Who was Mary Wollstonecraft?
Mary Wollstonecraft was a very complex person and to try to completely describe who she was would be impossible. However it’s not impossible to share her life and what she accomplished.
Mary was born in 1759 in London; she was the second of six children. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother was a battered house wife. Wollstonecraft tried to protect her mother from her father’s attacks but she was also a victim of her father’s abuse. She had very little formal education and was largely self-taught. When she was nineteen she went out to earn her own living. In 1783, Mary helped her sister escape a miserable marriage and later on the two sisters founded and taught at …show more content…
Shortly after Mary became the governess in the family of Lord Kingsborough, living most of the time in Ireland. Following her dismissal Wollstonecraft spent several years observing political and social developments in France, and wrote History and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution. In 1790 she wrote Vindication of the Rights of Man, the first response to Edmund Burke 's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Mary Wollstonecraft’s most famous work which got her the reputation as a feminist was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; it was published in 1792. Her first child, Fanny, was born in 1795, the daughter of American Gilbert Imlay. When Imlay deserted her she tried to drown herself. Eventually she recovered and went to live with William Godwin, a longtime friend. She then married Godwin in 1797. Wollstonecraft died a few days after the birth of her second daughter, Mary. Before Wollstonecraft died she had been writing a book called Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman; it was