“[I]f we revert to history, we shall find t
themselves have neither been the most be
Mary Wollstonecraft,
Mother of Rebels
As we celebrate a century of voting rights for Amer-
ican women, there’s a natural inclination to reflect
on the women who got this particular ball rolling:
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, of the
Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, come first to mind.
But the first-wave feminists had a revered role mod-
el of their own in Mary Wollstonecraft, a British au-
thor of the revolutionary A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects;
Susan B. Anthony even serialized the book in her
suffrage newspaper and hung Wollstonecraft’s por-
trait on her wall. Published in 1792 to some acclaim
and much outrage, this brilliant, highly-influential
work is as relevant today as it ever was – which is
both a testament to Wollstonecraft’s enduring vi-
sion, and an indictment of how far we still have to
go to realize it.
While Vindication covers many points, its central
thesis was that humanity’s greatest gift is the abil-
ity to reason, and that women possess it as fully as
men do. All women lacked was education. Educa-
tion reform was, therefore, Wollstonecraft’s rallying
cry, which put her book in competition with some
other popular proposals on the subject. She took
special aim at these, none of which called for female
equality, and which she was certain would increase
female servitude and misery.
I attribute [these problems] to a false system of education,
gathered from the books written on this subject by men,
who, considering females rather as women than human
creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring
mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman came on the
heels of another work, A Vindication of the Rights of
Men, which Wollstonecraft published in 1790. The
first work was a furious rebuttal to Edmund Burke’s
Reflections on the French Revolution; Burke felt that in-
16
Special Theme: The Good Fight
herited positions and wealth
were the backbone of a strong
society. After arguing elo-
quently that religious and
civil liberties were, in fact,
men’s birthright, Wollstone-
craft produced her second
Vindication to add women to
her thesis.
I do not wish them [women] to
have power over men; but over
themselves.
She also took the thesis fur-
ther. These were more than
rights, she argued: they were duties. Raising girls
to be mindless playthings would result in a morally
bankrupt society, devoted only to materialism and
social posturing. A society based upon reason and
justice would have to begin at home, in the struc-
ture of the family, and that would entail a profound
change in the relationship between men and wom-
en. Only a sound upbringing of both the sexes could
secure that.
Vindication was popular within liberal intellectual
circles, but otherwise its reception was, not sur-
prisingly, very negative. After her death, her well-
meaning husband attempted to redeem her image
by publishing a memoir that only made matters
worse. She became known primarily as the radical
who bore an illegitimate child, and when that child
grew up and committed suicide, Wollstonecraft’s
attackers blamed her ideals for poisoning the girl’s
mind. When her second daughter, Mary, whom she
died giving birth to, grew up to elope with Percy
Shelley and write the dark and horrifying Franken-
stein, Wollstonecraft’s ideals were again blamed for
creating (almost literally!) a monster.
by Mason Jane M . .