69 Facts About Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights.

Today Mary Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.

Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men but appear to be only because they lack education.

Mary Wollstonecraft suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

Mary Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38 leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts.

Mary Wollstonecraft died 11 days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who would become an accomplished writer and the author of Frankenstein.

Mary Wollstonecraft was the second of the seven children of Elizabeth Dixon and Edward John Wollstonecraft.

The family's financial situation eventually became so dire that Mary Wollstonecraft's father compelled her to turn over money that she would have inherited at her maturity.

Mary Wollstonecraft played a similar maternal role for her sisters, Everina and Eliza, throughout her life.

Mary Wollstonecraft revelled in the intellectual atmosphere of the Arden household and valued her friendship with Arden greatly, sometimes to the point of being emotionally possessive.

Unhappy with her home life, Mary Wollstonecraft struck out on her own in 1778 and accepted a job as a lady's companion to Sarah Dawson, a widow living in Bath.

However, Mary Wollstonecraft had trouble getting along with the irascible woman.

Rather than return to Dawson's employ after the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft moved in with the Bloods.

Mary Wollstonecraft realised during the two years she spent with the family that she had idealised Blood, who was more invested in traditional feminine values than was Wollstonecraft.

Mary Wollstonecraft had envisioned living in a female utopia with Blood; they made plans to rent rooms together and support each other emotionally and financially, but this dream collapsed under economic realities.

Blood's death devastated Wollstonecraft and was part of the inspiration for her first novel, Mary: A Fiction.

Mary Wollstonecraft moved to London and, assisted by the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson, found a place to live and work to support herself.

Mary Wollstonecraft learned French and German and translated texts, most notably Of the Importance of Religious Opinions by Jacques Necker and Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote reviews, primarily of novels, for Johnson's periodical, the Analytical Review.

The first time Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft met, they were disappointed in each other.

Godwin had come to hear Paine, but Mary Wollstonecraft assailed him all night long, disagreeing with him on nearly every subject.

In London, Mary Wollstonecraft lived on Dolben Street, in Southwark; an up-and-coming area following the opening of the first Blackfriars Bridge in 1769.

Mary Wollstonecraft was, she wrote, enraptured by his genius, "the grandeur of his soul, that quickness of comprehension, and lovely sympathy".

Mary Wollstonecraft proposed a platonic living arrangement with Fuseli and his wife, but Fuseli's wife was appalled, and he broke off the relationship with Wollstonecraft.

Mary Wollstonecraft had written the Rights of Men in response to the Whig MP Edmund Burke's politically conservative critique of the French Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France and it made her famous overnight.

Mary Wollstonecraft called the French Revolution a "glorious chance to obtain more virtue and happiness than hitherto blessed our globe".

Mary Wollstonecraft was compared with such leading lights as the theologian and controversialist Joseph Priestley and Paine, whose Rights of Man would prove to be the most popular of the responses to Burke.

Mary Wollstonecraft pursued the ideas she had outlined in Rights of Men in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her most famous and influential work.

Mary Wollstonecraft's fame extended across the English channel, for when the French statesmen Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord visited London in 1792, he visited her, during which she asked that French girls be given the same right to an education that French boys were being offered by the new regime in France.

Mary Wollstonecraft sought out other British visitors such as Helen Maria Williams and joined the circle of expatriates then in the city.

Mary Wollstonecraft tried to leave France for Switzerland but was denied permission.

Mary Wollstonecraft put her own principles in practice by sleeping with Imlay even though they were not married, which was unacceptable behaviour from a "respectable" British woman.

Mary Wollstonecraft was to a certain extent disillusioned by what she saw in France, writing that the people under the republic still behaved slavishly to those who held power while the government remained "venal" and "brutal".

Mary Wollstonecraft was, after all, a British citizen known to be a friend of leading Girondins.

Mary Wollstonecraft was overjoyed; she wrote to a friend, "My little Girl begins to suck so MANFULLY that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the R[igh]ts of Woman".

Mary Wollstonecraft continued to write avidly, despite not only her pregnancy and the burdens of being a new mother alone in a foreign country, but the growing tumult of the French Revolution.

Imlay, unhappy with the domestic-minded and maternal Mary Wollstonecraft, eventually left her.

Mary Wollstonecraft promised that he would return to her and Fanny at Le Havre, but his delays in writing to her and his long absences convinced Wollstonecraft that he had found another woman.

