Mary Wollstonecraft

today is the birthday of Mary Shelley (1797). she was a novelist, most famous for Frankenstein.

this reminds me, though, of Mary Wollstonecraft, her mother. i wrote a paper in grad school on Mary Wollstonecraft, considering her one of the first female sociologists. in 1792 she wrote Vindication on the Rights of Woman, advocating equality of the sexes. in 1792! it was written after the French Revolution, a response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution in France (1790). excerpts from my paper to give you an idea of who she was:

Wollstonecraft saw that not much was changing for women or the poor at the time of the Revolution, and she noticed that the majority of men seemed to think as Burke did. Burke saw inequality as the natural state of things, while Wollstonecraft said that “the present unequal distribution of wealth and...property in one small group of the population is corruptive of all strata of society and therefore inhibits improvement.”

To Wollstonecraft, there are no intrinsic differences between men and women ... The only differences between the two sexes are the lack of education of women, which is purposefully done by the men to keep them inferior. If women had the same educational opportunities as men had, then women could achieve men’s “intellectual and spiritual accomplishments.”

Mary took notice of ideology drowning women in domains such as sex and sexuality, marriage, social position, and society in general.

she married William Godwin in 1797, and died 11 days after giving birth to daughter Mary.