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Mary Wollstonecraft (UK. 1759-1797)



This picture was painted by John Opie towards 1797. The picture is on display at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), London, UK. At the NPG you can find several pictures of her. Her loved one was William Goldwin. They were both anarchists, philophers. She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), now regarded as one of the founders of modern British feminism.

Listen to the audio version at LibriVox, where we got this text from:

Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in which she argued that women are not naturally inferior to men, but only appeared to be because they lacked education. She suggested that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagined a social order founded on reason.

Today, Wollstonecraft is considered a foundational thinker in feminist philosophy. Her early advocacy of women’s equality and her attacks on conventional femininity and the degradation of women presaged the later emergence of the feminist political movement. Feminist scholars and activists have cited both her philosophical ideas and personal struggles as important influences in their work.