Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, on 27 April 1759 and died in 1797, shortly after giving birth to her daughter Mary (later Mary Shelley). Her family's fortunes declined under an improvident and violent father, and she supported herself as a lady's companion, a teacher who ran a school at Newington Green, a governess in Ireland and, from 1787, a writer and translator for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. At Newington Green she came into contact with Dissenters, including the minister Richard Price.

When Edmund Burke attacked Price in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Wollstonecraft replied within weeks with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, first published anonymously. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman followed in 1792. She went to Paris in late 1792, witnessed the Terror, wrote a history of the Revolution, and had a daughter with the American Gilbert Imlay. Her Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) was widely read. In March 1797 she married the philosopher William Godwin; she died of an infection after childbirth that year. Godwin's candid memoir of her life damaged her reputation for much of the nineteenth century.

• Rights grounded in reason. Drawing on a Lockean view of God-given rights discoverable by reason, Wollstonecraft argued that Burke's veneration of inherited institutions blinded him to poverty and injustice created by those institutions.
• Education, not nature. The Rights of Woman argues that women's supposed weakness, vanity and dependence are the product of an education designed to make them pleasing to men. She criticised Rousseau's Émile, whose programme for girls aimed at making them agreeable companions, and called for a national system of co-educational day schools.
• Independence. She wanted women to be rational, independent and educated: 'I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.' This required skills for self-support and access to occupations such as medicine and business.
• Against dependency and arbitrary power. Her writing treats subordination to another's arbitrary will — of wives to husbands, subjects to monarchs, the poor to the rich — as corrupting both parties. Recent scholars place her in the republican tradition that defines freedom as independence from domination.
• Marriage and citizenship. She described marriage as largely a property relation, argued that it should rest on friendship between equals, and suggested that women should have representatives in government rather than being 'arbitrarily governed'.

Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founders of liberal and republican feminism. Her argument that differences in capacity reflect institutions rather than nature became a standard move in debates on suffrage, education and employment, and it shaped John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor's The Subjection of Women (1869). Her account of freedom as independence anticipates neo-republican theories of non-domination and feminist theories of relational autonomy.

For governance design, her work raises the question of whether formal political rights mean much when citizens depend economically or legally on others. That concern runs through later debates on property qualifications, women's legal capacity, universal education and, today, the economic preconditions of democratic participation — including arguments for basic income and for workplace democracy.

• Limited scope. Critics note that her programme addresses mainly middle-class women and that she accepted many conventions about motherhood and domestic duty; she wrote little about working-class or enslaved women.
• Rationalism. Some feminists argue that her emphasis on reason and virtue adopts a masculine ideal and disparages emotion and the body, while others reply that she valued the 'heart' and feeling alongside reason.
• Reformism. Radical critics see her demands as compatible with existing property relations; conservatives of her day regarded them, and her life, as subversive.

• A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) — Project Gutenberg
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) — Project Gutenberg
• An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794)
• Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)
• Overview: Sylvana Tomaselli, 'Mary Wollstonecraft', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy