Front Page Authors (by Period) Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft

1759 - 1797

About the Author

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an English author who rose to prominence in radical circles with a very quick response to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) in which she defended the idea of natural rights. She extended her analysis two years later to defend the idea of equal rights for women in one of the founding texts of modern feminism - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft lived in France during the Revolution and wrote an early history of that event. She also wrote travel letters and novels. In 1797 she married the radical political philosopher William Godwin. Her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Mary Shelley, wrote the novel Frankenstein (1818).

In The Library:

• author: The Best of the OLL No. 33: Mary Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792) (2013)
• author: An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect it Has Produced in Europe (1795)
• author: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
• author: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792)

Quotations:

• Mary Wollstonecraft believes that women are no more naturally subservient than men and nobody, male or female, values freedom unless they have had to struggle to attain it (1792) (10 October, 2005)
• Mary Wollstonecraft likens the situation of soldiers under a tyrant king to women under a tyrant husband (1792) (14 May, 2013)
• Mary Wollstonecraft’s “I have a dream” speech from 1792 (14 May, 2013)