Mary Wollstonecraft: the firebrand feminist thinker with a rule-breaking life
Hailed as the “foremother of feminism”, Mary Wollstonecraft shook up 18th-century Britain with her barnstorming treatises on equality and women’s fundamental rights. And the thinker’s life was just as sensational and rule-breaking as her writing. Ellie Cawthorne speaks to biographer Bee Rowlatt to uncover her story
Who was Mary Wollstonecraft?
Mary Wollstonecraft was a firebrand thinker of the late 18th century, whose writing proposed radical ideas about equality for all, and the fundamental rights of women.
“Mary Wollstonecraft has a really significant philosophical legacy,” says Bee Rowlatt, author of In Search of Mary: The Mother of all Journeys, who spoke about Wollstonecraft on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. “Running alongside that, she also led an insane blockbuster life.”
That life took Wollstonecraft from humble beginnings to the heart of Enlightenment Europe, via a front row seat for the French Revolution, a treasure hunt for stolen silver along the Norwegian coast, and several personal scandals.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s early life
Born in 1759 in Spitalfields, London, as the second of seven children, Wollstonecraft did not have the most promising of beginnings. Her family was sliding rapidly down the social scale, as her father quickly squandered the wealth he had inherited.
Later, Wollstonecraft recalled how he would turn violent after drinking and did not believe in educating girls. “Instead, she was expected to be quiet, sit still and shut up,” says Rowlatt. “Eventually all that injustice bubbled up inside her. And as soon as she started writing it just burst out; she went off like a blender with the lid off.”
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In order to escape her oppressive home life, Wollstonecraft began working as a lady’s companion and governess, forging connections with several intellectual families. Through these relationships, she gained access to the latest reading material of the day and was introduced to ideas that expanded her intellectual horizons and fuelled a desire to become a writer.
She was “a great absorber of current language, and a raw, self-educated genius,” says Rowlatt.
After her stint as a governess and companion, Wollstonecraft fell in with a set of radical thinkers and writers based in Newington Green, London. From publishers and pamphleteers to writers and philosophers, these were people questioning the social and political status quo and explored revolutionary ideals – and they inspired Wollstonecraft to do the same.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s major works
In 1790, Wollstonecraft published her first major work, a pamphlet titled A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Penned in response to an attack on the French Revolution by philosopher Edmund Burke, her arguments cemented her reputation as a noteworthy Enlightenment thinker.
Wollstonecraft followed this up in 1792 with her most influential treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which passionately and brilliantly argued that girls should receive the same education as boys, and called for the empowerment of women in society and politics.
Beyond her intellectual and literary contacts, Wollstonecraft wanted to live out her revolutionary ideals through romantic connections.
“According to legend, she proposed a menage-a-trois with the painter Henry Fuseli and his wife, but the relevant letters were sadly destroyed, so we’ll never really know the truth about what happened there,” says Rowlatt.
“She was prone to fall massively in love with people – men and women. But she was intense, possessive, and probably borderline intolerable. Imagine receiving a hundred text messages in caps lock from the person you’re dating – that’s what a relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft would have been like.”
Mary Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution
In 1792, Wollstonecraft – who vehemently believed in the ideals of the French Revolution – travelled to Paris to get a front row seat to this pivotal event in radical history.
She was warned by friends that her plan was too dangerous; the French king Louis XVI would be executed on the guillotine a month after she arrived. “Wollstonecraft rocked up in Paris the week that William Wordsworth left because it was getting too scary for him,” says Rowlatt. “Fear was not a problem for Wollstonecraft: she was utterly fearless. In Paris, she really was in the thick of it.”
Despite her unquestionable courage and revolutionary fervour, Wollstonecraft’s life in France quickly became a nightmare. She recalled how “death and misery, in every shape of terror, haunts this devoted country”.
When several associates from the Girondin faction were executed by the more extreme and violent Jacobins, she feared her own arrest might follow. Rowlatt says: “Her entire political history, legacy and network was bound up in the ideals of the revolution, so it was hard for her when she witnessed the Reign of Terror.”
The chastening experience wasn’t just political, either. Wollstonecraft embarked on a passionate affair with an American diplomat and businessman named Gilbert Imlay, and became pregnant.
Shortly after she gave birth, however, Imlay left her for another woman and returned to London. Alone, penniless and unmarried with a newborn baby, Wollstonecraft was left to fend for herself through the coldest winter that Paris had seen in 100 years.
A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
Her first major foray into print, Wollstonecraft wrote this pamphlet in defence of her mentor Richard Price, after he had become embroiled in a debate over the values of the French Revolution. Driven by the principles of the Enlightenment, it was a full-bodied argument in favour of republicanism.
“You can read it as a blueprint for human rights, fully inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution,” says Rowlatt. “It was written in a white-hot fury. Wollstonecraft actually lost her nerve halfway through writing it, but she was spurred back into action by her publisher Joseph Johnson.
