Mary Wollstonecraft

She was not your feminist fairy godmother.

Buckle Up, Besties!

Today we’re headed to late eighteenth century London to meet Mary Wollstonecraft, a woman who spent her life getting paid to be difficult in print. She didn’t invent the notion that women deserve an education, rights, or a say in their own lives. Other women got there first, and we’ll give them their flowers later. What Wollstonecraft did was rarer: she got paid, under her own name, to argue for it in public, loudly, in the middle of a political firestorm. And, she made it stick long enough that nobody could fully erase it.

That’s the actual accomplishment. “Mother of Feminism” is a title built decades after her death by people who needed a founder more than they needed the complicated, class-blind, occasionally judgmental woman who actually existed. So let’s meet the woman instead of the statue.

The Myth vs. The Woman

Picture the version of Wollstonecraft you probably already have in your head: marble bust, serene expression, “mother of feminism” plaque underneath. She would have picked a fight with that plaque. The real Mary Wollstonecraft was mocked in print during her own lifetime as a “hyena in petticoats,” courtesy of Horace Walpole, who apparently had strong opinions about women who wrote political theory. She also has the distinction of being character assassinated by the person who loved her most: her husband, whose tell all memoir nearly buried her name for a century. We’ll get there. It’s a genuinely wild story, and it starts with a childhood that would have outright flattened most people.

Built from Genteel Poverty: A Woman With an Iron Will

Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in Spitalfields, London, the second of seven kids. Her family started out comfortable. Her paternal grandfather was a prosperous silk weaving master who left a solid inheritance behind him. Her father then spent that inheritance on a series of failed gentleman farming schemes across four different counties, dragging the family through repeated moves and downward mobility while becoming, by most accounts, a drunk and physically abusive man.

Here’s the part that stings: only her older brother Ned received a formal education and a direct inheritance. Mary was later pressured to hand over money that was legally hers.

That early role, the one who manages everyone else’s crisis while getting none of the resources, shows up again and again in her adult life. In 1784 she orchestrated a dramatic rescue of her sister Eliza, who was struggling in what was probably postpartum depression and an unhappy marriage, helping her flee into hiding and leaving Eliza’s infant behind. The baby died the following August. Biographies still debate her motives here. It’s not a clean, feel-good story, but this series doesn’t usually do those anyway.

The Door Myth

You’ve probably heard the story that teenage Mary slept on the landing outside her mother’s bedroom to physically block her father from getting to her at night. It’s a great, cinematic detail, and it shows up in basically every popular account of her life. It also comes entirely from her husband’s memoir, written after her death, not from any independent record. That doesn’t make it false. It makes it unverified, which is a distinction your teachers were right to care about.

Her formal schooling amounted to one day school in Yorkshire. Everything else, the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, Rousseau, she picked up herself, through mentors like Jane Arden and the Reverend Mr. Clare, and later through sheer professional necessity as a book reviewer. Historian Sylvana Tomaselli has pushed back on the tidy narrative that her feminism was simply trauma with footnotes, arguing that biography alone doesn’t explain her thought. She was responding to a live Enlightenment argument about reason, virtue, and who gets to have both, not just processing her childhood on the page.

In fact, by many accounts, Mrs. Wollstonecraft “was herself far from being an amiable woman; a petty tyrant and a stern but incompetent ruler of the household.” Mary was often treated as the scapegoat of the household and by all accounts were far from happiness. When she was sixteen and the family returned to London, Mary befriended Fanny Blood and when her mother died in 1780, Mary would live temporariy with the Bloods at Walham Green.

She Took Every Broke Job a Broke Genteel Woman Could Get

Before she was a famous writer, Wollstonecraft worked her way through basically the entire menu of “respectable” jobs available to a woman with no money and no husband. She was a paid companion to a wealthy widow in Bath, a role she later described with the enthusiasm of someone who had been mildly humiliated for a paycheck. She co-founded a girls’ school at Newington Green that introduced her to a circle of radical Dissenting thinkers, including the Reverend Richard Price and, crucially, the publisher Joseph Johnson. The school also collapsed under debt within two years, because nothing about this era of her life was easy.

