Mary Wollstonecraft and A Vindication of the Rights of Women

Mary Wollstonecraft: The Woman

This section traces the timeline of Mary Wollstonecraft's life. Understanding the choices, relationships, and events she experienced helps illuminate her drive and focus as a liberal feminist throughout her short, thirty-eight-year life.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born into an English family that moved repeatedly during her formative years, from birth through age nine. Between the ages of nine and sixteen, she befriended a neighboring clergyman, Mr. Clare. It has been theorized that it was during this period that Mary began to develop intellectually in a meaningful way.

By the age of eighteen, Mary had developed enough influence to persuade her father to stop the family's incessant relocating and to allow her to live near a friend and continue her studies.

The first clear indication of Wollstonecraft's social awareness came when her sister Eliza, suffering from what appeared to be postpartum breakdown compounded by spousal abuse, called on Mary for help. During this same period, Wollstonecraft met and began associating with Dr. Richard Price and others of "liberal persuasions."

Although Mary wrote pamphlets such as Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, children's books, contributions to works of morality — including Elements of Morality for the Use of Children and On the Importance of Religious Opinions — and played an integral role in the monthly periodical The Analytical Review, her liberal feminism was most powerfully expressed in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Her sense of justice is further evidenced by her involvement with A Vindication of the Rights of Men.

Upon discovering her lover's infidelity, Mary — described as a psychologically dependent woman — attempted suicide. After leaving that relationship, she traveled on a business trip with her child and a nurse. On her return, she discovered her lover involved with an actress and jumped from Putney Bridge in a second suicide attempt.

Mary Wollstonecraft eventually reconnected with a man from an earlier period of her life and married him. In August of 1797, she gave birth to her second child and died eleven days later of "childbed fever." Her final work, Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, was published posthumously.

Her Core Values and the Vindication

Mary Wollstonecraft's fundamental attitude toward women was captured in a statement from A Vindication of the Rights of Women:

"The neglected education of my fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore."

By every record and report, Wollstonecraft cared deeply about correcting the neglected education of her "fellow-creatures." Although she did not exclude men from this concern, she believed women to be repressed, owned like property, and denied any voice in society.

Chapters One Through Three: Rights, Duties, and Sexual Character

This paper reviews her treatise on the liberation of women's minds, rights, attitudes, and futures as expressed through her personal advocacy for education in A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

Chapter one opens with an effort to lead readers back to original principles "in search of the most simple truths." A recurring theme throughout Mary's work — and this chapter in particular — is her constant urging of women to challenge authority, question prejudices wherever encountered, and assert their right to speak, even when their questions were "formally contradicted, either by the words or conduct of men."

In this chapter, Mary challenges man's assumed dominion over all of creation — the societal assignment that exalts men above women, children, and all other creatures — and calls for happiness "by reason, virtue, and knowledge, that distinguishes the individual . . . equally undeniable, if mankind be view collectively."

With singularity of purpose, Mary moves from the general to the specific, accusing men of using intellect and reason to justify their prejudices against women. She boldly labels men who shrink from forming their own values without the pressure of gender peers as cowards. Chapter one ends with Mary examining why men degrade women — while excusing the few women fortunate enough to have received a "masculine education" — and asserting that men of genius achieve that status only because they began in a privileged social class to which women have never been permitted entrance.

Chapters two and three display a surprising completeness of thought for a woman writing in the late 1700s, a time when women were regarded as little more than vessels for childbearing and household labor. Wollstonecraft demonstrates both research and a working knowledge of the biological sciences when she observes that most great men live past forty-five — while women frequently died in childbirth or at young ages from the rigors of domestic life — yet these men waste the gift of longevity: "forgetful of the midnight hour," they "wasted the lamp of life," and "the soul is therefore disturbed, till it shook the constitution by the passions that meditation had raised."