Mary Wollstonecraft: biography of this pioneer of feminism

There are women who, throughout history, have championed equal rights and opportunities without distinction of sex.

This is the case of the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft. In this article we will review her life to better understand the aspects that marked her life and what her contributions were to what is known today as feminism; we will make it through a summarized biography of Mary Wollstonecraft.

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Short Biography of Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in the year 1759 in the city of London, England. Although in its early years, this family had a reasonably good economic level, a series of bad decisions of their their father led to their ruin, which curtailed Mary Wollstonecraft's chances of receiving a large inheritance in the future. To this was added that her father was a person who drank regularly and when he did, he physically abused his wife.

Childhood and youth

From her youth, Mary Wollstonecraft was already involved in the search for women's freedom and equal rights

. In fact, she managed to get Eliza, her sister, to leave behind a life that she did not satisfy, starting another away from her husband and her son of her, which was worth feeling the rejection of society and being doomed to a series of precarious jobs during the rest of his life. lifetime.

There were two friendships that marked the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. The first one was Jane Arden, whose father introduced the two to a scientific and intellectual environment that further aroused Mary's concerns. The friendship was so intense that Mary Wollstonecraft even considered that what she felt was romantic love for Jane Arden, even showing possessive and jealous behaviors with her.

The other person who left a mark on Mary Wollstonecraft was Fanny Blood, with whom she even She came to develop a life plan in common, not as a couple, but with mutual support on an economic and especially emotional level, something really transgressive for the time in which they lived. However, this plan was truncated because finally for Fanny Blood the traditions and social norms of her time weighed more.

However, this was not an obstacle to continue a strong friendship that would last a lifetime, and in which they even collaborated to build a school. Fanny's health was always quite delicate, so she traveled with her husband to different parts of Europe in search of the best doctors. They finally settled in Lisbon, where Mary Wollstonecraft moved to be able to be with her friend and give her the care she needed. Sadly, Fanny could not overcome her illness and she passed away.

First works

The death of Fanny Blood would be an event that would mark Mary Wollstonecraft for the rest of her life. In fact, the sadness she found herself in is clearly reflected in the plot of the first of the novels she wrote for years to come. After Fanny's death, Mary would return to her native country and start a new profession as a governess. for the distinguished Kingsborough family.

This work allowed her to develop one of her most important works of hers, Reflections on the education of daughters, and also in another, Original stories. In both volumes, Mary Wollstonecraft deals in detail with questions of etiquette and morals. quickly became popular, as middle-class families were keen to learn as much as possible about this theme.

Mary Wollstonecraft she makes the decision to abandon her profession as a governess and dedicate herself entirely to writing, doing translation and literary review work that allowed him an intellectual enrichment that would be reflected later in future works of her. At that time she began an affair with Henry Fuseli, an artist who was already married.

Wollstonecraft she proposed a romantic relationship of what today we would call polyamory, between the three parties, but Henry's wife flatly refused, which also meant the end of the relationship as lovers between Mary and him. After this disappointment, Mary Wollstonecraft would move to France and publish another of her most notable works: Vindication of the rights of man, which would be followed shortly after by what is possibly her masterpiece: Vindication of women's rights.

Stage in France and first couple

Once this book was published, Mary Wollstonecraft was already a figure in equality activism, impregnated in addition to the atmosphere of social change that reigned in the times of the French Revolution. Then she met the American Gilbert Imlay, with whom she would have her first daughter, Fanny Imlay, named after her late friend. Shortly after, she would publish another great work about the time she was living: A historical and moral vision of the origin of the French Revolution.

At the beginning of the war between France and England, and as she was a British citizen, they established themselves as marriage, despite not being legally married, in order to avoid any possible retaliation for their citizenship. With an increasingly tense situation, they moved to London. However, this family would not last long, because Gilbert abandoned them for another woman, which led Mary Wollstonecraft to commit a suicide attempt by poisoning., from which she was barely saved.

In later works, Mary spoke of this event as something absolutely rational and premeditated, logical consequence of the events experienced, and not as a visceral act, the result of despair and spite. After a brief period in which she tried to reestablish her relationship with Gilbert Imlay, traveling with him through the Scandinavian countries, the relationship was finally dissolved.

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Second partner and death

Following the end of her troubled marriage, Mary Wollstonecraft she focused again on her facet as a literary author, interacting with other British authors, among whom she met William Godwin, the one who in the end would become her great love. Godwin claimed to have fallen completely in love with Mary while he was reading her work, Letters written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, where she recounted the pain caused by the end of her relationship with Imlay.

This new love led to the second pregnancy of Mary Wollstonecraft, which led them to legally formalize the marriage, a fact that she revealed that Mary and Gilbert had never actually married, which was really scandalous for such a puritanical society as was the England of the eighteenth century. Even some friends came to deny them the word after this, something unthinkable in our days.

His death

Months later would come the sad death of Mary Wollstonecraft, who It happened because of an infection suffered while she gave birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley (that in her adult life she would become a famous writer, author of many works, among which the best-known novel of her stands out, Frankenstein). They were eleven days of agony, suffering the consequences of septicemia originating in childbirth, until finally, Mary Wollstonecraft died.

This dramatic death left William Godwin devastated, who claimed that he could never be happy again, after the loss of his beloved. She months later she would publish the work Memoirs of the author of Vindication of women's rights. It was a sincere work and written from the heart, but that did not make it without controversy, since brought to light different events that until then were only known to herself and people directly involved.

For example, it was as a result of this biography that society discovered that Mary Wollstonecraft's first daughter was the result of an illegitimate marriage, or even that she had tried to take her own life. Controversy aside, these writings made clear the strong personality and values ​​of Wollstonecraft, which would remain for posterity, being she today considered a pioneer of the feminist movement.

Although the memoirs published by her husband initially put the reputation of Mary Wollstonecraft into question, the truth is that They were the trigger that later her figure was popularized by her proposals on women's rights in a society as conservative as that of Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, she being a pioneer in most of these approaches.

For this reason, we could not understand today many of the advances achieved in the total equality of all citizens if we did not take into account the influence of such important figures as Mary Wollstonecraft, who suffered the rejection of society to achieve advances for generations to come. Serve as a tribute to her figure, therefore, these lines.

Bibliographic references:

• Kelly, G. (1992). Revolutionary feminism: The mind and career of Mary Wollstonecraft. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Poovey. M. (1985). The proper lady and the woman writer: Ideology as style in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. The University of Chicago Press.
• Taylor, B. (2003). Mary Wollstonecraft and the feminist imagination. Cambridge University Press.
• Todd, J. (2014). Mary Wollstonecraft: a revolutionary life. Bloomsbury Reader.