Mary Wollstonecraft continued to write to Imlay, asking him to return to France at once, declaring she still had faith in the revolution and did not wish to return to Britain.

Mary Wollstonecraft was not trained as a historian, but she used all sorts of journals, letters and documents recounting how ordinary people in France reacted to the revolution.

Mary Wollstonecraft was trying to counteract what Furniss called the "hysterical" anti-revolutionary mood in Britain, which depicted the revolution as due to the entire French nation's going mad.

Mary Wollstonecraft argued instead that the revolution arose from a set of social, economic and political conditions that left no other way out of the crisis that gripped France in 1789.

Burke called the women "furies from hell", while Mary Wollstonecraft defended them as ordinary housewives angry about the lack of bread to feed their families.

Against Burke's idealised portrait of Marie Antoinette as a noble victim of a mob, Mary Wollstonecraft portrayed the queen as a femme fatale, a seductive, scheming and dangerous woman.

Mary Wollstonecraft argued that the values of the aristocracy corrupted women in a monarchy because women's main purpose in such a society was to bear sons to continue a dynasty, which essentially reduced a woman's value to only her womb.

Mary Wollstonecraft argued that aristocratic values, by emphasising a woman's body and her ability to be charming over her mind and character, had encouraged women like Marie Antoinette to be manipulative and ruthless, making the queen into a corrupted and corrupting product of the ancien regime.

Mary Wollstonecraft undertook this hazardous trip with only her young daughter and Marguerite, her maid.

Mary Wollstonecraft recounted her travels and thoughts in letters to Imlay, many of which were eventually published as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in 1796.

Mary Wollstonecraft then went out on a rainy night and "to make her clothes heavy with water, she walked up and down about half an hour" before jumping into the River Thames, but a stranger saw her jump and rescued her.

Mary Wollstonecraft considered her suicide attempt deeply rational, writing after her rescue,.

Mary Wollstonecraft speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration.

Godwin's views of Mary Wollstonecraft were perpetuated throughout the nineteenth century and resulted in poems such as "Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli" by British poet Robert Browning and that by William Roscoe which includes the lines:.

In 1851, Mary Wollstonecraft's remains were moved by her grandson Percy Florence Shelley to his family tomb in St Peter's Church, Bournemouth.

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Wickham seems to be based upon the sort of man Mary Wollstonecraft claimed that standing armies produce, while the sarcastic remarks of protagonist Elizabeth Bennet about "female accomplishments" closely echo Mary Wollstonecraft's condemnation of these activities.

The balance a woman must strike between feelings and reason in Sense and Sensibility follows what Wollstonecraft recommended in her novel Mary, while the moral equivalence Austen drew in Mansfield Park between slavery and the treatment of women in society back home tracks one of Wollstonecraft's favourite arguments.

Mary Wollstonecraft's work was exhumed with the rise of the women's suffrage movement in the United Kingdom.

Mary Wollstonecraft's work has had an effect on feminism outside academia.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a political writer and former Muslim who is critical of Islam in general and its dictates regarding women in particular, cited the Rights of Woman in her autobiography Infidel and wrote that she was "inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist thinker who told women they had the same ability to reason as men did and deserved the same rights".

In 2009, Mary Wollstonecraft was selected by the Royal Mail for their "Eminent Britons" commemorative postage stamp issue.

In both her conduct book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and her children's book Original Stories from Real Life, Mary Wollstonecraft advocates educating children into the emerging middle-class ethos: self-discipline, honesty, frugality, and social contentment.

Mary Wollstonecraft argues that well-educated women will be good wives and mothers and ultimately contribute positively to the nation.

Mary Wollstonecraft attacked not only monarchy and hereditary privilege but the language that Burke used to defend and elevate it.

Mary Wollstonecraft was unique in her attack on Burke's gendered language.

Mary Wollstonecraft argues for rationality, pointing out that Burke's system would lead to the continuation of slavery, simply because it had been an ancestral tradition.

Mary Wollstonecraft describes an idyllic country life in which each family can have a farm that will just suit its needs.

One of Mary Wollstonecraft's most scathing critiques in the Rights of Woman is of false and excessive sensibility, particularly in women.

Mary Wollstonecraft argues that women who succumb to sensibility are "blown about by every momentary gust of feeling" and because they are "the prey of their senses" they cannot think rationally.

Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is a deeply personal travel narrative.

Mary Wollstonecraft promotes subjective experience, particularly in relation to nature, exploring the connections between the sublime and sensibility.