In this essay I will discuss how the status of feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft changed after the publication of William Godwin’s publication of ‘Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), through the analysis of the poem by Richard Polwhele ,The Unsex’d females’ (1798), which was motivated by William Godwin’s biography of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft. I will also analyse Jane Moore’s account of Mary Wollonstone craft……. INTRO Mary Wollstonecraft’s Romantic period writings have played a major part towards the feminist movement in the 20th century and is still recognised as a great influence to women writers today. The Romantic era witnessed various changes especially within the liberty of gender equality, women …show more content…
Notably disproportionate to that of men, women's education (at least for middle- and upper-class women) emphasized form at the expense of content. For example, women were taught how to dance, paint, and sew but were not introduced to philosophy, politics, history, economics or the like. The main curriculum of women's education centered on helping women attract husbands, and to that end, taught them how to dress and behave rather than how to think. Women were encouraged to pay more attention to their bodies rather than their minds. In turn, the display of body and behavior became the principle means by which women were …show more content…
She came to be read principally within the context of the history of the women's movement. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, however, a growing number of commentators have looked at A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in its historical and intellectual context rather than in isolation or in relation to subsequent feminist theories. This has led to renewed interest in her other political writings, including her Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Wollstonecraft is thus no longer seen as just a scandalous literary figure, nor the embodiment of a nascent feminism which only reached maturity two hundred years later, but as an Enlightenment moral and political thinker whose works present a self-contained argument about the kind of change society would need to undergo for men and women to be virtuous in both the private and the public sphere and thereby secure the chance of a measure of