Mary Wollstonecraft Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was an eighteenth-century British writer best known for her passionate defense of women’s moral and intellectual equality. The author of texts in multiple genres, her most influential work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), argues that women’s inferiority to men is not sanctioned by nature but is instead the product of corrupt social institutions and mores, which must be radically reformed. Her critical stance against women’s subordination, coupled with her unconventional personal life, make Wollstonecraft a seminal figure in the history of feminist thought.

Born in London into a large, volatile middle-class family, Wollstonecraft left home at the age of nineteen. Although initially employed as a governess, she was determined to support herself as a writer. Her first three books, published in 1787 and 1788—a conduct manual, a novel, and a children’s book—all criticized European society for fostering weakness and superficiality in women and insisted on the importance of education in rectifying this tendency. Wollstonecraft also worked as a translator of French and German philosophical texts and as a reviewer and editor for the journal Analytical Review. An affair with a married artist ended when his wife rejected Wollstonecraft’s suggestion that they form a three person relationship. In the years that followed, Wollestonecraft wrote her two major works, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as well as a history of the French Revolution (1789–1799) and a narrative of her travels through Scandinavia. In 1792 she moved to France and acquired a new lover, Gilbert Imlay, an American writer with whom she had a daughter out of wedlock. After Imlay left her, Wollstonecraft returned to London and attempted suicide twice in 1795 before becoming involved with William Godwin, the anarchist philosopher. Godwin and Wollstonecraft were married in 1797 after learning she was pregnant, although both had previously criticized marriage. Their short-lived and unusual marriage (they kept separate residences) was by all accounts happy, and Godwin was devastated when Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight due to complications from childbirth. Their only child would later write the novel Frankenstein (1818) under her married name, Mary Shelley.

Although A Vindication of the Rights of Men, which attacks Irish philosopher Edmund Burke’s defense of hereditary rule by forwarding a doctrine of universal natural rights, remains an important text, it is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that articulates the position for which Wollstonecraft is best known. In the work she paints damning portraits of women’s vanity, passivity, and poorly developed intellect to argue for the alteration of this condition. Contending that women suffer from an “artificial weakness” encouraged by dominant beliefs and habits, Wollstonecraft calls for significant changes in education, politics, and family life so that women may develop their reason, and in turn, their virtue. Although she encourages women to take an interest in political and humanitarian matters and argues for their equal citizenship, she also affirms women’s unique roles as mothers. She offers a revolutionary vision of domesticity in which educated, moral, and independent women oversee the care of children and act as “rational companions” to their husbands. She insists, as in all her works, that women, like men, are endowed with the faculty of reason, which can flourish only if existing norms and customs are transformed.

Bibliography:

Falco, Maria J., ed. Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996.
Ferguson, Moira, and Janet Todd. Mary Wollstonecraft. Boston: Twayne, 1984.
Johnson, Claudia L., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. London: Joseph Johnson, 1989.
A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Edited by Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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