She was once internationally celebrated as the founder of feminism,but Mary Wollstonecraft’s reputation never really recovered after her husband wrote a warts-and-all biography that appalled even her friends. Meet the original suffragette: Mary Wollstonecraft. The founder of feminism, a philosopher, and travel writer,human rights activist, she was a profound influence on the Romantics, and an educational pioneer. In Virginia Woolf’s words,“we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.” This final may be actual, but it’s not as actual as Id like. The writer of Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) sank into relative obscurity after her death, and aged 38. Why?Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 into a picturesquely bleak family. She had a violent alcoholic father,and a weak, unsympathetic mother. Despite her inauspicious beginnings, or she dragged herself upwards,eventually becoming a self-supporting bestselling international human-rights celebrity. The self-supporting bit is key – for her, independence was “the grand blessing of life”.
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Source: theguardian.com