Mary Wollstoncraft

At this moment in time, American women take their independence and personal freedoms for granted. A realization that women around the world do not have life as well as American women has become more recognized; especially as we learn more about women in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. Contact with women's rights subjects, including the Women's Suffrage movement and the equal rights movement, often only come from history or government classes for American women. How these events influenced the freedoms that American women have today comes from no more than a general understanding. Today, an American woman would give little thought about personal freedoms unless there was controversy about equal pay or job advancement in the work place. Thought has rarely been given to an earlier time when women around the world had little or no say in anything concerning their lives.

Throughout most of the world's history, social and political systems were of a patriarchal design. This meant that males were superior and had supremacy over females. First to their fathers or male family members, then to their husband and family, women have always been servants to men. From a man's point of view, a woman was obviously the deficient sex. The viewpoint was that women were naturally inadequate. Besides a weaker biological body, women were perceived to have difficulty with any kind of rational thought. The principle was that women were entirely incapable of investigating new concepts , generating original ideas, or evaluating innovative impressions about the world they lived in.

Profound things happened in the eighteenth century that changed the way a number of people viewed the world. Europe was the center of the world in the 1700's, and then shifts started to happen. America had broken away from England. France had a Revolutionary War. Many people were restructuring how they perceived their world.

Unreasonable political tolerance was being challenged. New philosophical theories were come to light. Social transformations were set in motion. An event also happened that would alter how women saw themselves in the world and how they were regarded by men. This incident was the birth of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Wollstonecraft was probably never mentioned in anything you have read before. Her approach to life was that women did have unconditional individual rights. A thought considerably before her time. Her most famous book on the subject was "A Vindication of the Rights of Women." The book was a substantial milestone in the state of affairs surrounding women's rights, though not truly appreciated in her generation. Wollstonecraft sought to inspire her readers with her contemporary attitude. Sequentially, she wanted to accomplish some no-nonsense reorganization in public procedures and societal ideas about women. Today, Wollstonecraft would be called a feminist. What is a feminist? Simply put, a person with a commitment to the eradication of male domination in human society.

Throughout the ages, the highest aspiration a woman could have was to be the wife of an important and/or wealthy man. Even so, a woman became the property of the man upon marriage and was unable to divorce, leaving women powerless in unhappy marriages. A woman had no rights, freedoms, or liberties unless her husband granted them to her. An unmarried woman usually had even less freedom. Care of her husband, children and home was all that a woman could do with her life. Wollstonecraft believed that a women's assessment should not be calculated by men's value. Let me give you a brief history lesson so you can understand the experiences that ruled her life.

The year of 1759 brought Wollstonecraft into an English household. There to welcome her was a subservient mother, an older brother, and an alcoholic, abusive father. Though her father later came into an inheritance, he quickly spent all of the money on failed ventures. With these financial failures, her father began to drink heavier, leading his violence to increase in intensity at home. Time also brought four more children into the family. Life was not easy for Wollstonecraft.

Before our current time, women rarely received any schooling. Wollstonecraft grew up with just the bare minimum of education; probably what we would consider as an elementary education. Beyond formal education, she had to teach herself. As most female children did, Wollstonecraft helped her mother and siblings. The family moved several times before Wollstonecraft finally left to be on her own.

As a child, Wollstonecraft knew she wanted to be independent and self sufficient. After watching her father dominate the family, Wollstonecraft vowed to never marry. Women before this time might have thought about this sort of notion. Never would a woman have acted on this type of contemplation.

Wollstonecraft discovered that she would have to find a way to reputably support herself in a world not wanting to give a woman work, even an unmarried one. Wollstonecraft began employment as a wealthy widow's companion. Later, Wollstonecraft and her sister started a girl's school. [It was here that the sisters truly began to believe that the young women they were trying to teach were already bound by society to be subordinate to men. Wollstonecraft began to look for ways to take women out from under men's dominance.] After financial trouble, Wollstonecraft closed the school and became a governess. When exploring ideas on how to increase her earnings, Wollstonecraft become conscious of the fact that she might be able to become a writer.

She began writing about subjects that were important to her; as in the education of women. Her publisher became a good friend and a substitute father figure in her life.

She wrote to make others aware that women where capable of innate knowledge; that women were able to comprehend new ideas and had the ability to act on their inspiration. For most, Wollstonecraft's ideas were considered adequate for reading, but the concepts could not to be accomplished.

Even her sexuality was ahead of its time, Wollstonecraft had several lovers before marriage. She had an affair with an American, while they both were in Paris. The union produced a baby girl. Along the way, Wollstonecraft continued to write. Later, after years of intermittent affairs and finally breaking her vow, Wollstonecraft marries an English social reformer, William Godwin. Soon after the birth of her second daughter, she died of complications from childbirth. With this exceptional understanding about Wollstonecraft's life, let me make clear how she surveyed the world around her.

The eighteenth century was part of the new Age of Reason or Enlightenment. It was held as a truth that the most distinctive attribute given to mankind