Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Alicia on Women Writing: Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (Alicia Shupe)



Painting by John Opie c. 1797

Born April 27, 1759 to Edward John Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Dixon, Mary was the second of seven children. Mary’s father was a violent man who bullied and abused both herself and her mother. Mary began to earn her own living at nineteen years old, and worked as a lady’s companion in Bath. When her mother’s health began to fail, Mary returned home to nurse her, and after her death, she lived with her good friend Fanny Blood’s family. In 1783, Mary helped her sister Eliza escape from an unhappy marriage by hiding her sister until a legal separation could be obtained. After which, the sisters, along with Mary’s friend Fanny, established a school in Newington Green. Mary’s experiences as a schoolteacher would eventually be drawn upon to write Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (1787).

In 1787-88, Wollstonecraft began working in London as a literary translator for Joseph Johnson, who had published Thoughts. Johnson was a publisher of “radical” texts, and it was in his employ that she began writing and publishing her own radical intellectual works concerning the treatment and education of women. Her novel, Mary, A Fiction was published in 1788 and is still considered one of her most radical texts. In it, she considers marriage as a patriarchal institution which diminishes rather than enriches the women who participate in it.

In accordance with her gender and station in life as a child, Mary did not receive an extensive formal education, however, her time spent as a literary translator and reviewer coupled with her own curiosity helped to introduce her to a world of authors, including Leibniz (plato.stanford.edu). Wollstonecraft contributed to Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review both as a reviewer and as an editorial assistant. It was in the course of this work that in 1789 she reviewed a speech given by her friend Richard Price to the Revolution Society. His speech was later attacked by Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France, and those attacks prompted Wollstonecraft to take up her pen in Price’s defense in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). The publication of Vindication marked the beginning of Wollstonecraft’s career as a political writer, and in 1791 she began writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects.

To date, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman remains Wollstonecraft’s most famous and influential work. In it, she critiques the notions of women as helpless and argues for equality of the sexes. Wollstonecraft noted that women were often allowed to become silly and foolish and that this plight could be remedied if they were allowed an education equal to that of the men. “Education held the key to achieving a sense of self-respect and anew self-image that would enable women to put their capacities to good use” instead of becoming frustrated by their marital captivity and becoming tyrants to their children and servants (historyguide.org).

In 1792, Wollstonecraft met Gilbert Imlay, an American merchant and author, in France. The two began a romantic relationship the result of which was the birth of Mary’s daughter, Fanny, who was named for her friend Fanny Blood, in 1794. However, Mary and Gilbert were never married and the relationship was a miserable one which eventually ended in Imlay rejecting Wollstonecraft completely. In 1795, one year after Fanny’s birth, Mary attempted suicide twice due to her chronic unhappiness, but it was spring of 1796 before she and Imlay ended their relationship for good. Later that summer, Wollstonecraft met William Godwin whom she would marry in 1797. Godwin was the father of Mary’s second and most famous daughter, author Mary Shelley. Shelley was born August 30th 1797, however, Wollstonecraft suffered complications and died ten days later.

Wollstonecraft was a true feminist radical in her time, and the arguments of her Vindication would later set the doctrine for the women’s rights movement with the work returning to prominence during the second wave of the feminist movement in 1960s and 1970s (thefamouspeople.com).



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