Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and philosopher, born in 1759 and died in 1797, renowned for championing women's rights and regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, with her life and work significantly influencing later feminist thought. Her literary output included novels, treatises, travel narratives, historical works and children's books, and she gained lasting prominence through A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, in which she contended that women are not naturally inferior to men but appear to be only because they lack education. After relationships with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had a daughter, Fanny, Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin; she died at 38, shortly after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who would later write Frankenstein. Godwin's 1798 memoir of her life exposed her unconventional lifestyle and damaged her reputation for decades, but her legacy was rehabilitated by twentieth century feminism, as her advocacy of women's equality and her critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important.