The Life and Times of Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft

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Vargas

The Life and Times of Mary Wollstonecraft

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Melania Vargas

Miss. Nelly Valdivia

AP Euro History

4 December 2015

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Melania Vargas

Miss. Nelly Valdivia

AP Euro History

4 December 2015

The Life and Times of Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English philosopher, scholar, women's rights activist, educator and journalist. Her most famous book “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” sought for educational reforms of women. She is known to be one of the first modern day feminists. Mary went against the ideology that women only exist to please men. She is attributed of altering the traditional views on women, as well as giving women a place in the studies of science. She was important because thanks to her, women were more included in scientific and rational views, instead of religious and traditional ones.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born on April 27, 1759, in London, England. She had an abusive father who spent a lot of money on a series of unsuccessful ventures in farming. She was flustered by her father’s behavior and by her mother’s death in 1780, Mary went to live on her own. In 1784, her sister, her best friend, and Mary founded a school in Newington Green. From these experience in teaching, she wrote the pamphlet Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). When the school was shut down, Wollstonecraft went to work as a governess in an Irish house. She didn’t like the job at all, in fact, she hated it. Her boss went against everything that Mary thought was correct, so she left. In 1788 she began working as a translator for the London publisher James Johnson, who later published several of her works. In 1792, she left England and went to France, this was during the French Revolution. There, she met an American Capitan and fell in love with him. She got pregnant but never married, and she had her first daughter in 1794. She had a lot of problems going on in her life which led her to fall into depression and attempt suicide. After all of this she returned to England and joined a group of writers that specified in radical politics. Here she met William Godwin, who became her spouse and the father of her second baby girl, Mary Shelly. Their marriage was quite short, since Mary Wollstonecraft died 11 days post-partum. (Janet Todd, BBC.co.uk) (Encyclopedia Britannica editors, Encyclopedia Britannica)

Though Mary had a short