Welcome to the Deep Dive, where we crack open
the most fascinating intellectual stacks of history
and philosophy, giving you the complete picture,
the context, the complexity, and the core genius
in a fraction of the time. Today, we are undertaking
a deep dive into Mary Wollstonecraft. She's an
English writer, a philosopher, and her life was,
well, it was as revolutionary and volatile as
her ideas were enduring. Oh, absolutely. And
in this case, it's just impossible to separate
the woman from the work. Right. You know, until
well into the 20th century, her famously unconventional
life, it was just full of scandal, intense passion,
tragic endings. It all tended to overshadow her
actual contributions. And those contributions
were huge. She is justly regarded as one of the
founding feminist philosophers. Her pen wasn't
just for writing. It was a weapon for radical
social change. And that's our mission for you,
the learner, today. We want to synthesize these
two narratives, the key works that laid the groundwork
for equality and the dramatic, often chaotic
life events that forced her to write them. We
want to give you a shortcut to understanding
the complete picture, the enduring and... let's
be honest, often controversial influence she
had. And we have some incredible source material
to work with. We really do. The conversation
is going to center on three major works. First,
the foundational text, A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman from 1792. Of course, the big one. Then
there's the explosive political pamphlet that
came before it, A Vindication of the Rights of
Men from 1790. And the third. And maybe surprisingly.
Her most popular book during her own lifetime,
The Travel Narrative Letters, written in Sweden,
Norway, and Denmark. It's amazing when you look
at the sheer volume of material she produced
in such a short career. It's staggering. I mean,
novels, philosophical treatises, a history of
the French Revolution, a conduct book, even a
children's book. And her time as an author was
so compressed because her life was, well, brutally
brief. She died at the age of 38, just 11 days
after giving birth to her second daughter. A
daughter who would become an immortal literary
figure herself. Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.
Right. It's a lineage that speaks to this incredible
intellectual power that continued despite, or
maybe because of, all this personal tragedy.
And the sources show us that this intellectual
power was absolutely forged in fire. Okay, let's
unpack this. Starting with the volatile environment
that produced such a revolutionary thinker. Mary
Wollstonecraft was born on April 27, 1759, in
Spitalfields, London. And we tend to think of
philosophers as these products of, you know,
stability and higher education. But her reality
was the complete opposite. It was defined by
constant flux, financial insecurity. She was
the second of seven children, and her early life
was just dictated by her father's profound ongoing
failure. And this wasn't just a case of the family
being poor, right? The sources say they started
out with a comfortable income. Precisely. Her
father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, he squandered
a considerable inheritance, a really comfortable
income. On what? On speculative projects, mostly.
And they were usually failed ones. The most devastating
result for the family was just this constant
uprooting. So they were always on the move? Always.
Forced into these frequent, disruptive moves
all across England, chasing new, ill -fated ventures.
This instability, it just created this atmosphere
of constant precarity. It's not hard to see how
it established a deeply negative link in Mary's
mind between, well, patriarchy and economic ruin.
You can absolutely see the seeds of her later
political theory right there. Economic independence
for women isn't a luxury. It's a necessity for
moral survival. And the financial cruelty, it
wasn't limited to just bad business deals. No.
He actively compounded the insecurity for his
daughter. Once Mary came of age, she was actually
compelled to turn over an inheritance she was
expecting. He took it from her. He took it. It
left you with absolutely no secure economic fallback.
This personal experience of being dependent and
then, you know, actively stripped of her own
future wealth, it completely informed her intense
critique of laws that made women lifelong minors.
Under the control of male relatives. Exactly.
And the instability at home, it was matched by,
well, domestic terror. The sources paint a very
disturbing picture of her father's behavior.
He was violent. Very. Prone to drunken rages,
regularly beat his wife. The consequences for
young Mary were immediate, and they fundamentally
shaped her character. She took on this protective,
almost maternal role. She really did. As a teenager,
the sources state she would literally sleep outside
her mother's bedroom door to protect her from
her father's violence. Wow. And that fierce protective
instinct, it carried over to her sisters, Evreina
and Eliza. She essentially became the de facto
adult in a home where the father was a constant
destabilizing threat. It's such a powerful origin
story for a future feminist thinker. The first
lesson she learns is that the traditional protected
domestic sphere was actually the most dangerous
place for a woman. That's it. And that necessity
for fierce, defiant independence really sets
the foundation for her later philosophy. And
we see that defiance manifest in this dramatic
defining moment of her early adulthood, the Eliza
incident in 1784. This incident is absolutely
pivotal because it wasn't just abstract philosophy
for her. It was a radical high stakes action
that showed her total contempt for societal norms
when those norms protected violence and despair.