She then took a job as a governess to the Kingsborough family in Ireland, where she clashed with Lady Kingsborough, resented the built in humiliation of the role, and got fired after about a year. One of her charges, Margaret King, later credited Wollstonecraft with freeing her mind “from all superstitions,” which is a genuinely great review from a teenager. King went on to study medicine in male disguise and eventually cared for Wollstonecraft’s own daughter, Mary Shelley, decades later in Italy. That’s the clearest case of Wollstonecraft directly, provably changing one specific woman’s life, and it’s worth sitting with, because most of her “influence” is a lot blurrier than that.

Along the way she was also writing. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters came out of the school years, and Mary: A Fiction and Original Stories from Real Life, the latter eventually illustrated by William Blake, came out of the governess years. None of these are the book people remember her for. All of them were her working out the arguments she’d later make famous.

The real pivot came when Joseph Johnson told her she could support herself by writing. She became a translator, reviewer, and editorial assistant for his Analytical Review, and she called herself “the first of a new genus.” Historians have since called her the first truly professional woman literary critic in Britain. She was proud of the independence and broke the whole time, dressing plainly and, according to biographers, drinking wine out of a teacup because she couldn’t afford a proper glass. Financial precarity followed her for the rest of her life, even after she became famous.

Worth flagging, in the spirit of not letting anyone’s origin story pretend to be a solo act: Wollstonecraft’s career happened because men with power let her in. Joseph employed her, published her, floated her advances, and introduced her to his circle of writers and artists. Richard Price connected her to a whole network of radical Dissenting thinkers. None of that undoes what she built. It does mean her path wasn’t purely self-made, and most women without her specific combination of literacy, city access, and the right connections could not have walked in, no matter how hard they hustled.

A Vindication of the Rights of Women and Mary’s Major Turning Point

In late 1791, Wollstonecraft sat down and wrote fast. She delivered A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to Joseph Johnson sheet by sheet as she finished it, and he printed it the same way. It came out in January 1792, dedicated, somewhat cheekily, to Talleyrand, and it argued something that should not have needed arguing: women are rational beings, and their apparent inferiority is manufactured by bad education and enforced dependence, not by nature.

Not Torched on Arrival

Here’s your myth bust for the week. The popular version of this story is that the book was scandalous and reviled the moment it hit shelves. It wasn’t. Historians R.M. Janes and Barbara Taylor have both documented that the initial reception was largely favorable. It sold out its first edition, went to a revised second edition within the year, and was translated into French and German almost immediately. The reputation destroying scandal came later, in 1798, and it wasn’t the book’s fault. More on that shortly.

Now, the receipts moment, because this series doesn’t do lone genius origin stories. Wollstonecraft did not invent the argument that women deserve rights and education. Mary Astell was making the case nearly a century earlier, asking pointedly, “if all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?” Catharine Macaulay’s writing on education directly shaped Wollstonecraft’s own thinking, and in France, Olympe de Gouges published a Declaration of the Rights of Woman the year before that arguably went further than Wollstonecraft did in demanding full political personhood. What made Wollstonecraft’s version land the way it did was synthesis and nerve: she took the “rights of man” language already circulating around the French Revolution and extended it to women, in a single sustained, widely translated, hard to ignore book. That’s a real achievement. It’s just not the same achievement as invention, and the difference matters.

Not everyone was a fan. The scholar Thomas Taylor published a satirical response titled A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, apparently under the impression that comparing women to animals was a devastating own. And then there was Walpole’s “hyena in petticoats” line, which has outlived basically everything else he ever wrote.

The Books You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of

Rights of Woman gets all the attention, but it wasn’t her only serious work, and honestly might not even be her best. A Vindication of the Rights of Men, published in 1790, was almost certainly the first published response to Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution, and it went after Burke’s gendered language head on, his idea that “beautiful” meant weak and feminine while “sublime” meant strong and masculine. Her 1794 history of the French Revolution, written while she was living through it in Paris, got praised by a contemporary reviewer for writing “not like an annalist, but like a philosopher,” and modern scholars rate it among her strongest work despite it being widely under-read today. Her 1796 travel memoir, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, was actually her most popular book during her own lifetime. Godwin later said that if any book was designed to make a man fall in love with its author, that was the one. He would know.

