Wollstonecraft, Mary
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–97)Self-educated writer and social theorist. She worked as a governess and a school teacher and spent much time in France. She produced an early manifesto on human rights and the French Revolution and then the strikingly original and influential Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In this book she argued against ideas of the natural inequality of the sexes and held that women were just as capable of the exercise of reason as were men. Her book became a leading text in feminist thought. She lived with the radical William Godwin from 1796, marrying him when she became pregnant. She died shortly after childbirth. Their daughter, Mary Shelley, was the author of the novel Frankenstein (1818).
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