So her sister, Eliza, was married and suffering
terribly. Terribly. It was likely from severe
postpartum depression, maybe even psychosis,
and it was all exacerbated by a very difficult
domestic situation. Mary was just convinced that
Eliza's life was at risk if she stayed. So Mary
basically orchestrates a legal and social disaster
to save her sister's sanity. That's a perfect
way to put it. She persuaded Eliza to take this
unthinkable step, leaving her husband and her
infant child. Wollstonecraft personally made
all the arrangements for Eliza to flee. She was
the architect of the escape. For the time, this
was a profound, scandalous rupture. Now, we have
to remember the human costs, right? Under the
social and legal framework of 18th century England,
it sounds like a rescue mission, but the consequences
would have been brutal. They were catastrophic.
Eliza faced intense, immediate social condemnation.
divorce was prohibitively expensive, almost impossible
for most people. So she was left in this state
of permanent non -marital status. She couldn't
remarry. Couldn't remarry, lost all rights to
her property, and was essentially doomed to a
life of poverty and hard labor. For Mary, seeing
her sister endure domestic violence and then
suffer such severe societal punishment, it profoundly
informed her later scorching critique of marriage
as an institution. As a contract that exclusively
benefits the man. And traps the woman. Her philosophy
wasn't theoretical. It was documented observation
of institutionized cruelty. So moving beyond
her family, she sought solace and intellectual
refuge in these really intense friendships. Yes,
and these friendships were characterized by this
specific, almost needy emotional intensity. It
kind of mirrors the volatility of her home life.
Like her bond with Jane Arden. Exactly. Intellectually,
it was great. They read books, attended lectures
together, but the emotional demands Mary placed
on it were immense. She confessed to Arden that
she had formed romantic notions of friendship.
I must have the first place or none. That's very
telling. It reveals this psychological intensity,
a need for a primary attachment, which we see
throughout her life. But the truly formative
relationship was with Fanny Blood. Right. Wollstonecraft
credited Frances Blood with, in her words, opening
her mind. It was a pivotal relationship where
they envisioned what the sources call a female
utopia. What did that look like? It was a dream
where they could live together, support each
other emotionally and financially, and just completely
defy the economic necessity of marrying men they
did not love. A completely independent life powered
by neutral support. Exactly. But tragically,
this utopian dream just collapsed under harsh
economic realities. Fanny Blood got married.
moved to Lisbon for her health, Mary, who was
running a small school at the time, rushed over
to nurse her when she became pregnant. But Fanny
died. She died in 1785. The loss was profound.
It just devastated Wollstonecraft. And the sources
confirm this became the explicit inspiration
for her first novel, Mary, a fiction which explores
the intensity of female friendship and the failure
of conventional marriage. So even her first creative
output was driven by this intense emotional and
biographical necessity, not just detached intellectual
curiosity. Not at all. It was all deeply, deeply
personal. Following these intense personal struggles
and after the failure of the school she'd started
with her sisters and fanny blood, Wollstonecraft
had to confront the brutal economic reality of
being a respectable but poor woman. And the options
were just depressingly narrow. Right. Companion,
teacher, or governess. These were pretty much
the only acceptable roles outside of marriage.
And she tried all of them. She briefly worked
as a lady's companion, a job she absolutely detested.
She called it tedious and demeaning. And she'd
later use that experience in her arguments. Yes.
