Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman

Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women 's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children 's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 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.
Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft 's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships, received more attention than her writing. After two ill-fated
Although the delivery seemed to go well initially, the placenta broke apart during the birth and became infected; puerperal fever was a common and often fatal occurrence in the eighteenth century. After several days of agony, Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia on 10 September. Godwin was devastated: he wrote to his friend Thomas Holcroft, "I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again." She was buried at Old Saint Pancras Churchyard, where her tombstone reads, "Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Born 27 April 1759: Died 10 September 1797." Her monument in the churchyard lies to the north-east of the church just north of Sir John Soane 's grave. Her husband was buried with her on his death in 1836. His second wife, Mary Jane Godwin is also buried
up until the last quarter-century Wollstonecraft 's life has been read much more closely than her writing". After the devastating effect of Godwin 's Memoirs, Wollstonecraft 's reputation lay in tatters for a century; she was pilloried by such writers as Maria Edgeworth, who patterned the "freakish" Harriet Freke in Belinda after her. Other novelists such as Mary Hays, Charlotte Turner Smith, Fanny Burney, and Jane West created similar figures, all to teach a "moral lesson" to their readers. Scholar Virginia Sapiro states that few read Wollstonecraft 's works during the nineteenth century as "her attackers implied or stated that no self-respecting woman would read her work". One of those few was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who read Rights of Woman at the age of 12, and whose poem Aurora Leigh reflected "Wollstonecraft 's unwavering focus on education". Another was Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister and activist against slavery who helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention, an influential women 's rights convention held in 1848. Another who read Wollstonecraft was George Eliot, a prolific writer of reviews, articles, novels, and translations. In 1855, she devoted an essay to the roles and rights of women, comparing Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller. Fuller was an American journalist, critic, and women 's right