Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–1797)

Mary Wollstonecraft's contribution to the development of feminist thought in Britain is undeniable. As a polemical writer, greatly influenced by the radical, pro-revolutionary thinking of the 1790s, she argued forcefully for the recognition of women as equal to men both intellectually and legally.

Born into an impoverished middle-class family, Wollstonecraft had to support herself financially from an early age. Brief experiences as a governess and a schoolteacher led to her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), a conventional work illuminated by flashes of insight into the disadvantages of women's position in society. By 1788, she had become a full-time writer, working as a reviewer for The Analytical Review and publishing a further educational work, Original Stories from Real Life.

The beginning of the French Revolution, in July 1789, strongly politicized Wollstonecraft's thinking. In 1790, she responded to Edmund Burke's (1729–1797) reactionary publication of the same year, Reflections on the Revolution in France in an impassioned reply, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. She countered Burke's conservative arguments for the preservation of a traditionally hierarchical society with a view of the birthright of every man as “such a degree of liberty, social and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact” (Butler and Todd 1989: 9).

Her next, most celebrated, work, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), took a further step. Its fundamental premise was that, where the innate ability to reason was concerned, there was no difference between men and women. She made faulty education the basis of her arguments, but her definition of education extended beyond what was learned in school to encompass social conditioning: “everything [a woman] sees or hears serve to fix impressions…that give a sexual character to the mind” (Butler and Todd 1989: 186). Although she emphasized what was wrong with society more than suggesting improvements, her recommendations that women should be given opportunities to develop professional careers were considerably in advance of her time.

Wollstonecraft's final work was a novel, Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman (1798), in which she developed her earlier feminist arguments to encompass the legal injustices to which women were subject. She illustrated these by a multiplicity of accounts of women's lives, showing them united by the wrongs imposed on them by a patriarchal society. The novel remained unfinished at the time of her death following the birth of her second child.