She drew on it to argue in her conduct book just
how humiliating and uninspiring these limited
options were for educated women. After that,
she took a position as a governess to the Anglo
-Irish Kingsborough family. Which became something
of an intellectual battleground. It did. She
clashed significantly with Lady Kingsborough,
who probably found Mary's intellectual rigor
threatening to the established order. But she
was an inspiration to the daughters. A profound
inspiration. We know one of them, Margaret King,
later credited Wollstonecraft with freeing her
mind from all superstitions. And this experience
also directly supplied the material for her children's
book, Original Stories from Real Life. But the
sources suggest the real pressure cooker moment
came when she wrote her first published philosophical
work, the conduct book, Thoughts on the Education
of Daughters. That's where the frustration really
becomes formalized argument. Absolutely. The
book is on the surface a guide. But within it,
she provides this devastatingly eloquent protest
against female limitation. There's a whole chapter
titled Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably
Educated and Left Without a Fortune. She's describing
her own life. She is articulating precisely the
economic trap she was living in, being trained
for superficiality but denied the tools to survive
when your female accomplishments fail to land
you a husband or a living. And that moment where
her personal frustration meets public critique,
that seems to be the pivot point. In 1787, she
makes a decision that defines her whole career.
It was an audacious choice, almost suicidal for
a woman of her class at the time. She decided
to move to London and become a professional author.
To achieve financial independence solely through
her writing. Through intellectual labor, yes.
She articulated this ambition so clearly to her
sister, Everina, writing that she intended to
become The first of a new genus. The first of
a new genus. That's such a powerful phrase. It's
a declaration. She's not just aiming for personal
success. She's creating an entirely new category
of professional identity for women. And this
transformation was really only possible because
of the support of one man, right? The liberal
publisher Joseph Johnson. He was her anchor.
He became her mentor, her employer, her friend.
She referred to him in her letters with immense
affection, calling him a father and a brother.
It was a kind of familial trust she had really
lacked in her life. So what exactly was her intellectual
labor during this period before the vindications?
She wasn't just sitting down to write masterpieces
from scratch. No, she was building her intellectual
arsenal. Johnson hired her to translate French
and German texts, which forced her to engage
rigorously with major continental thinkers. Like
who? For instance, she translated Jacques Necker's
Of the Importance of Religious Opinions and Christian
Godhill Salsman's Elements of Morality. This
work exposed her to all this diverse European
thought on religion, morality, and education,
which deeply informed her later work. And crucially,
she was also reviewing novels for Johnson's influential
periodical, The Analytical Review. This was indispensable
training for her. Reviewing novels, especially
the popular contact literature and sentimental
fiction of the day, it allowed her to systematically
dissect and critique the very literature that
she believed was corrupting women's minds. So
she was getting firsthand knowledge of the culture
she was fighting against. Hundreds of examples
of the excessive sensibility she would later
condemn. And it was at Johnson's famous intellectual
dinners that she met the most radical minds of
the time. People like Thomas Paine, author of
Rights of Man, and eventually her future husband,
William Godwin. Johnson's dinners were the epicenter
of radical dissent in London. She was immersed
in the debates defining the era, republicanism,
skepticism, social reform. And her first meeting
with William Godwin is a classic story because
it was so, well, volatile. It was. Godwin came
hoping to hear Thomas Paine speak, but Wollstonecraft
just dominated the conversation. How did she
manage to assail the leading philosopher of the
era? The report is that she just disagreed with
him on virtually every subject. monopolized the
conversation to the point that Godwin was deeply
frustrated and disappointed. It really illustrates
her argumentative style. She didn't defer to
reputation or gender. Not at all. She was intensely
rational, aggressive in debate. She likely challenged
Godwin on his abstract theoretical principles
versus their real world application. A critique
she often leveled at male enlightenment thinkers
who, you know, tended to forget the plight of
women. A woman who won't shut up debating her
future husband until he's furious. That's a powerful
start. It was, ironically, the perfect preparation
for her next world -changing intellectual intervention.
The stage was perfectly set by her translation
work, her reviews, her immersion in Johnson's
radical circle. And the first result of all this
was a vindication of the rights of men in 1790.
And this wasn't a slow scholarly release. It
was, as you said, a political hand grenade. The
context here is everything. This was a direct,
immediate, and fiery rebuttal to Edmund Burke's
huge conservative manifesto, Reflections on the
Revolution. in France. Burke's reflections came
out in early November 1790. It defended aristocracy,
monarchy, tradition. It was basically a massive
argument against the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft
found his conservatism morally reprehensible
and his language just manipulative. So she wrote
her rebuttal in a matter of weeks. Weeks. She
got it published anonymously on November 29th.
And it made her famous overnight. When her name
was revealed in the second edition, just a few
weeks later, she was suddenly a major intellectual
player. What made her critique of Burke so devastating?
