Mary Wollstonecraft
On the 10th of September 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia, eleven days after giving birth to a daughter. That daughter, also named Mary, would grow up to write Frankenstein. The mother left behind several unfinished manuscripts and a reputation about to be torn apart. Wollstonecraft was an English writer and philosopher, born on the 27th of April 1759, and remembered today as one of the founding feminist philosophers. Yet for almost a century after her death, almost nobody read what she had actually written. People talked instead about how she had lived: the affairs, the suicide attempts, the child born outside marriage. How did a woman become more famous for scandal than for thought? Who decided her books were not fit for a self-respecting woman to read? And what, exactly, did she argue that made a Whig politician and a French statesman both worth answering? The story runs from a violent household in London through revolutionary Paris to a quiet churchyard, and then onward into the hands of suffragists, novelists, and a Nobel laureate.
As a teenager, Wollstonecraft used to lie outside the door of her mother's bedroom to protect her. Her father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, was apparently a violent man who would beat his wife in drunken rages. Born in Spitalfields, London, she was the second of seven children of Elizabeth Dixon and Edward John Wollstonecraft. The family had once enjoyed a comfortable income. Her father gradually squandered it on speculative projects, and the family was frequently forced to move, eventually so financially unstable that he compelled her to hand over money she would have inherited at maturity.
In 1784, Wollstonecraft persuaded her sister Eliza, who was probably suffering from postpartum depression, to leave her husband and infant. She made all the arrangements for the escape. The human costs were severe. Her sister faced social condemnation and, unable to remarry, was doomed to poverty and hard work. Wollstonecraft played a maternal role for her sisters Everina and Eliza throughout her life.
Two friendships shaped her early years. The first was with Jane Arden in Beverley, whose father, a self-styled philosopher and scientist, gave lectures the two girls attended. Wollstonecraft wrote to Arden, "I have formed romantic notions of friendship... I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first place or none." The second friendship, with Fanny Blood, mattered more. Wollstonecraft credited Blood with opening her mind. When Blood's health failed during a pregnancy in 1785, Wollstonecraft left a school she had set up to nurse her, but to no avail. Blood's death helped inspire her first novel, Mary: A Fiction, published in 1788.
"The first of a new genus" was how Wollstonecraft described her ambition in a 1787 letter to her sister Everina. She had decided, after only a year as a governess to the Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family in Ireland, to become an author. This was a radical choice. At the time, few women could support themselves by writing. One of her former pupils, Margaret King, later said Wollstonecraft "had freed her mind from all superstitions."
In London, the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson gave her a place to live and work. She learned French and German and translated texts, including Of the Importance of Religious Opinions by Jacques Necker. She wrote reviews, mostly of novels, for Johnson's periodical, the Analytical Review. Johnson became, she wrote, far more than a friend; she described him in her letters as a father and a brother.
At Johnson's famous dinners she met the radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine and the philosopher William Godwin. The first time Godwin and Wollstonecraft met, they were disappointed in each other. He had come to hear Paine, but she assailed him all night, disagreeing on nearly every subject. She also pursued a relationship with the already-married artist Henry Fuseli, enraptured, she wrote, by "the grandeur of his soul, that quickness of comprehension, and lovely sympathy." She proposed a platonic living arrangement with Fuseli and his wife. The wife was appalled, and he ended things. Humiliated, Wollstonecraft resolved to travel to France.
Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France on the 1st of November 1790, and it so angered Wollstonecraft that she spent the rest of the month writing a rebuttal. A Vindication of the Rights of Men appeared on the 29th of November, at first anonymously. A second edition on the 18th of December named her as the author, and it made her famous overnight.
Burke had dismissed the Third Estate as men of no account. Wollstonecraft answered, "Time may show, that this obscure throng knew more of the human heart and of legislation than the profligates of rank, emasculated by hereditary effeminacy." Where Burke praised Queen Marie Antoinette and called the women who marched on Versailles "furies from hell," Wollstonecraft replied that he probably meant "women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had any advantages of education."
The book was the first response in a pamphlet war later known as the Revolution Controversy. Wollstonecraft attacked not just monarchy but Burke's gendered language. He had associated the beautiful with weakness and femininity and the sublime with strength and masculinity, terms he had established in his 1756 work on the sublime and beautiful. She turned these definitions against him, arguing his theatrical tableaux turned citizens into weak women swayed by show. When the French statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord visited London in 1792, he called on her, and she asked that French girls receive the same education French boys were being offered.
"Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison." This is the argument at the heart of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, Wollstonecraft's most famous and influential work. Women, she insisted, are not naturally inferior to men. They appear so only because they lack education.
Large sections respond vitriolically to conduct book writers such as James Fordyce and John Gregory, and to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued in Émile that women should be educated for the pleasure of men. Wollstonecraft called such women "spaniels" and "toys," but blamed men who denied them schooling rather than any innate deficiency of mind. She maintained that women are human beings deserving the same fundamental rights as men, companions to their husbands rather than ornaments or property.
Her arguments were not always straightforward. She granted that men "seem to be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue," claiming equality between the sexes chiefly in the eyes of God. Such ambiguous statements have since made her difficult to classify as a modern feminist, especially since the word did not exist until the 1890s. In the twelfth chapter, "On National Education," she proposed co-educational country day schools. Even so, she suggested that after the age of nine the poor, except the brilliant, should be separated from the rich and taught elsewhere.
