So picture this. It's 1798 and a grieving husband
sits down to write this really loving but brutally
honest tribute to his wife who had just passed
away. Right. And he genuinely thinks he's immortalizing
her, you know, like cementing her as one of the
greatest philosophers of the 18th century. Exactly.
He wanted the world to see her complete authentic
self. But instead, he accidentally destroys her
legacy. He turns her name into this toxic, scandalous
punchline for, like, the next hundred years.
Yeah, it's honestly the ultimate historical cautionary
tale of oversharing. I mean, he practically handed
society the exact ammunition they needed to cancel
a woman who was already threatening the entire
social order. Welcome to today's deep dive. If
you're joining us, we are taking a really close
look at the life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft.
And if you know the name, you probably know the
big heavy titles attached to it. Right. Like
the mother of feminism or the author of A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman. Or honestly, just Mary
Shelley's mother. So, OK, let's unpack this,
because if you really want to understand her,
you have to look past that sanitized marble bust
of the great thinker. You really do, because
she wasn't just sitting in a quiet room theorizing.
No, not at all. We're looking at a woman who
lived her philosophy out loud. I mean, navigating
political revolutions, surviving devastating
heartbreak, fighting for intellectual survival.
And doing all of that in a world that literally
demanded her silence. The 18th century world
she was fighting against was, it was entirely
defined by rigid inequality. Yeah, we have to
establish that context for you listening, because
as a woman back then, your identity was essentially
a legal fiction. Exactly. You were the property
of your father, and then upon marriage, your
legal existence was effectively suspended and
just absorbed into your husband's. So to demand
to be treated as a rational independent mind
in that environment. I mean it wasn't just progressive
it was a profound rebellion. It was incredibly
radical. And to understand why she viewed that
traditional social structure not as this like
romantic ideal but as a literal trap we have
to look at her childhood it was basically domestic
warfare. Yeah she was born in Spittlefields London
in 1759 second of seven children. And her father
started out with a pretty comfortable income,
right? He did, but he completely squandered it
on these disastrous speculative farming projects.
And as his financial power collapsed, he compensated
by asserting his physical power. Right, he was
a violent alcoholic who regularly beat Mary's
mother. Which is just horrific. It is. And that
dynamic is so crucial to understanding Mary.
She spent her teenage years literally sleeping
on the landing outside her mother's bedroom door
to protect her from his drunken rages. Oh, wow.
So she absorbed, at a completely visceral level,
that economic dependence in a marriage could
directly equate to physical danger. Precisely.
And because of that, she became this fiercely
protective matriarch to her siblings, especially
her sisters, Everina and Eliza. Which perfectly
sets the stage for this deeply controversial
pivotal choice she makes in 1784. So her sister
Eliza had recently married and given birth. But
she was suffering from a total psychological
collapse, what we would totally recognize today
as severe postpartum depression. Right. And Mary
observes this situation and decides the marriage
itself is what's destroying her sister. So. Her
solution is extreme. She orchestrates an escape.
Yeah, she literally persuades Eliza to flee the
house and completely abandon her husband and
her infant child. And Mary hides her away until
a legal separation is forced. But the fallout
from that was swift and brutal, isn't it? Oh,
absolutely. By leaving her husband and child,
Eliza suffered total social excommunication.
She couldn't legally remarry, so she was condemned
to a life of poverty, just scraping by through
grueling work. The human cost was devastating.
But I had to play Dell's advocate here, though.
Wait, so Mary's idea of a rescue mission was
to convince a woman suffering from postpartum
depression to abandon her baby and become a total
social outcast. Yeah, when you put it like that.
I mean, that sounds incredibly destructive. How
is this a triumphant origin story for a philosopher?
Well, it is destructive and it's certainly not
a neat triumphant narrative. But what's fascinating
here is that it illustrates her absolute uncompromising
willingness to challenge ironclad social norms.
Right. This wasn't an academic exercise for her.
She watched her mother destroyed by submission
and she believed she was watching her sister
lose her sanity in the exact same institution.
So she viewed the traditional structure of female
dependence as basically a burning building. Exactly.
You don't politely unlock the door of a burning
building. You shatter the window and drag the
person out, even if they get cut on the glass.
She prioritized psychological survival over social
respectability. OK, that makes sense. But without
the safety net of a family or a marriage, Mary
still had to survive economically. And the options
for a poor but respectable woman back then were
pretty bleak. Very bleak. I mean, she tried being
a ladies' companion, which she found deeply humiliating.