It wasn't just a political disagreement. It was
a rhetorical takedown. Burke had gone on and
on with this theatrical pity for Queen Marie
Antoinette, describing her as a vision of beauty
and elegance. And he used that language to condemn
the revolutionaries. Yes, he called the women
who marched on Versailles furies from hell. And
she flipped that aristocratic script entirely,
didn't she? Completely. Wollstonecraft accused
Burke of prioritizing superficial appearance
and sentimental feeling over justice and reason.
She defended the marching women not as Furies,
but as ordinary, uneducated housewives who were
desperate and angry because they lacked bread
for their children. She reframed their passion
as righteous economic fury, not madness. And
the most profound intellectual strategy was how
she used Burke's own aesthetic terminology against
him. This idea of the sublime versus the beautiful.
This is where she truly earns her title as a
philosopher. Burke had associated the sublime
with masculine qualities, strength, grandeur,
terror, and the beautiful with feminine weakness,
softness, superficial charm. And she turned that
on its head. She argued that Burke's sentimental
flowing language, his excessive descriptions
of royal beauty, actually turned his own readers
into weak women swayed by show because it appealed
to their senses, not their intellect. So she's
basically arguing that Burke's conservatism was
aesthetically effeminate and therefore irrational
and weak. Exactly. She stripped the nobility
of their moral and intellectual authority. Her
political argument was fundamentally an attack
on aristocracy and a defense of middle class
virtue. She argued that true virtue rationality
industry resided in the middle classes. And she
contrasted that with the vice written aristocratic
code. She positioned reason against tradition,
showing the danger of relying purely on ancestral
custom. She did this brilliantly. She pointed
out the logical conclusion of Burke's argument.
If tradition is the only virtue, then it would
logically endorse the continuation of slavery
simply because it was an ancestral custom. It's
a killing argument. It is. And her argument for
natural, universal rights, founded on reason,
provided the perfect intellectual groundwork
for her next major work. She had established
inequality as the enemy. Now she turned that
focus toward the most pervasive inequality she
knew, gender. Which brings us to the monumental
work, two years later, A Vindication of the Rights
of Women. This is arguably the foundational text
of liberal feminism. What's the core non -negotiable
thesis? The core thesis is a radical declaration.
Women are not naturally or biologically inferior
to men. They only appear so because they are
systematically denied a rational education and
are conditioned by society to be weak. So she's
calling for a sweeping social reform. A total
overhaul where both sexes would be treated as
rational beings capable of moral and intellectual
self -governance. And this required a wholesale
attack on the literature and the philosophical
figures who perpetuated this conditioning. Oh,
she went after everyone. Enlightenment thinkers
like Rousseau, who famously argued that women
should be educated solely to please men. And
she just skewered the popular conduct literature
of the time, the manuals by writers like James
Fordyce and John Gregory. The ones that instructed
women on how to be charming and delicate. Exactly.
How to maintain delicate manners, cultivate physical
charm, practice superficial accomplishments.
Why was that critique so important? Why was teaching
women to be charming so dangerous to society,
in her view? She saw it as completely destructive.
If women are taught that their primary value
and power, their scepter, as she calls it, comes
only from their physical beauty, they'll never
develop their minds. And the sources capture
this perfectly in her famous metaphor, the guilt
cage. Let's unpack the guilt cage metaphor. It's
one of the most powerful images in Western philosophy.
It speaks volumes about the trap of female socialization.
She describes women as being taught from their
infancy that beauty is women's scepter. That's
their only power source. So the mind just shapes
itself to the body. Precisely. Their intellect
only serves to enhance their appearance rather
than cultivate virtue. They become creatures
roaming around its guilt cage, only seeking to
adorn its prison. The prison is marriage, dependency,
intellectual confinement. The guilt is the beauty
that distracts them from the reality of their
captivity. Their entire existence is reduced
to decorating the space they are trapped in.
rather than figuring out how to leave the cage.
It's a devastating indictment of beauty culture.
And this led her to propose a solution that was
equally radical, a specific, detailed plan for
education. Yes, laid out in Chapter 12 on national
education. This moves beyond abstract theory
into practical policy. What does she advocate
for? She envisioned a national, state -funded
system. All children, boys and girls, would attend
a country day school up to the age of nine. They'd
also get home education to maintain family bonds.
