Ceres Magazine Issue 3 - Spring 2016 | Page 34

husband) and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin."

[Wikipedia].

Finally, in January 1798, out of love, Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as well as Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, Maria: or the Wrongs of Woman. His honesty backfired as people were shocked to read about her children out of wedlock, her troubled love relationships, her suicide attempts. It resulted in conservative critics finding reason to oppose women's rights.

Ironically, this attempt to portray Wollstonecraft with sincerity almost caused the loss of her ideas. Many readers avoided Wollstonecraft. Few writers mentioned her, at least openly. Vicious satires were published, still Godwin's views of Wollstonecraft were perpetuated throughout the nineteenth century.

Nowadays, it may be naïve to think that the same educational opportunity can ensure true equality for women, but Wollstonecraft opened the door. In the century that followed, the Romantic Era, and the Victorian Era also saw advocacy for women's education in their own way, significantly changing the lives and opportunities for women. Without this advance in education, women would have been doomed to Rousseau's vision of inferior creatures, incapable of reason, undeserving of citizenship.

Legacy:

Mary Wollstonecraft opened doors in ways she could not possibly have imagined. Here are some thoughts on her legacy cited in Wikipedia.

-In 2011, her image was projected onto the Palace of Westminster to raise support for a permanent statue of the author.

-Wollstonecraft has what scholar Cora Kaplan labelled in 2002 a "curious" legacy that has evolved over time: "for an author-activist adept in many genres ... up until the last quarter-century Wollstonecraft's life has been read much more closely than her writing”.

-Scholar Virginia Sapiro states that few read Wollstonecraft's works during the nineteenth century as "her attackers implied or stated that no self-respecting woman would read her work.” (In fact, as Craciun points out, new editions of Rights of Woman appeared in the UK in the 1840s, and in the US in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s.) One of those few was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who read Rights of Woman at the age of 12, and whose poem Aurora Leigh reflected "Wollstonecraft's unwavering focus on education.” Another was Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister and activist against slavery who helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention, an influential women's rights convention held in 1848. Another who read Wollstonecraft was George Eliot, a prolific writer of reviews, articles, novels, and translations. In 1855, she devoted an essay to the roles and rights of women, comparing Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller. Fuller was an American journalist, critic, and women's right activist who, like Wollstonecraft, had travelled to the Continent, been involved in the struggle for reform (in this case the Roman Republic), and had a child by a man without marrying him.

-With the advent of the modern feminist movement, women as politically dissimilar from each other as Virginia Woolf and Emma Goldman embraced Wollstonecraft's life story. By 1929 Woolf described Wollstonecraft—her writing, arguments, and "experiments in living"—as immortal: "she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.”

-With the emergence of feminist criticism in academia in the 1960s and 1970s, Wollstonecraft's works returned to prominence. Their fortunes reflected that of the second wave of the North American feminist movement itself; for example, in the early 1970s, six major biographies of Wollstonecraft were published that presented her "passionate life in apposition to [her] radical and rationalist agenda.”

-Wollstonecraft’s work has also had an effect on feminism outside the academy in recent years. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a political writer and former Muslim who is critical of Islam in general and its dictates regarding women in particular, cited the Rights of Woman in her autobiography Infidel and wrote that she was "inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist thinker who told women they had the same ability to reason as men did and deserved the same rights.”

Sources: http://www.biography.com/people/mary-wollstonecraft-9535967, http://historyguide.org/intellect/wollstonecraft.html, http://womenshistory.about.com/od/wollstonecraft/a/wollstonecraft-legacy.htm, http://womenshistory.about.com/od/wollstonecraft/a/wollstonecraft-rights.htm (Jone Johnson Lewis, Women's History Expert), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley

Brown plaque on the site of Wollstonecraft's last residence, The Polygon, St Pancras, London. Photo: Ellaroth. Source: Wikepedia.

34 | Ceres Magazine | Spring 2016