She tried setting up a school in Newington Green,
but that collapsed financially. Yeah. And then
she worked as a governess in Ireland for the
untral wealthy Kingsborough family. And while
she actually loved the children, she absolutely
despised the subservience she had to show to
their aristocratic mother. Right, because those
roles... governess, companions. They were essentially
just different flavors of servitude. They required
women to shrink themselves. And she was so frustrated
by that reality, so she decides to invent a completely
new path. She actually writes to her sister,
declaring she's going to become, quote, the first
of a new genus. I love that. The first of a new
genus. Basically, she decides to become a professional
female author. So she moves to London, sets up
shop on Dolben Street, and teams up with a liberal
publisher named Joseph Johnson. She's incredibly
driven. She learns French and German. She translates
texts, writes reviews, and she just immerses
herself in this circle of radical thinkers. Right.
Dining with people like Thomas Paine and the
philosopher William Godwin. And it's in this
intellectual crucible that she really hones her
voice. She realizes she doesn't just want to
write fiction or polite essays. She wants to
dismantle the political philosophy of her time.
Which brings us to the works that cemented her
legacy. First, in 1790, A Vindication of the
Rights of Men, and then her 1792 masterpiece,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Yes, the
heavy hitters. Now, to understand the explosive
nature of these texts, we have to look at the
political battlefield. Her first vindication
was a direct, aggressive attack on conservative
Whig MP Edmund Burke. Right, because Burke had
just published this famous defense of the monarchy,
the aristocracy, and the traditional social order.
all in response to the French Revolution. Of
course. And in that historical context, Burke's
argument relied heavily on emotion and tradition.
He used highly gendered language, essentially
arguing that the state was like a vulnerable,
beautiful woman. Specifically Marie Antoinette,
right? Exactly. And that this vulnerable woman
needed the chivalrous protection of the aristocracy.
He associated beauty with feminine weakness and
used that emotional imagery to drum up loyalty
for the crown. And Wollstonecraft saw right through
that. She recognized exactly what he was doing,
and she argued that politics must be rooted in
cold, hard reason, not emotional manipulation
and hereditary privilege. Right. She was laying
the groundwork for her next book, taking that
demand for rational equality and turning it toward
the condition of women. Which leads to a vindication
of the rights of women, where she makes this
foundational claim. Women are not naturally inferior
to men. They only appear that way because society...
deliberately denies them an education. Yes, it's
an argument about systemic deprivation. The source
quotes this amazing part where she famously compared
uneducated pampered women to spaniels and toys
roaming around a guilt cage seeking only to adorn
their prison. It is a harsh metaphor, but she
was calling out an educational system that taught
women. You know, needlework, basic piano, and
superficial charm solely to catch a husband.
It's like trying to run a marathon while wearing
a tightly -laced corset. Exactly. If the runner
collapses, society says, look, she is naturally
weak, she lacks the stamina. Wollstonecraft was
pointing at the corset. She was saying, you have
physically and intellectually bound women from
childhood, and then you have the audacity to
claim their weakness is the design of nature.
It's such a powerful way to frame it. But here's
where it gets really interesting. The source
points out she explicitly admitted in the text
that men might have superior physical strength
and valor based on the constitution of their
bodies. She did write that, yes. And she didn't
even use the word feminist. So to modern ears,
isn't that a massive contradiction for the supposed
founder of feminist philosophy? Well, we really
have to calibrate our vocabulary to her era.
The word feminist didn't even exist until the
1890s, a full century later. Oh, wow. Good point.
Yeah. And Wollstonecraft was not arguing for
identical biological sameness. Her argument was
theological and philosophical, that men and women
are equal in the eyes of God. Right. She posed
a brilliant question. If virtue has only one
eternal standard, how can virtues differ between
the sexes? You can't have one moral standard
of truth and reason for men and a separate standard
of submissive emotional manipulation for women.
Okay, that makes total sense. So having mapped
out the architecture of radical equality on paper,
she doesn't just stay at her desk in London,
she decides she needs to witness the birth of
a society based on reason. She does. She packs
her bags. Yeah. In December 1792, she heads straight
into the epicenter of global upheaval, Paris,
France. And she arrives right on the precipice
of the reign of terror. The timing is almost
unbelievably dangerous. I mean, she gets there
about a month before King Louis XVI is guillotined.
She actually watches him being escorted to his
trial from her window and weeps at the sight.
