Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 to an alcoholic, abusive London father whose drinking she stood up to as a child by sleeping outside her mother's bedroom door. She supported herself as a teacher, then a governess, then a writer for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, then went to Paris to witness the at first hand. The book that made her name, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), was written in six weeks in answer to Talleyrand's report that excluded women from French education; it argued for the radical proposition that women, given the same education as men, would be men's intellectual equals. She had two children outside marriage in an age when this was social ruin, married the philosopher William Godwin in 1797 when she was pregnant with their daughter, and died eleven days after the birth of puerperal fever at thirty-eight. The daughter, Mary Shelley, would write Frankenstein at nineteen.
All Figures
Philosopher · Feminist · Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft
1,759 CE – 1,797 CE
The Englishwoman who wrote the foundational text of modern feminism in six weeks of 1792 — and died in childbirth at thirty-eight, leaving behind the daughter who would write Frankenstein.
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