Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was born on April 27, 1759, in London. She was a writer, philosopher, and advocate for women's rights. Her unconventional personal life received more attention than her writing. She is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences. Her writing career was brief, but during that time she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Her most famous book is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason. She had two affairs in her life, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay, who was the father of her daughter Fanny Imlay. She later married William Godwin, a philosopher and one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement. When she died in 1797, her widower published her memoir, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which was scandalous at the time and damaging to her reputation. In the twentieth century, with the emergence of the feminist movement, her advocacy of women’s equality was brought to the limelight, and she began to receive the recognition denied to her previously. She died at the age of 38, 11 days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who would become an accomplished writer herself and the author of Frankenstein.

Portrait of Mary by John Opie, c. 1797

Sources: https://www.bbc.co.uk/.../mary-wollstonecraft.../zkpk382

https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/authors/mary-wollstonecraft

https://books.google.com.eg/books?id=DvbMCwAAQBAJ&pg=PR14...