Mary Wollstonecrafts Life of Thirty-Eight Years

Dates:  April  27, 1759 -  September 10, 1797 Known for: Mary Wollstonecrafts  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman  is one of the most important documents in the history of womens rights and feminism. The author  herself lived an often-troubled personal life, and her early death of childbed fever cut short her evolving ideas. Her second daughter,  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, was Percy Shelleys second wife and author of the book,  Frankenstein. The Power of Experience Mary Wollstonecraft believed that ones life experiences had a crucial impact on ones possibilities and character.  Her own life illustrates this power of experience. Commentators on Mary Wollstonecrafts ideas from her own time until now have looked at the ways in which her own experience influenced her ideas. She handled her own examination of this influence on her own work mostly through fiction and indirect reference. Both those who agreed with Mary Wollstonecraft and detractors have pointed to her up-and-down personal life to explain much about her proposals for womens equality, womens education, and human possibility. For instance, in 1947, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, Freudian psychiatrists, said this about Mary Wollstonecraft: Mary Wollstonecraft hated men. She had every personal reason possible known to psychiatry for hating them. Hers was hatred of creatures she greatly admired and feared, creatures that seemed to her capable of doing everything while women to her seemed capable of doing nothing whatever, in their own nature being pitifully weak in comparison with the strong, lordly male. This analysis follows a sweeping statement saying that Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (these authors also mistakenly substitute Women for Woman in the title) proposes in general, that women should behave as nearly as possible like men. Im not sure how one could make such a statement after actually reading A Vindication, but it leads to their conclusion that Mary Wollstonecraft was an extreme neurotic of a compulsive type... Out of her illness arose the ideology of feminism... [See the Lundberg/Farnham essay reprinted in Carol H. Postons Norton Critical Edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman pp. 273-276.) What were those personal reasons for Mary Wollstonecrafts ideas that her detractors and defenders alike could point to? Mary Wollstonecrafts Early Life Mary Wollstonecraft was born on April 27, 1759. Her father had inherited wealth from his father but spent the entire fortune. He drank heavily and apparently was abusive verbally and perhaps physically. He failed in his many attempts at farming, and when Mary was fifteen, the family moved to Hoxton, a suburb of London. Here Mary met Fanny Blood, to become perhaps her closest friend. The family moved to Wales and then back to London as Edward Wollstonecraft tried to make a living. At nineteen, Mary Wollstonecraft took a position that was one of the few available to middle class educated women: a companion to an older woman. She traveled in England with her charge, Mrs. Dawson, but two years later returned home to attend her mother who was dying. Two years after Marys return, her mother died and her father remarried and moved to Wales. Marys sister Eliza married, and Mary moved in with her friend Fanny Blood and her family, helping to support the family through her needlework -- another of the few routes open to women for economic self-support. Eliza gave birth within another year, and her husband, Meridith Bishop, wrote to Mary and asked that she return to nurse her sister whose mental condition had deteriorated seriously. Marys theory was that Elizas condition was the result of her husbands treatment of her, and Mary helped Eliza leave her husband and arrange a legal separation. Under the laws of the time, Eliza had to leave her young son with his father, and the son died before his first birthday. Mary Wollstonecraft, her sister Eliza Bishop, her friend Fanny Blood and later Marys and Elizas sister Everina turned to another possible means of financial support for themselves and opened a school in Newington Green. It is in Newington Green that Mary Wollstonecraft first met the clergyman Richard Price whose friendship led to meeting many of the liberals among Englands intellectuals. Fanny decided to marry, and, pregnant soon after the marriage, called Mary to be with her in Lisbon for the birth. Fanny and her baby died soon after the premature birth. When Mary Wollstonecraft returned to England, she closed the financially-struggling school and wrote her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. She then took a position in yet another respectable profession for women of her background and circumstances: governess. After a year of traveling in Ireland and England with the family of her employer, Viscount Kingsborough, Mary was fired by Lady Kingsborough for becoming too close to her charges. And so Mary Wollstonecraft decided that her means of support had to be her writing, and she returned to London in 1787. Mary Wollstonecraft Takes Up Writing From the circle of English intellectuals to whom shed been introduced through Rev. Price, Mary Wollstonecraft had met Joseph Johnson, a leading publisher of the liberal ideas of England. