Mary Wollstonecraft

1759-1797

Mary Wollstonecraft, born in 1759 to a gentry farmer and an unloving mother. Her family moved a great deal during her childhood and she lived all around Great Britain. She decided at a very early age to be independent, in an age where girls were supposed to be subdued.

Mary left home at age 19 to become a governess, a companion and a teacher in Ireland. This was when she decided not to marry. The ultimate goal for women in the 18th century is to marry, and being against marriage she was way ahead of her time. She worked as a governess for seven years. She taught herself French and German, and at age 28 wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Mary, a Fiction (1788). She then settled in London, and then joined an intellectual group that included English poet and artist William Blake, Thomas Paine, and many others. Wollstonecraft became interested in politics, and became inspired and radicalized by improvements she now thought were possible for humanity.

In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft published a groundbreaking, controversial work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a response to Jen-Jacques Rousseau's argument that women exist to please men. This work asserts that intellectual companionship is the ideal of marriage, pleads for equality of education, and opportunity between the sexes.