“The result really marked her arrival on the scene as a writer and political thinker.”
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
With its demand for “justice for one half of the human race,” Wollstonecraft’s groundbreaking treatise is widely seen as a seminal text in the history of feminism. In it, she argues that women too are human beings, capable of reason, and rational thought.
“That may seem like a very basic point, but that was the level of debate at the time,” explains Rowlatt. “Women were like a kettle or a chair. They were simply objects with no rights whatsoever, and any independent status they had would be lost at marriage.”
Wollstonecraft follows up her assertion of women’s agency by arguing that they should therefore be educated, as Rowlatt explains: “Her entire body of work is predicated on the significance of education as a transformative power.”
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)
Recounting Wollstonecraft’s time in Scandinavia searching for stolen treasure on behalf of her former lover Gilbert Imlay, this was one of her most popular books. “It's structured as a series of letters addressed to Imlay, although she never mentions him or the true purpose of the trip,” says Rowlatt.
“What emerges is a unique combination of travelogue and economic/political treatise on everything she sees on her trip. She's fantastically rude, and doesn't hold back. She jumps onto boats and into horse carriages, mixing with everybody, talking her way into people’s homes, and hijacking ships that aren't meant for passengers, all with a baby in tow.”
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian treasure hunt
In 1795, she returned to London to seek out the father of her child, but Imlay’s continued rejections plunged Wollstonecraft into despair and led her to attempt suicide.
She survived and in a final desperate hope of winning her former lover’s favour once again, she agreed to undertake a mission on his behalf.
This mission was to locate a missing shipment of silver that Imlay had smuggled out of revolutionary France. Wollstonecraft headed out on a treasure hunt up the coast of Norway, taking her daughter Fanny with her. While she never located Imlay’s lost silver, or won him back, the letters written to Imlay during her journey would be published as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
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Once back home, Wollstonecraft attempted suicide for a second time by jumping into the Thames. Two strangers rescued her from the waters.
After finally accepting her affair with Imlay was over, Wollstonecraft returned to her literary London life. By 1796, a romantic relationship was developing with the radical writer and philosopher William Godwin.
“In Godwin, she finally found a partnership of equals,” says Rowlatt. “He was a huge admirer of her intellect, supported and understood her, and even wrote great tracts about her.”
Before long, the relationship posed an intellectual problem for the pair of radical thinkers. Godwin had previously argued publicly for the abolition of marriage. Yet when Wollstonecraft became pregnant, according to Rowlatt, the couple suffered “a dip in confidence in their ‘experiment in living’, as Virginia Woolf called it. They wanted to legitimise their child, so she gave in and married him.”
The marriage caused further controversy by exposing that Wollstonecraft had never been married to the father of her first child – a fact which saw her condemned in some quarters. Nevertheless, the couple were happy together.
How did Mary Wollstonecraft die?
On 30 August 1797, Wollstonecraft gave birth to her second child – a daughter by William Godwin. But quickly after the birth, she began to grow ill. It’s thought that she contracted sepsis, caused by a retained placenta.
Eleven agonising days later, on 10 September 1797, Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38.
Her daughter survived and would follow in Wollstonecraft’s footsteps to become another world-renowned writer: Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s reputation and Godwin’s memoirs
Following her death, a grieving Godwin wrote the first biography of Wollstonecraft. But this attempt to cement his wife’s legacy dramatically backfired.
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Readers of his frank and uncensored account of Wollstonecraft’s convention-breaking life were horrified to learn of a stream of scandals: unchaperoned travel, childbirth out of wedlock and suicide attempts.
“Godwin’s memoir unleashed a torrent of abuse,” says Rowlatt. “It went on for years, annihilating her as a credible presence in the political pantheon. Instead, she was associated with disgust and disgrace.”
How should be remember Mary Wollstonecraft today?
In the centuries since her death and Godwin’s misjudged biography, Wollstonecraft’s legacy has been re-evaluated. Her writings on equality continue to inspire activists across the globe, while her impassioned arguments on women’s rights have been repeated over and over by those who have hailed her as the ‘foremother of feminism’.
“Although she’s not as well-known as she should be, Mary Wollstonecraft is a massively significant historical figure,” says Rowlatt. “She's one of the key Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century, and an early architect of what we now call human rights. Wollstonecraft was very much the leading thinker in the ideology of western feminism and was the first person in the English language to call for gender equality.”
Bee Rowlatt (@BeeRowlatt) is a writer and cultural events programmer, and author of In Search of Mary (Alma Books, 2015). ). She is also chair of the human rights charity, the Wollstonecraft Society. (@TheWollSoc) She was speaking to Ellie Cawthorne on the HistoryExtra podcast.
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Ellie Cawthorne is HistoryExtra’s podcast editor. She also contributes to BBC History Magazine, runs the podcast newsletter and hosts several live and virtual BBC History Magazine events.
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