Every Good Hero Needs a Scandal

Wollstonecraft’s actual life after the Vindication was rough. She went to Paris in 1792 and lived through the Terror. She got involved with an American businessman named Gilbert Imlay, had a daughter with him, and was devastated when he grew distant and unfaithful. She attempted suicide twice in 1795. She eventually found real happiness with the philosopher William Godwin, whom she married in 1797 while pregnant, despite both of them having publicly criticized marriage as an institution. She died eleven days after giving birth to her second daughter, of an infection following childbirth. That daughter grew up to write Frankenstein.

Godwin, grieving and apparently allergic to discretion, published a memoir of her life in 1798 that documented all of it: the affairs, the illegitimate child, the suicide attempts, her religious skepticism. He meant it as an honest tribute. Conservative critics used it as a weapon. Richard Polwhele’s pamphlet The Unsex’d Females made her the poster child for everything supposedly wrong with politically outspoken women, and for decades her name functioned less as an argument and more as a warning label. Worth noting, since it’s more interesting than the simple version: recent scholarship suggests the memoir didn’t single handedly bury her the way the popular story goes. Her books stayed in circulating libraries, she kept getting read internationally, and the damage was more of a slow British respectability problem than a total disappearance.

The Contradiction

Here’s where we keep her human instead of turning her into a monument. Wollstonecraft preached independence while being emotionally wrecked by her dependence on Imlay. She attacked hierarchy and aristocratic idleness while her own national education plan quietly sorted poor children into domestic service after age nine. She used slavery as a metaphor for women’s condition constantly, by one scholarly count more than eighty times in the Vindication alone, while saying almost nothing about actual enslaved women. She could also be genuinely harsh toward other women, particularly ones she saw as vain, sexually indiscreet, or insufficiently rational. None of this cancels her arguments. It does mean the flawless feminist icon version of her is a sanitized one.

How Her Legacy is Still Earning Homework Assignments

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about Wollstonecraft’s actual lifetime impact: it was intellectual, not legal. No government adopted her education proposals. No laws changed because of her. Her school failed. What she left behind was a book, a reputation, and a handful of individual women she genuinely helped, most notably Margaret King.

The “mother of feminism” version of her got built later, first by suffragists who needed a respectable foremother and quietly downplayed the messier parts of her biography, then by second wave feminists rediscovering her in the 1970s. Millicent Fawcett wrote a centenary introduction to Rights of Woman in 1892. Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir both wrote about her decades after that. Each generation reached back, grabbed the parts of Wollstonecraft that were useful to their moment, and left the rest on the shelf. That title does honor her. It also erases Astell, Macaulay, and de Gouges, and flattens an eighteenth century political theorist into a single issue icon she never asked to be.

And her actual questions haven’t exactly been resolved. Equal access to education is legally recognized in plenty of places now, but resources and outcomes still aren’t equal. The wage gap and unpaid care work still preserve the kind of financial dependence she wrote about. Beauty as a form of social discipline didn’t go away, it just got a camera and an algorithm. And her observation that outspoken women get attacked through scandal and appearance rather than engagement with their actual ideas is, unfortunately, still an extremely current event. She didn’t solve any of this. She just correctly identified that it was a pattern worth naming, which turns out to be most of the job.

So, Why is She a Badass Worth a Deeper Dive?

Wollstonecraft is worth studying and not because she got everything right, but because she got the method right. When women look less capable, less confident less anything, her instinct was to ask what institution built that gap, not what’s wrong with women. She never fully applied that logic to class or race or the women she personally looked down on. That’s not a reason to cancel her. It’s the reason her work still has homework left for the rest of us, and honestly, over two hundred years later, we’re still doing it.