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote and published a novel,  Mary, a Fiction, which was a thinly-disguised novel drawing heavily on her own life. Just before shed written  Mary, a Fiction, shed written to her sister about reading Rousseau, and her admiration for his attempt to portray in fiction the ideas which he believed. Clearly,  Mary, a Fiction  was in part her answer to Rousseau, an attempt to portray the way that a womans limited options and the serious oppression of a woman by circumstances in her life, led her to a bad end. Mary Wollstonecraft also published a childrens book,  Original Stories from Real Life,  again integrating fiction and reality creatively. To further her goal of financial self-sufficiency, she also took on translation and published a translation from French of a book by Jacques Necker. Joseph Johnson recruited Mary Wollstonecraft to write reviews and articles for his journal,  Analytical Review. As part of Johnsons and Prices circles, she met and interacted with many of the great thinkers of the time. Their admiration for the French Revolution was a frequent topic of their discussions. Liberty in the Air Certainly, this was a period of exhilaration for Mary Wollstonecraft. Accepted into circles of intellectuals, beginning to make her living with her own efforts, and expanding her own education through reading and discussion, she had achieved a position in sharp contrast to that of her mother, sister, and friend Fanny. The hopefulness of the liberal circle about the French Revolution and its potentials for liberty and human fulfillment plus her own more secure life are reflected in Wollstonecrafts energy and enthusiasm. In 1791, in London, Mary Wollstonecraft attended a dinner for Thomas Paine hosted by Joseph Johnson. Paine, whose recent  The Rights of Man  had defended the French Revolution, was among the writers Johnson published -- others included Priestley, Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth. At this dinner, she met another of the writers for Johnsons  Analytical Review,  William Godwin. His recollection was that the two of them -- Godwin and Wollstonecraft -- immediately took a dislike to each other, and their loud and angry argument over dinner made it nearly impossible for the better-known guests to even attempt conversation. The Rights of Men When Edmund Burke wrote his response to Paines  The Rights of Man, his  Reflections on the Revolution in France, Mary Wollstonecraft published her response,  A Vindication of the Rights of Men. As was common for women writers and with anti-revolutionary sentiment quite volatile in England, she published it anonymously at first, adding her name in 1791 to the second edition. In  A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft takes exception to one of Burkes points: that chivalry by the more powerful makes unnecessary rights for the less powerful. Illustrating her own argument are examples of the lack of chivalry, not only in practice but embedded in English law. Chivalry was not, for Mary or for many women, their experience of how more powerful men acted towards women. Vindication of the Rights of Woman Later in 1791, Mary Wollstonecraft published  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,  further exploring issues  of womens education, womens equality, womens status, womens rights and the role of public/private, political/domestic life. Off to Paris After correcting her first edition of the  Vindication of the Rights of Woman  and issuing a second, Wollstonecraft decided to go directly to Paris to see for herself what the French Revolution was evolving towards. Mary Wollstonecraft in France Mary Wollstonecraft arrived in France alone but soon met Gilbert Imlay, an American adventurer. Mary Wollstonecraft, like many of the foreign visitors in France, realized quickly that the Revolution was creating danger and chaos for everyone, and moved with Imlay to a house in the suburbs of Paris. A few months later, when she returned to Paris, she registered at the American Embassy as Imlays wife, though they never actually married. As the wife of an American citizen, Mary Wollstonecraft would be under the protection of the Americans. Pregnant with Imlays child, Wollstonecraft began to realize that Imlays commitment to her was not as strong as she had expected. She followed him to Le Havre and then, after the birth of their daughter, Fanny, followed him to Paris. He returned almost immediately to London, leaving Fanny and Mary alone in Paris. Reaction to the French Revolution Allied with the Girondists of France, she watched in horror as these allies were guillotined. Thomas Paine was imprisoned in France, whose Revolution he had so nobly defended. Writing through this time, Mary Wollstonecraft then published  Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, documenting her awareness that the revolutions grand hope for human equality was not being fully actualized. Back to England, Off to Sweden Mary Wollstonecraft finally returned to London with her daughter, and there for the first time attempted suicide over her despondency over Imlays inconsistent commitment. Imlay rescued Mary Wollstonecraft from her suicide attempt, and, a few months later, sent her on an important and sensitive business venture to Scandinavia. Mary, Fanny, and her daughters nurse Marguerite traveled through Scandinavia, attempting to track down a ships captain who had apparently absconded with a fortune that was to be traded in Sweden for goods to import past the English blockade of France. She had with her a letter -- with little precedent in the context of 18th century womens status -- giving her legal power of attorney to represent Imlay in attempting to resolve his difficulty with his business partner and with the missing captain. During her time in Scandinavia as she attempted to track down the people involved with the missing gold and silver, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote letters of her observations of the culture and people she met as well as of the natural world. She returned from her trip, and in London discovered that Imlay was living with an actress. She attempted another suicide and was again rescued. Her letters written from her trip, full of emotion as well as passionate political fervor, were published a year after her return, as  Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Done with Imlay, Mary Wollstonecraft took up writing again, renewed her involvement