Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication

Mary Wollstonecraft may perhaps be best known to some as being the mother of the author of Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and one might well argue that her daughter could not have written that novel were it not for her mother in more ways than one. For in addition to giving birth to one of the first successful female novelists, Mary Wollstonecraft also plays a significant part in the birth of women’s rights and feminism. Although modern day feminism diverges from Wollstonecraft’s when it comes to some of the particulars about the duties of women in society, that conservative strain is merely an ideological subtext.

Mary Wollstonecraft was a leading social critic of her time, and not just a leading female social critic. Ironically, she may very well have been held in higher esteem by the men of her day than the women. The list of Wollstonecraft’s ardent male admirers reads like a who’s who of literary legends: Thomas Paine, William Wordsworth, William Blake, etc. On the other hand, the argument could be made that Wollstonecraft’s feminist theories were more palatable to men than to women since they did contain certain assumptions of a woman’s place that may very well have resonated better with men than women.