But the most revolutionary aspect of this plan
was its design. It had to be coeducational. It
had to be, which was virtually unheard of for
the upper and middle classes. Why was coeducation
non -negotiable for her? She argued that men
and women, whose marriages are the cement of
society, must be educated after the same model.
If they're educated separately, they grow up
with fundamentally different expectations. They
become incapable of being rational companions.
They become strangers to each other. Resulting
in marriages based on power and appearance, not
mutual respect. She wanted men and women to be
friends, colleagues, intellectual equals. But
if we're trying to classify her fairly, we have
to look at the nuances of who this plan served.
The sources are clear that her focus, while radical,
was distinctly middle class. That's a crucial
historical distinction for you, the learner.
She explicitly addresses her text to the middle
class, which she calls the most natural state.
She argues virtues like modesty and industry
are best found there. And the education plan
reflects that. It does. She suggests that after
age nine, poor children, with the exception of
the brilliant ones, should be separated and taught
elsewhere. It shows her worldview, while revolutionary
on gender, still retain a clear class based structure.
Another core argument that complicates things
is her scathing attack on excessive sentimentality
or sensibility. She viewed false and excessive
sensibility. this tendency toward dramatic uncontrolled
emotionality as an intellectual and moral disease.
She was arguing against the cultural tide which
celebrated women's delicate, fragile emotions.
She said they were blown about by every momentary
gust of feeling. Yes, and the prey of their senses,
which makes them completely incapable of rational
thought or consistent moral action. So the woman
who would later be called reckless by her critics
for her own passions was arguing for absolute
rational control. Absolutely. She believed that
this indulgence in feeling, often fostered by
reading sentimental novels, made women useless.
If women are irrational, they can't help refine
or stabilize civilization itself. For her, reason
was the only path to virtue. Finally, let's address
the equality debate, because modern readers often
try to retroactively fit her into a modern feminist
box, but her text doesn't always comply. It's
ambiguous, and we have to acknowledge that. She
certainly championed equality in fundamental
areas like morality. Both sexes were equal in
the eyes of God, deserved the same rational respect.
But she did not declare men and women equal in
every physical or perhaps even psychological
capacity. The sources quote her writing. I have
already granted that from the constitution of
their bodies, men seem to be designed by providence
to attain a greater degree of virtue. That is
a significant concession. She seems to be granting
men a greater capacity for physical valor, maybe,
but arguing that this physical difference is
irrelevant to their core moral and intellectual
rights. That's the most logical interpretation.
She prioritized reason and moral duty above all.
If men have a stronger body, Fine, let them go
to war. It has no bearing on a woman's right
to education, economic self -sufficiency, or
rational judgment. So her overall demand, despite
these nuances, was singular. Women must be treated
as human beings first, not merely as ornamental
appendages to men. After publishing The Rights
of Woman, which was an immediate global sensation,
Wollstonecraft decides to move from theory to
action. She does. She travels to Paris in December
1792. just a month before Louis VI was guillotined.
She was determined to be a firsthand witness
to the revolution she had celebrated on paper.
That strikes me as incredibly dangerous, almost
recklessly idealistic. Britain and France were
on the verge of war. She was advised strongly
not to go. But she was just driven by this commitment
to liberty. She arrived just as the revolution
was spiraling into violence. And she associated
mainly with the moderate faction, the Jerome
Downs. Which put her immediately at odds with
the radical Jacobins. Yes, the ruthless, increasingly
powerful faction. And despite celebrating the
abstract revolution, her personal observation
of the violence was emotionally complex. Very
much so. She witnessed Louis VI being taken to
trial. And she was surprised by her own reaction,
writing that The tears flowed insensibly from
my eyes. She noted the unexpected dignity of
the deposed king. It shows this profound tension
between her republican ideals and the chilling
reality of revolutionary bloodshed. And when
France declared war on Britain in February 1793,
life for British subjects became, well, nightmarish.
She was trapped. Foreigners were placed under
strict police surveillance, forbidden to leave.
The reign of terror led by the Jacobins began
in earnest. Friends she knew were being guillotined.
It must have been terrifying. The sources show
she was glad she came to gain a just opinion
of the extraordinary event. But she confessed
that death and misery and every shape of terror
haunts this devoted country. It was in this atmosphere
of extreme danger that she met Gilbert Imlay
and her principles regarding marriage were put
to the ultimate test. She fell passionately in
love with Imlay, an American adventurer and merchant.