in the circle of English Jacobins, defenders of the Revolution, and decided to renew one particular old and brief acquaintance. William Godwin: an Unconventional Relationship Having lived with and borne a child to Gilbert Imlay, and having decided to make her living in what was considered a mans profession, Mary Wollstonecraft had learned not to obey convention. So in 1796, she decided, against all social convention, to call upon William Godwin, her fellow  Analytical Review  writer and dinner-party-antagonist, at his home, on  April 14, 1796. Godwin had read her  Letters from Sweden,  and from that book had gained a different perspective on Marys thought. Where hed formerly found her too rational and distant and critical, he now found her emotionally deep and sensitive. His own natural optimism, which had reacted against her seemingly-natural pessimism, found a different Mary Wollstonecraft in the  Letters  -- in their appreciation of nature, their keen insights into a different culture, their exposition of the character of the people shed met. If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book, Godwin wrote later. Their friendship deepened quickly into a love affair, and by August they were lovers. Marriage By next March, Godwin and Wollstonecraft faced a dilemma. Theyd both written and spoken in principle against the idea of marriage, which was at that time a legal institution in which women lost legal existence, subsumed legally in their husbands identity. Marriage as a legal institution was far from their ideals of loving companionship. But Mary was pregnant with Godwins child, and so on March 29, 1797, they married. Their daughter, named  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was born on August 30 -- and on September 10, Mary Wollstonecraft died of septicemia -- blood poisoning known as childbed fever. After Her Death Mary Wollstonecrafts last year with Godwin had, however, not been spent in domestic activities alone -- they had, in fact, maintained separate residences so that both could continue their writing. Godwin published in January 1798, several of Marys works that shed been working on before her unexpected death. He published a volume  The Posthumous Works  along with his own  Memoirs  of Mary. Unconventional to the end, Godwin in his  Memoirs  was brutally honest about the circumstances of Marys life -- her love affair with and betrayal by Imlay, her daughter Fannys illegitimate birth, her suicide attempts in her despondency over Imlays unfaithfulness and failure to live up to her ideals of commitment. These details of Wollstonecrafts life, in the cultural reaction to the French Revolutions failure, resulted in her near-neglect by thinkers and writers for decades, and scathing reviews of her work by others. Mary Wollstonecrafts death itself was used to disprove claims of womens equality. Rev. Polwhele, who attacked Mary Wollstonecraft and other women authors, wrote that she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are liable. And yet, such susceptibility to death in childbirth was not something Mary Wollstonecraft had been unaware of, in writing her novels and political analysis. In fact, her friend Fannys early death, her mothers and her sisters precarious positions as wives to abusive husbands, and her own troubles with Imlays treatment of her and their daughter, she was quite aware of such distinction -- and based her arguments for equality in part on the need to transcend and do away with such inequities. Mary Wollstonecrafts final novel  Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman,  published by Godwin after her death, is a new attempt to explain her ideas about the unsatisfactory position of women in contemporary society, and therefore justify her ideas for reform. As Mary Wollstonecraft had written in 1783, just after her novel  Mary  was published, she herself recognized that it is a tale, to illustrate an opinion of mine, that a genius will educate itself. The two novels and Marys life illustrate that circumstances will limit the opportunities for expression -- but that genius will work to educate itself. The ending is not necessarily going to be happy because the limitations that society and nature place on human development may be too strong to overcome all attempts at self-fulfillment -- yet the self has incredible power to work to overcome those limits. What more could be achieved if such limits were reduced or removed! Experience and Life Mary Wollstonecrafts life was filled with both depths of unhappiness and struggle, and peaks of achievement and happiness. From her early exposure to abuse of women and the dangerous possibilities of marriage and childbirth to her later blossoming as an accepted intellect and thinker, then her sense of being betrayed by both Imlay and the French Revolution followed by her association in a happy, productive and relationship with Godwin, and finally by her sudden and tragic death, Mary Wollstonecrafts experience and her work were intimately tied together, and illustrate her own conviction that experience cannot be neglected in philosophy and literature. Mary Wollstonecrafts exploration -- cut short by her death -- of the integration of sense and reason, imagination and thought -- looks toward 19th century thought, and was part of the movement from Enlightenment to Romanticism. Mary Wollstonecrafts ideas on public versus private life, politics and domestic spheres, and men and women were, though too often neglected, nevertheless important influences on the thought and development of philosophy and political ideas that resonate even today. More About Mary Wollstonecraft Mary Wollstonecraft Quotations  - key quotations from Mary Wollstonecrafts workJudith Sargent Murray  - a contemporary feminist, from AmericaOlympe de Gouges  - a contemporary feminist, from FranceMary Wollstonecraft Shelley  - Mary Wollstonecrafts daughter, author of  Frankenstein