It's just incredible to imagine her there. And
soon, France goes to war with Britain. Suddenly,
Mary is an enemy alien in a country descending
into absolute paranoia. The Jacobins seize control,
and the daily reality becomes this nightmare
of surveillance. Right. Friends disappearing
to the guillotine forced public displays of loyalty
to the Republic. It was terrifying. And amidst
this atmosphere of constant terrifying violence,
she seeks a lifeline. She meets Gilbert Imlay.
Ah, yes, Gilbert Imlay. He's an American adventurer.
Yeah. And Mary, who just for a whole book explicitly
warning women not to be ruled by their passions,
falls completely recklessly in love with him.
They sleep together out of wedlock. And to protect
her from being imprisoned by the Jacobins, Imley
registers her as his wife at the U .S. Embassy,
which grants her American citizenship. Right.
But while Mary is pregnant, and navigating a
literal revolution. Imlay is busy chartering
ships to run the British blockade. He's smuggling
food and soap into France and selling it at an
exorbitant premium. He was straight up a wartime
profiteer. He's the 18th century equivalent of
a sleazy finance bro. He is capitalizing on the
blockade while she is having his baby Fanny in
a foreign war torn country. And eventually. The
profiteer loses interest. He leaves her in Paris,
goes back to London, and starts a relationship
with another woman. Which is just devastating.
When Mary finally returns to London and realizes
the extent of his betrayal, she completely shatters.
She attempts suicide twice. The second time is
chillingly methodical. Yeah, the source details
this. She walks up and down in the rain for half
an hour to ensure her clothes are heavy with
water, then jumps off a bridge into the freezing
river Thames. She is only saved because a passing
boatman spots her and pulls her out unconscious.
She later wrote that she viewed that suicide
attempt as a deeply rational act, a fixed determination.
The pain was just absolute. But I struggle with
this, though. She wrote an entire treatise telling
women not to be the prey of their senses, right?
Warning that being blown about by every gust
of feeling destroys a woman's capacity for reason.
Right, that was a core part of her philosophy.
Then she completely loses herself over a guy
who is blatantly ignoring her and she jumps in
a river. Doesn't her agonizing breakdown invalidate
the very philosophy she championed? It's the
exact paradox that her critics have always seized
upon. But if we connect this to the bigger picture,
the reality of her breakdown actually deepened
her philosophical work. How so? Well, while in
France, she was writing an historical and moral
view of the French Revolution. In that work,
she analyzed how the oppressive French monarchy,
the ancient regime, conditioned women to use
manipulation and charm. Right, even Queen Marie
Antoinette. Because society valued their bodies
over their intellects. Exactly. Through her heartbreak
with Imlay, Mary was realizing firsthand that
this conditioning, this sensibility, wasn't just
a bad habit you could turn off. It was physically
deeply ingrained. Oh, I see. You cannot just
flip a switch to pure cold reason when society
has spent decades programming your nervous system
for emotional dependence. Wow. So hitting absolute
rock bottom in the waters of the Thames forced
her to confront the agonizing gap between her
rational theories and her messy human reality.
Yes. And she had to find a way to drag herself
back to life, which led to one of the most bizarre
business trips in history. Seriously. To try
and win M. Lay back, she agrees to act as his
legal proxy. she undertakes this incredibly grueling
journey to Scandinavia. She takes her baby daughter
Fanny and a maid and travels to Scandinavia to
track down a Norwegian sea captain who had stolen
a shipment of Himalayan silver. Just picture
the sheer grit of this. An unescorted single
mother in 1795 traversing the rugged, isolated
landscapes of Sweden, Norway and Denmark conducting
forensic accounting with hostile merchants. It's
wild, but what is truly brilliant is how she
processed that experience. She turned that desperate
errand into a wildly popular travel narrative,
letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
She basically writes a best seller out of her
heartbreak. The book weaves her melancholic reflections
on nature with sharp critiques of commerce, which
she clearly associates with the mercenary Imlay.
And returning to London, the success of the book
helps her finally close the door on him. She
re -enters the intellectual scene and rekindles
her acquaintance with the philosopher William
Godwin. The same Godwin she'd clashed with at
a dinner party years earlier. Right. But he read
her Scandinavian travel book and remarked that
it was a book calculated to make a man fall in
love with its author. They developed this profound,
deeply intellectual connection and soon she is
pregnant again. which forces a massive ideological
collision. A huge collision. Wait, because Godwin
literally wrote a famous philosophical treatise,
Political Justice, advocating for the abolition
of marriage, viewing it as an oppressive monopoly,
and Mary was notoriously anti -patriarchal marriage.
