Mary Wollstonecraft on sensibility, women's rights, and patriarchal power

Abstract

One of the results of the resurgence in feminist scholarship over the past twenty-five years has been the inclusion of Mary Wollstonecraft in the ranks of early modern political theorists. The “rediscovery” of Wollstonecraft focused attention on both her life and her writings. It was not surprising that feminists interested in politics and political theory found Wollstonecraft's life a source of inspiration. In an age when female writers were rare and a challenge to “the traditional male monopoly of literacy, learning, and publication,” Wollstonecraft was one of the few women of her day who supported herself by her writing. She was a versatile writer, author not only of her famous A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), but also of a book on female education, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787); the novels Mary (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798); An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794); and a book of observations on nature and culture, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). She supported the French Revolution, and then traveled to France to witness its aftermath for herself. While in France she had an unhappy love affair and bore a child out of wedlock. In 1796 she became pregnant by the English philosopher and anarchist William Godwin, whom she then married. She died eleven days after giving birth in August 1797.