Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) British social theorist and feminist. Drawn into radical politics by the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft was part of a creative and intellectual circle that included her husband, the anarchist William Godwin. She died giving birth to her daughter, Mary, who later married the poet Shelley and wrote Frankenstein.
Wollstonecraft developed the first systematic feminist critique some 50 years before the emergence of the female suffrage movement. Her feminism, which was influenced by Lockian liberalism as well as by the democratic radicalism of Rousseau (even though she objected to his exclusion of women from citizenship), was characterized by a belief in reason and a radical humanist commitment to equality. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) she criticized the structures and practices of British government from the standpoint of what she called the ‘rights of humanity’. Her best known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women ([1792] 1967), emphasized the equal rights of women on the basis of the notion of ‘personhood’. She claimed that the ‘distinction of sex’ would become unimportant in political and social life as women gained access to education and were regarded as rational creatures in their own right. However, Wollstonecraft’s work did not merely stress civil and political rights but also developed a more complex analysis of women as the objects and subjects of desire, and also presented the domestic sphere as a model of community and social order.
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