On the 26th of December 1792, Wollstonecraft watched the former king, Louis XVI, taken to be tried, and found "the tears flowing insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach going to meet death." She had arrived in Paris that month, about a month before his execution, associating mostly with the moderate Girondins rather than the radical Jacobins.
France declared war on Britain in February 1793. On the 12th of April, all foreigners were forbidden to leave. Some of Wollstonecraft's French friends lost their heads to the guillotine. On the 31st of October 1793, most Girondin leaders were guillotined, and when Gilbert Imlay broke the news, she fainted. Imlay, an American adventurer, had become her most experimental romantic attachment. She slept with him though they were not married, behaviour widely viewed as unacceptable for a respectable woman.
Imlay ran the Royal Navy's blockade, chartering ships to bring food and soap from the United States to sell at a premium, which earned him Jacobin goodwill and his freedom. To protect Wollstonecraft from arrest, he falsely told the U.S. embassy in Paris that he had married her, making her an American citizen. She called life under the Jacobins "nightmarish," describing daytime parades where everyone had to cheer lustily and nighttime raids to arrest enemies of the republic. On the 14th of May 1794, she gave birth to her first child, Fanny, named after her closest friend.
An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution was published in London in December 1794, written while Wollstonecraft was at Le Havre. The British historian Tom Furniss has called it the most neglected of her books, and also her best work; a second edition did not appear until 1989. She was not trained as a historian, but used journals, letters, and documents to argue that the revolution arose from social, economic, and political conditions, not from a nation going mad.
It was a difficult balancing act. She condemned the Jacobin regime and the Reign of Terror, yet called the revolution a great achievement, and so stopped her history in late 1789 rather than write about the Terror of 1793-94. Against Burke's idealized Marie Antoinette, she portrayed the queen as a femme fatale, a corrupted and corrupting product of the ancien régime, whose value a monarchy reduced to her womb.
Not everyone admired the result. In Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolution, published in 1799, the strongly anti-Jacobin historian John Adolphus condemned her work as a "rhapsody of libellous declamations" and took particular offence at her depiction of Louis XVI. By then the winter of 1794-1795, the coldest in Europe for over a century, had frozen the Seine and reduced Wollstonecraft and Fanny to desperate circumstances. She left France on the 7th of April 1795, still calling herself "Mrs. Imlay" to lend legitimacy to her child.
"Let my wrongs sleep with me! Soon, very soon, shall I be at peace." Wollstonecraft left this note for Imlay before walking up and down in the rain to make her clothes heavy with water, then jumping into the River Thames. A stranger saw her and pulled her out. It was her second suicide attempt after he rejected her; the first, in May 1795, probably with laudanum, Imlay had also interrupted. She considered the act "one of the calmest acts of reason."
Godwin had read her Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, published in 1796, and wrote, "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book." Their courtship became a passionate love affair. When she became pregnant, they married on the 29th of March 1797 so the child would be legitimate, a marriage that revealed she had never been married to Imlay and cost them many friends. They moved to 29 The Polygon, Somers Town, while Godwin kept a study twenty doors away so both could retain their independence.
On the 30th of August 1797 their daughter Mary was born. The placenta broke apart and became infected, and after several days of agony Wollstonecraft died. Godwin wrote to his friend Thomas Holcroft, "I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world." In January 1798 he published Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, revealing her illegitimate children, love affairs, and suicide attempts. The poet Robert Southey accused him of "the want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked." Her reputation lay in tatters until the women's suffrage movement exhumed her work. Millicent Garrett Fawcett introduced the 1892 centenary edition of the Rights of Woman, claiming Wollstonecraft as the foremother of the struggle for the vote, and in 1929 Virginia Woolf wrote that "she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living."
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Common questions
Who was Mary Wollstonecraft?
Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and philosopher who lived from the 27th of April 1759 to the 10th of September 1797. She is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers and is best known for advocating women's rights.
What did Mary Wollstonecraft write in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman?
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, Wollstonecraft argued that women are not naturally inferior to men but appear so only because they lack education. She maintained that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and that women deserve an education matching their position in society.
How did Mary Wollstonecraft die?
Mary Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia on the 10th of September 1797, eleven days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary. The placenta had broken apart during the birth and became infected, a common and often fatal occurrence in the eighteenth century.
Who were Mary Wollstonecraft's children?
Mary Wollstonecraft had two daughters. Her first, Fanny Imlay, was born on the 14th of May 1794, fathered by the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay. Her second, Mary Shelley, became the author of Frankenstein.
Why was Mary Wollstonecraft's reputation destroyed after her death?
Wollstonecraft's reputation was destroyed because her widower, William Godwin, published Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in January 1798. It revealed her illegitimate children, love affairs, and suicide attempts, which shocked readers and damaged her standing for nearly a century.
What did Mary Wollstonecraft do during the French Revolution?
Wollstonecraft arrived in Paris in December 1792, about a month before Louis XVI was guillotined, and associated mostly with the moderate Girondins. She wrote An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, published in 1794, and lived through the Reign of Terror as a British subject under suspicion.