Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Reviewer

Abstract

Mary Wollstonecraft was not born a feminist. However much she may have chafed under the tyranny of men, she kept silence until she had served her apprenticeship as a writer. In 1786, while she was teaching school at Newington Green, she wrote Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, a collection of innocuous platitudes which any maiden schoolmistress then might have approved; in 1787, while serving as governess in an Irish family, she wrote Mary, a semi-autobiographical novel of sensibility about a virtuous and long-suffering heroine.1 Then in 1790, at the age of 31, she emerged suddenly as a second Mrs. Macaulay, a female champion of human emancipation, when she published her Vindication of the Rights of Men in answer to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. And early in 1792 she eclipsed even Mrs. Macaulay by urging, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that her own sex be included in the general emancipation. She who had been an obscure schoolma'am dabbling in fiction became for many of her contemporaries the symbol of women's potentialities—and for others, a shameless vixen.