Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 – 1797

Mary Wollstonecraft was an 18th-century English writer and philosopher, regarded as one of the founding figures of modern feminist political thought. Her 1792 work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argued that women appear inferior to men only because they are denied education, and called for legal and political equality on Enlightenment grounds. She also produced a Vindication of the Rights of Men in defence of the French Revolution, philosophical novels, a history of the French Revolution, and influential writings on education. She died eleven days after giving birth to her daughter, the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Her work fell into neglect in the 19th century but has been recovered as foundational to feminist philosophy and modern political thought since the 20th century.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was the foundational figure of modern philosophical feminism and one of the most original political philosophers of the late Enlightenment. Born in London to a violent and improvident father, she educated herself, worked as a lady's companion and a teacher, and entered the radical London circle of the 1780s and 1790s that included William Godwin, Thomas Paine, William Blake, and Joseph Priestley.

A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) is a direct reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and one of the earliest defenses of the French Revolution from the British radical tradition. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her most important work, extends Enlightenment arguments about reason, education, and political rights to women: women are rational beings who have been systematically deformed by an education designed to produce coquettes rather than citizens. The argument is grounded in the same broadly republican framework that Wollstonecraft used against Burke, rather than in any liberal individualism foreign to her century.

Wollstonecraft died at thirty-eight from complications following the birth of her daughter, who would become Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Godwin's grief-stricken Memoirs revealed her unconventional life and damaged her reputation for a century. The twentieth-century recovery of her work has restored her standing as one of the founding figures of feminist political philosophy.