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• MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT POSTERS
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Mary Wollstonecraft
“Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.”
The book Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in England in 1792. The author, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote that men were given more respect and power in society than women were, and that women were taught only to be concerned with their looks and with getting married. Wollstonecraft believed mothing would change until men and women received the same education. Vindication of the Rights of Woman caused a huge controversy in England – but this was nothing new for Mary Wollstonecraft.
Wollstonecraft was born in London, and her family moved all over England and Wales because of her father's financial troubles. She left home at 19 and became a governess, watching over and teaching young children. She also helped her sister found a school. Eventually, she met Richard Price, a radical preacher who helped her form her thoughts about how unfairly women were treated in English society. With his encouragement, she began to write pamplets and books.
Wollstonecraft became famous (and infamous) when Vindication of the Rights of Woman came out. The book was very important in England and around the world. Her ideas, including the view that women should be seen as equal to men, were revolutionary at he time. Because of Vindication, Wollstonecraft has been called the mother of the feminist movement. Not everyone was happy about her work, however; the writer Horace Walpole called her “a hyena in petticoats.” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote many other works, including two novels. She died after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who grew up to write Frankenstein.
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Mary Wollstonecraft
Pioneer of Women's Rights Poster Series
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Mary Wollstonecraft
“I earnestly wish to paint out in what true dignity and human happiness consists – I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength both of mind and body.”
English writer Mary Woostonecraft was most famous for her 1792 book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Its main theme, that women would be intellectually equal to men, was radical at the time and the book angered many people. Today it is considered one of the most important early feminist works. Wollstonecraft felt frustrated by the limited roles that were open to women in her day. She was acquainted with many intellectual leaders, including the writer Thomas Paine. Their views on individual rights and freedoms influenced her own writing. In Vindication, Wollstonecraft stressed the importance of education for women. She believed that education would allow women to be men's equals in society. Wollstonecraft wrote that there were “natural rights” that society was unfairly denying women. She wrote that women were treated as inferiors, much like children, rather than as intelligent adults. Wollstonecraft blamed society for valuing women's obedience, politeness, and physical beauty over virtues such as curiosity, logic, independence, and strength. She was a vocal critic of marriage as it existed in her day, saying that women were forced to marry because no other choices were open to them. Her ideas and the way she expressed them shocked many people. One man publicly called her a “hyena in petticoats”! Mary Wollstonecraft died in 1797 at age 38, following complications from the birth of her second daughter. That daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, grew up to write the famous novel Frankenstein.
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Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Author of a Vindication of The Rights of Woman, Giclee Print. Portrait by John Opie.
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Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, daughter of Mary Wollestonecraft & William Godwin
b. 8-30-1797; London
d. 2-1-1851; England
The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, also named Mary, became an English romantic/gothic novelist and the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. She was married to poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
This childhood portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was done by her parent's friend, William Blake.
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“Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.”
Mary Wollstonecraft
b. 4-27-1759; London
d. 9-10-1797
• MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT BOOKS
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft - In an era of revolutions demanding greater liberties for mankind (sic!!!), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an ardent feminist who spoke eloquently for countless women of her time.
Having witnessed firsthand the devastating results of male improvidence, she assumed an independent role early in life, education herself and eventally earning a living as a governess, teacher and writer. She was also an esteemed member of the radical intellectual circle that included William Godwin, father of her daughter, novelist Mary Godwin Shelley, and later her husband, Thomas Paine, William Blake, Henry Fuseli and others.
First published in 1792, A Vindicaton of the Rights of Woman created a scandal in its day, largely, perhaps, because of the unconventional lifestyle of its creator. Today, it is considered the first great manifesto of women's rights. arguing passionately for the education of women: “Tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavor to keep women in the dark, because the former want only slaves, and the latter a plaything.”
No narrow-mined zealot, Wollstonecraft balanced passionate advocacy with a sympathetic warmth–a characteristic that helped her ideas achieve widespread influence. Anyone interested in the history of the women’s rights movement will welcome this inexpensive edition of one the landmark documents in the struggle for human dignity, freedom and equality. (From the back cover.)
The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft - Once viewed solely in relation to the history of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft is now recognised as a writer of formidable talent across a range of genres, including journalism, letters and travel writing, and is increasingly understood as an heir to eighteenth-century literary and political traditions as well as a forebear of romanticism. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft is the first collected volume to address all aspects of Wollstonecraft's momentous and tragically brief career. The diverse and searching essays commissioned for this volume do justice to Wollstonecraft's pivotal importance in her own time and since, paying attention not only to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but also to the full range of her work across disciplinary boundaries separating philosophy, letters, education, advice, politics, history, religion, sexuality, and feminism itself. A chronology and bibliography offer further essential information for scholars and students of this remarkable writer.
The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, Janet Todd, Editor
Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination by Barbara Taylor - in the two centuries since Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she has become an icon of modern feminism: a stature that has paradoxically obscured her real historic significance. In the most in-depth study to date of Wollstonecraft's thought, Barbara Taylor develops an alternative reading of her as a writer steeped in the utopianism of Britain's radical Enlightenment. Wollstonecraft's feminist aspirations, Taylor shows, were part of a revolutionary programme for universal equality and moral perfection that reached its zenith during the political upheavals of the 1790s but had its roots in the radical-Protestant Enlightenment. Drawing on all of Wollstonecraft's works, and locating them in a vividly detailed account of her intellectual world and troubled personal history, Taylor provides a compelling portrait of this fascinating and profoundly influential thinker.
Mary Wollstonecraft: Mother of Women's Rights by Miriam Brody - Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the first champion of women's rights in the modern Western world. Drawing on her experiences as a paid companion, governess, and school teacher, Woolstonecraft rebelled against conventional notions of female education in her first work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Under the tutelage of her publisher and mentor Joseph Johnson, she joined a circle of liberal intellectuals that included poet and artist William Blake, chemist Joseph Priestly, and political thinker William Godwin.
In 1790 Wollstonecraft penned A Vindication fo the Rights of Men, an impassioned reply to conservative criticism of the French Revolution and a call for social equality. She developed her ideas further in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which extended the notion of natural rights to include women's rights as well as men's. Going so far as to suggest that women should be allowed to vote, Wollstonecraft's revolutionary ideas garnered her overnight fame – and notoriety. She traveled to Paris, lived through the Reign of Terror, fell in love with an American revolutionary, and gave birth to hir first daughter. Though the love affir ended badly, resulting in her thwarted suicide attempts, she happily wed William Godwin in 1797. That year she gave birth to her second child (Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein). Days later, she died from complications of childbirth.
Wollstonecraft's writing inspired leaders of the American woman suffrage movement, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and moved one admirer to call her a ‘pioneer of modern womanhood’.” (back cover) Young Adult reading level-
LINKS FOR LEARNING : MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
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