Mary Wollstonecraft Research Paper

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 in Spitalfields, London, England. This year, England was nearing the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This was an age when the world was slowly transitioning from its usual agriculture society to one filled with more machinery and dominated by the industry. This was also a time when women didn’t have as many rights as men. Women were believed to be inferior to men also at this point in time. Mary Wollstonecraft brought about the idea that women were only inferior to men because of their social status and the fact that women weren’t allowed to learn. That meant that women lacked the education that they needed in order to be in the same social class as the men. Wollstonecraft was

She died in 1797, ten days after her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, was born (the author of Frankenstein). She was born in Spitalfields, London, England. It was said that Spitalfields “is very sparsely peopled; wave after wave of immigrants has come and gone, leaving a few sad Indian faces on the streets and a floating population of tramps who built bonfires at the deserted corners on winter Sundays” (Tomalin pp. 17). When Wollstonecraft was young, her father Edward Wollstonecraft, had a very violent temper and when drunk, had a tendency to beat on her mother. As a young child, Mary learned to play a maternal role towards her mother and her sisters. This was all done because she felt as if she could help them to be protected from her own father. Mary Wollstonecraft got her initial ideas of philosophy when she was young as well. It was taught to her by family friend, Jane Arden. She endured many failed trials in her life including being a lady companion, opening a school that failed soon after that. She also tried to be a governess before moving on to become the inspirational author that we know her as today. Many of the things she endured in life were the inspiration for the books that she wrote. The things that she went through in life helped her to become a feminist, supporting the rights of women and the belief that women should have rights. They also pushed Wollstonecraft to try

When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of The Rights of Woman, she was stating the fact that not all women were happy with their place in the society at that day and time. One of the main reasons that she initially wrote the book was because of the teachings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau believed that women only existed to serve men because they were much weaker. Back then, many people believed that men and women were two completely different species which, in turn, that meant that they should be treated differently. Mary believed that a women should be educated the same way that a man was, as well as being able to work the same way a man could. She also reasoned that if a women knew nothing and had no education, how could it be humanely possibly that they could actually take care of children and be able to do everything in the household. With this work of art, Wollstonecraft tied together the belief that women should have rights with philosophical views. In her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft states that “Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfill; but they are HUMAN duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same. . .they are treated as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as part of the human