Very anti -marriage. So why on earth did these
two famous rule -breaking radicals quietly go
to a church in St. Pancras and tie the knot?
It was the ultimate pragmatic compromise. They
knew exactly how punitive and cruel their society
was. Mary had lived it. Right. She saw her sister's
ruin, and she had endured the immense stigma
of raising Fanny as an unmarried mother. Exactly.
So they chose to sacrifice their public ideological
purity to shield their unborn child from that
brutal social ostracization. But they managed
the compromise brilliantly. They moved to Summerstown,
but Godwin rents an apartment 20 doors down the
street for his study. They maintained completely
separate living spaces, often communicating via
notes delivered by servants. They designed a
marriage that preserved their individual intellectual
boundaries. It was a profoundly modern arrangement.
They found a way to be legally bound while remaining
fiercely independent. It seemed Mary had finally
engineered her perfectly balanced ending. But
the universe is rarely that neat. No, it isn't.
On August 30th, 1797, she gives birth to her
second daughter, Mary, who, by the way, will
grow up to write Frankenstein. The delivery initially
seems fine, but the placenta fails to deliver
completely. An infection sets in. Child bed fever.
And 11 days later, Mary Wollstonecraft dies of
sepsis at the age of 38. Godwin was shattered.
He wrote to a friend stating he firmly believed
her equal did not exist in the world and that
he would never know happiness again. Which brings
us back to where we started. Driven by grief
and a desire to honor her complete humanity,
Godwin publishes his memoirs of the author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798.
And he holds nothing back. He details her lack
of religion, the out of wedlock child, the obsessive
love for Imlae, and the suicide attempts. And
society reacted with vicious glee. The conservative
press, already terrified by the radicalism of
the French Revolution, weaponized her life story
to discredit her political ideas. She was literally
labeled a hyena in petticoats. By presenting
her unapologetically, Godwin handed the establishment
the excuse it needed to bury her work. So basically,
Godwin overshared before the internet even existed,
and accidentally got his own late wife historically
canceled. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
And this raises an important question, right?
It shows how society historically demands moral
purity from female thinkers in a way it rarely
does from men. That is so true. For almost a
century, she was historically cancelled. Writers
like Jane Austen suddenly nodded to Mary's ideas
in her novels, but Austen never dared print Mary's
name. It wasn't until the late 19th century that
the suffragettes dared to exhume her legacy.
Millicent Fawcett wrote an introduction to the
centenary edition of Rights of Woman in 1892,
claiming her as the intellectual foremother of
the struggle for the vote. But even today, how
we remember her is fraught. Take the 2020 controversy
over the commemorative sculpture in London by
Maggie Hamblin. Oh, the silver statue, yes. Right,
it featured a small nude symbolic female figure
rising out of a silver mass. And critics were
furious, arguing it diminished her by focusing
on a stereotypical naked body rather than her
formidable intellect. It perfectly encapsulates
the ongoing struggle to reconcile her brilliant
mind with her physical bodily reality. But I'd
ask you listening to reflect on this. How often
do we let a person's messy personal life blind
us to the brilliance of their ideas? The fact
that we now read her life alongside her philosophy,
embracing that messy human reality, it shows
that the world is finally catching up to Mary.
The messiness wasn't a distraction from her genius.
It was the crucible that forged it. So what does
this all mean? We started this deep dive looking
for the real woman behind the heavy titles. And
we found a thinker who clawed her way out of
an abusive home, shattered the theoretical foundations
of inequality, and stared down the French Revolution.
Chased a stolen silver shipment across the Scandinavian
wilderness, and loved with a ferocity that almost
killed her. She was exactly what she set out
to be, the first of a new genus. I will leave
you with a final thought to ponder. When Mary
died at 38, her desk was covered with unfinished
work. There was a fragment called Lessons, and
most tantalizingly, a set of notes titled Hints
Outlines meant for a second volume of Gil, A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A second
volume. Right. Imagine for a moment if Mary hadn't
died. Having finally found a stable, intellectually
equal partnership with Godwin, what would that
second volume have looked like? fascinating to
think about. How might the agonizing heartbreak
in Paris, her confrontation with her own deep
-seated emotional conditioning, and her ultimate
domestic happiness have reshaped her revolutionary
theories? It's a ghost of a masterpiece waiting
in the margins of history for you to explore.