And she decided to live with him. have a physical
relationship without being married. She saw it
as an embodiment of the rational free union she
advocated for. But ironically, the relationship
she chose to protect her anti -marriage principles
ended up providing her only means of political
survival. It's a huge irony. Imlay was an American
and a bit of a profiteer. To protect Wollstonecraft
from arrest as a hostile British subject during
the terror, he made a false declaration to the
U .S. Embassy that they were married. Which made
her an American citizen. And protected her from
the guillotine. But the personal cost was high.
Her disillusionment with the revolution continued
to deepen. She still held on to hope for a fairer
day, but she saw that even under the Republic,
people behaved slavishly. The new French government
proved to be venal and brutal. She was particularly
offended when the Jacobins actively denied women
equal political rights, denounced Amazons, and
pushed women back into the limited domestic roles
advocated by Rousseau. So she saw the revolution
failing women specifically. And her historical
writing on Marie Antoinette at the time reflects
this complexity. While pregnant, she wrote an
historical and moral view of the French Revolution.
It's a neglected masterpiece, where she argues
the revolution arose from profound social and
economic conditions, not madness. But in this
work, she gives a devastating critique of Marie
Antoinette, which contrasts so sharply with Burke's
idealized victim. She saw Marie Antoinette as
a manipulative femme fatale, a corrupting product
of the ancient regime. Wollstonecraft argued
that aristocratic society valued the queen only
for her body, her ability to bear sons, reducing
her worth entirely to her womb, and that this
environment encouraged her to become ruthless
and manipulative to exert any power at all. It's
a powerful sociological argument. The system
corrupted the queen just as it corrupted the
housewife. And she was deeply troubled by the
specific charges leveled against the queen. The
incest charge. Yes. She was appalled that the
infamous incest charge against Marie Antoinette
was made central to the case. Wollstonecraft
argued this focus on sexual perversion was degrading
and a cynical use of misogyny to condemn a political
enemy. It showed her the new republic could be
just as morally depraved as the monarchy it replaced.
Tragically, her personal life began to mirror
the political chaos. Imlay, unhappy with domestic
life after the birth of their daughter Fanny,
started to pull away. She was initially ecstatic
about Fanny. She wrote that the baby would suckle
so manfully that her father reckoned saucily
on her writing the second part of The Rites of
Woman. But Imlay was an adventurer. He was dissatisfied
with the domestic -minded and maternal Wollstonecraft.
He left for London. He did. and his rejection
became painfully clear. This pushed her to the
edge, leading to two catastrophic suicide attempts.
The first was in May 1795. After she followed
him to London and faced his coldness. She likely
attempted suicide with laudanum, though Imel
managed to save her. And in a last desperate
attempt to hold on to him, she undertook this
hazardous business negotiation for him in Scandinavia.
A solo trip. across dangerous waters with only
her infant daughter and a maid to recover his
fortune from a Norwegian captain. It shows both
her profound desperation and her incredible competence.
But it wasn't enough. No. Upon her return, when
she realized the relationship was irrevocably
over, she made her second attempt. She left a
note declaring the attempt one of the calmest
acts of reason. before walking through the rain
to soak her clothes and jumping into the Thames.
He was rescued. Rescued by a stranger. Let's
stop on that shilling phrase. One of the calmest
acts of reason. It just encapsulates the painful
duality of her mind. It's the ultimate paradox.
For Wollstonecraft, whose entire philosophy hinged
on reason as the path to virtue and freedom,
this note suggests that the pain and humiliation
she faced were so absolute that survival itself
had become an irrational act. The rational choice
in the face of such destruction was to end the
misery. It's the life experience that stands
in the starkest opposition to the arguments of
her vindications. But she survived, returned
to Joseph Johnson's radical circle, and reconnected
with William Godwin. The connection was sparked
by her travelogue. Godwin was completely captivated
by her letters written in Sweden, calling it
the book calculated to make a man in love with
its author. The passion was immediate. Intense.
And when she became pregnant again, they married
in March 1797. Which must have been a highly
controversial choice for both of them, given
their philosophies. Massively so. Godwin was
famous for advocating the complete abolition
of marriage in his masterpiece Political Justice.
To marry was seen as a betrayal of their radical
principles. And the marriage revealed that she
had never been legally married to Imlay. Which
meant her first daughter, Fanny, was illegitimate.
