mary.

The birth went wrong. The placenta didn't fully detach. Infection set in. Eleven days later, on September 10th, Mary Wollstonecraft died.

The Destruction of a Reputation

Godwin loved his wife. In his grief, he did something that would haunt her legacy for nearly a century: he published a memoir.

Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared in 1798, less than a year after her death. Godwin, believing that honesty was the highest virtue, revealed everything. The affair with Imlay. The illegitimate daughter. The suicide attempts. The rejection of conventional religion. The decision to live with a married man before Imlay.

He thought he was honoring her memory by telling the truth.

He destroyed her reputation instead.

In the conservative backlash that followed the French Revolution—a backlash intensified by the Terror and by Britain's long war with Napoleonic France—Wollstonecraft became a cautionary tale. Her ideas about women's rights were dismissed as the ravings of an immoral woman. For almost a hundred years, respectable people didn't talk about Mary Wollstonecraft.

The Feminist Revival

It took until the early twentieth century for Wollstonecraft to be rediscovered. The women's suffrage movement needed ancestors, intellectual mothers who had made the arguments first. Mary Wollstonecraft, with her insistence that women were rational beings deserving of education and independence, fit perfectly.

The very aspects of her life that had scandalized the Victorians—her refusal to conform, her willingness to live by her own principles regardless of social cost—now made her a hero. She had practiced what she preached, sometimes disastrously, but always authentically.

Today, she is recognized as one of the founding philosophers of feminism. Her argument in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—that women's apparent inferiority is the result of inadequate education, not inherent limitation—remains foundational to feminist thought.

The Daughter She Never Knew

Mary Wollstonecraft never got to see what her daughter would become.

The younger Mary grew up reading her mother's books and visiting her grave. At nineteen, she eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. At twenty, during a ghost-story contest at Lord Byron's villa near Lake Geneva, she conceived the idea for a novel about a scientist who creates life and then abandons his creation.

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published in 1818. Mary Shelley was twenty years old.

Critics have long noted the echoes of Wollstonecraft's life in her daughter's work: the emphasis on education and nurture over nature, the tragedy of abandonment, the consequences of hubris. Mary Shelley grew up motherless, raised by a father who had inadvertently destroyed her mother's reputation, surrounded by her mother's ideas.

The woman who invented feminism and the woman who invented science fiction never met. But their works are still in conversation, two hundred years later.

What She Left Behind

Mary Wollstonecraft died with several manuscripts unfinished. Her final novel, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, remained incomplete. She had also written a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, and various treatises and essays. She was prolific, even by the standards of an age when writers produced mountains of text.

But her lasting contribution isn't any single book. It's an idea—one that seems obvious now but was revolutionary in 1792: women are people.

They can reason. They can learn. They can govern themselves. The differences between men and women that everyone assumed were natural were actually the product of education and upbringing. Change the education, and you change everything.

We're still arguing about this, more than two centuries later. We're still catching up to Mary Wollstonecraft.