The Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft is known as one of the world’s most influential liberal, feminist authors. With her literary works shocking the world with her new and radical ideas of that conservative time period. She is renowned to have her feminist, but also realistic, views on equal rights and education. She believed that women and men should have equal opportunity in education and everyday life. She uses tone, symbol, and mood in her literary works to help pave the way for women’s equal rights in the future.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in London to a fairly wealthy family. Her father gained his inheritance through his successful father, who was a master weaver. Unfortunately throughout the years, due to poor judgment and several failed farming escapades, which relocated the family numerous times, they eventually lost it all. Like most women during this time era, Mary was not formally educated. She was generally self-educated, except for the help of a local retired clergyman and his wife. Though there were five children in her family, her older brother, Edward, also known as Ned, was the only one formally educated. He later went on to become a successful lawyer. Some could say this is what sparked her interest in equal education opportunities and gender rights.

At the young age of nineteen, Mary started making her own living and moved out for her first job to work as a companion to an elderly widow, Mrs. Dawson, in the City of Bath. After only a short time at this occupation, she was called home by her family to take care of her dying mother, who died in 1780 from a long-term, severe illness. After this tragic family event, three years later she helped her sister, Eliza, escape from a horrific, abusive marriage. After Eliz...

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...ohnson, 1788. Print.

• Wollstonecraft, Mary. Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman. London: William Goodwin, 1798. Print.

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