This cost them many friends. Yet, despite the
controversy, they seemed to find a brief moment
of stable happiness. They did. They lived 20
doors apart in Summerstown, maintaining separate
residences to ensure their intellectual independence.
It was a stable, content period, but devastatingly
short. Because in August 1797, she gave birth
to her second daughter, Mary, who would become
Mary Shelley. Yes. Tragically, she died just
11 days later from septicemia, or childbed fever.
It was a common, brutal fate caused by an infected
piece of placenta. She died, ironically, while
finally experiencing the stable, rational domesticity
she had fought for. If we look at the entire
scope of her bibliography, it's clear that every
single work from her children's stories to her
treatises was driven by her core convictions
about education. And the failure of society to
provide women with the rational tools necessary
for survival. Her early educational works like
thoughts on the education of daughters, reflected
this emerging middle -class ethos that valued
self -discipline and frugality. She was deeply
influenced by John Locke, but she added her own
spin. She did. She integrated Locke's views on
teaching children to reason with a focus on religious
faith and innate feeling. She was actively trying
to construct a balanced model, a rational mind
informed by moral sentiment, to counteract the
excesses of pure sensibility she saw destroying
women's lives. And her novels marry. A fiction
and the posthumously published Maria, or The
Wrongs of Woman, served as fictionalized critiques
of marriage and sensibility. In Mary, a fiction,
the heroine is forced into a loveless, purely
economic marriage, a theme taken directly from
her own life. And she finds fulfillment instead
in passionate friendships outside of marriage.
A radical proposition for the time. And Maria,
often considered her most politically radical
novel, goes even further. How so? In Maria, The
heroine is cruelly imprisoned in an asylum by
her husband, symbolizing the complete legal confinement
of women under patriarchal law. Maria finds solace
and fulfillment not just with a male inmate,
but most significantly through a deepening friendship
with her female keeper, Jemima. And Jemima is
working class. Exactly. This hints at an early
cross -class feminist argument. That women of
different economic positions share the same fundamental
interests. And face the same dangers from patriarchal
systems. Both novels function as literary critiques
of the sensibility genre itself, arguing that
indulgence in romantic fantasies, often fostered
by novel reading, is detrimental. Ironically,
her most popular book in the 1790s was the one
that embraced sensibility and imagination more
deeply. Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and
Denmark. This book was a phenomenal success.
It's a remarkable stylistic achievement, blending
sociological observation on Scandinavia with
these deeply personal, heart -wrenching musings
on her shattered identity and the collapse of
the inlay relationship. Without ever naming him.
Without ever naming him. It sounds like the rational
philosopher gave way to the tormented romantic
poet. She used the rhetoric of the sublime, the
overwhelming beauty and terror of nature to explore
her own suffering. Precisely. In this work, she
gave far greater value to the imagination than
she had in her earlier purely rational treatises.
She contrasted the imaginative connection to
nature with the commercial mercenary attitude,
a clear veiled jab at Imlay. And the influence
of this shift was immense, particularly on the
Romantic generation. The book was universally
praised. It was highly influential on major Romantic
poets, including Wordsworth and Coleridge. And
as we noted, Godwin himself confessed it was
the book that made him fall in love with her.
She had finally achieved through vulnerability
the intellectual and emotional connection she
craved. But this brief moment of critical acclaim
and marital happiness was brutally short circuited
by the man who loved her most. We have to discuss
the catastrophic effect of William Godwin's memoirs.
Godwin published his memoirs of the author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in January
1798, just months after her death. His intention
was to portray his wife with love and sincere
transparency. based on his philosophical belief
in complete honesty he revealed everything and
by revealing everything her illegitimate children
her love affairs her two public suicide attempts
he inadvertently destroyed her reputation for
nearly a century. The effect was instant and
catastrophic. The public was scandalized. The
poet Robert Southey accused Godwin of the want
of all feeling and stripping his dead wife naked.
She was immediately satirized. Most famously
in Rickard Polhoyle's misogynistic poem, The
Unsexed Females. She was openly portrayed in
novels as a morally depraved, dangerous figure,
like the freakish Harriet Freak and Maria Edgeworth's
Belinda. So she became synonymous with moral
degradation and danger. radicalism. For polite
19th century society, she was essentially unmentionable.
