Overview
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was an English radical writer whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) founded modern liberal feminist argument. She wrote on education, the French Revolution, and travel, and mixed in Dissenting and Jacobin circles. Personal life—including relationship with Gilbert Imlay and marriage to William Godwin—fed hostile biographies after her death in childbirth. Handbook dates: 1759–1797. She demanded reason’s rights for women as human beings.
Main ideas
Women’s apparent inferiority stems largely from false education in coquetry and dependence, not nature. Republican virtue and middle-class rationality should replace aristocratic gallantry. Rights of men incomplete without rights of woman; citizenship requires cultivated reason. Marriage as friendship between equals contrasts with legal slavery of wives. Sensibility without fortitude corrupts both sexes. Education reform is political reform at the root.
Major works
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- A Vindication of the Rights of Men
- Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
- Letters Written in Sweden
Legacy
Wollstonecraft became a foundational feminist philosopher despite nineteenth-century smears. Liberal and radical feminisms both claim and contest her. Syllabi in political theory now treat Vindication as a classic.