Britain's First "Feminist:" Mary Wollstonecraft

To some, she may only be vaguely remembered as the mother of Mary Shelley, but in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century she was considered somewhat of a radical feminist. This was in part due to her gender-shattering essay, Vindication of the Rights of Woman. There are some critics who claim that she may have been the first woman in Britain, since Boadicea to proclaim the equality for women. She stated: "The foundation of morality in all human beings, male or female, is their common possession of the faculty of reason, Wollstonecraft argued, and women must claim their equality by accepting its unemotional dictates. Excessive concern for romantic love and physical desirability, she believed, are not the natural conditions of female existence but rather the socially-imposed means by which male domination enslaves them" (Kemmerling 2).

"Published in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was the first great feminist treatise. Wollstonecraft preached that intellect will always govern and sought "to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonimous [sic] with epithets of weakness" (Anon 1).