Her books were censored, ignored, actively suppressed.
Yet the sources show us her work didn't entirely
vanish. Its influence became subtle, covert,
working through the intellectual underground.
We see this influence popping up in unexpected
places, especially among women writers of the
next generation like Jane Austen. Absolutely.
Though Austen could never openly endorse the
disgraced Wollstonecraft, literary scholars point
to positive allusions. For instance, Elizabeth
Bennett's sarcastic remarks in Pride and Prejudice
about superficial female accomplishments are
almost direct echoes of Wollstonecraft's condemnation.
The theme of balancing sense and sensibility.
It's deeply indebted to the intellectual problem
Wollstonecraft framed. Her philosophy was permeating
the very intellectual air women breathe, even
when she was publicly scorned. And the true revival
was led by activists who needed a foremother
for their struggle. The American movement was
key. Activists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton bonded over reading Wollstonecraft. They
were directly inspired by her vision to call
the foundational 1848 Seneca Falls Convention
the birthplace of the organized women's rights
movement in the United States. But the formal
rehabilitation in England really took hold at
the turn of the 20th century. With the suffrage
movement, yes. The suffragist needed an intellectual
tradition. In 1892, Millicent Garrett Fawcett,
one of the foremost leaders of the movement,
wrote the introduction to the centenary edition
of Rights of Woman. It was a deliberate, formal
effort to cleanse her memory, claiming her as
the intellectual foremother of their struggle.
And since then, she has been embraced by every
subsequent feminist wave. From Virginia Woolf.
who wrote about her experiments in living, to
modern political philosophers. The Nobel laureate
Amartya Sen uses her ideas repeatedly in his
work on global justice. Contemporary figures
like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and writers like Caitlin
Moran all cite her influence. She is no longer
just a figure of feminist history. She is a global
political philosopher. And her continued relevance
was perfectly demonstrated by the controversy
surrounding her commemorative sculpture in 2020.
The sculpture by Maggie Hambling in Newington
Green sparked massive debate. Many felt it was
highly inappropriate because it was a symbolic
nude depiction rather than a lifelike one. Critics
argued it diminished the gravity of her intellectual
achievements, playing right back into the very
notion of women's value being tied to the body.
Which is exactly what Wollstonecraft fought so
hard against. But that controversy itself proves
the point. She remains a dynamic, active, and
disputed figure in cultural debates today. So
what we have seen today is Mary Wollstonecraft
moving from this childhood defined by financial
precarity and domestic violence to becoming truly
the first of a new genus. A writer whose life
was the source material for her political vision.
She wielded pamphlets as weapons with a vindication
of the rights of men and permanently changed
the discourse on gender and education with a
vindication of the rights of women. What's truly
fascinating here is the stark contrast between
the intellectual ideal she promoted, rationality,
control, reason over sensibility, and the volatile,
passionate and often reckless life she lived.
I'm still struggling to reconcile the Lockean
rationalist with the woman who tried to drown
herself twice. And it suggests that for her,
the drive for intellectual freedom and the desire
for emotional fulfillment were just inextricably
linked. Her philosophy was her attempt to rationalize
a world that was constantly threatening to destroy
her through irrational forces. Her life was an
intense testing ground for her principles. And
sometimes the principles failed the test. So
what does this all mean? It means understanding
her life is absolutely crucial to understanding
her work. She was a writer whose personal experiments
in living, as Virginia Woolf called them, were
just as radical and often as catastrophic as
her philosophy was for the society she sought
to reform. Her demand for women to be rational
was a necessary defense against a world that
perpetually sought to confine them through sentimentality
or dependency. Here is a final provocative thought
for you, the learner, as you mull over her legacy.
The source material confirms that her husband
William Godwin, fell in love with her entirely
by reading her letters written in Sweden, Norway,
and Denmark, a book written out of deep sorrow
and humiliation following Imlay's rejection.
So if her most politically influential book was
written from a place of cold, rational argument,
consider this. Was her greatest rhetorical power
achieved not when arguing purely through reason,
but when blending that raw, passionate sensibility
with profound political reflection? Did the pain
unlock a deeper form of persuasive genius. We
encourage you to seek out those sources and explore
the full, beautiful, and devastating complexity
of Mary Wollstonecraft for yourself. That is
all the time we have for this deep dive. Thank
you for joining us. We'll see you next time.