Mary Wollstonecraft

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Mary Wollstonecraft (also known as the United Kingdom) was an English writer, scholar, and defender of women's rights from 1759 to 1797.

Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed many personal ties at the time, received more attention than her writing until the late twentieth century.

Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the pioneer feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her work as primary influences. During her brief career, she wrote books, essays, a travelogue, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book.

Wollstonecraft is best known for her book A Vindication of Women (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men but that education is the primary reason.

Both male and female should be regarded as rational beings, according to her, and a social order based on reason should be established. She widower of Wollstonecraft's death released a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle that had inadvertently ruined her image for almost a century.

However, Wollstonecraft's promotion of women's rights and critiques of traditional femininity became more popular with the emergence of the feminist movement at the start of the twentieth century. Wollstonecraft married philosopher William Godwin, one of the anarchist movement's forefathers, after two ill-fated affairs with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay (by whom she had a daughter, Fanny Imlay).

Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38, leaving several unfinished manuscripts behind.

Mary Shelley, her second daughter, died 11 days after giving birth to her second daughter, Frankenstein's accomplished writer and author.

Early life

Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, on April 27th. She was Elizabeth Dixon and Edward John Wollstonecraft's second child. Though her family had a comfortable income when she was a child, her father gradually squandered it on speculative causes. As a result, the family became financially poor, and they were often forced to relocate during Wollstonecraft's youth. The family's financial situation became so dire that Wollstonecraft's father begged her to fork over money that she would have earned at her youth. In addition, he was reported to be a sarcastic guy who would beat his wife in a fit of rages. Wollstonecraft abused her mother's bedside to shield her as a child. Wollstonecraft played a similar maternal role for her sisters Everina and Eliza throughout her life. She begged Eliza, who was obviously postpartum depression, to leave her husband and child; Wollstonecraft made all of the arrangements for Eliza to escape, demonstrating her willingness to defy social conventions in 1784. The human costs, on the other hand, were high: her sister was socially chastised, and because she did not remarry, she was doomed to a life of poverty and hard work.

Wollstonecraft's early life was inspired by two friendships. Jane Arden of Beverley was the first to be involved in the first. The two men read books together and attended lectures delivered by Arden's father, a self-styled philosopher and scientist. Wollstonecraft revelled in the Arden household's intellectual atmosphere and adored her relationship with Arden greatly, sometimes to the point of being obsessive. "I have developed romantic notions of love," Wollstonecraft wrote to her: "I have developed romantic expectations of marriage." I am a little odd in my feelings of love and marriage; I must have the first place or none." She opens a series of Wollstonecraft's letters to Arden, describing the tumultuous and depressing emotions that would haunt her throughout her life. The second and most important friendship was with Fanny (Frances) Blood, introduced by the Clares, a couple in Hoxton who became parental figures to her; Wollstonecraft credited Blood with opening her eyes.

Wollstonecraft, a widow in Bath, who was unhappy with her domestic life, leapt out on her own in 1778 and accepted a job as a lady's companion. However, Wollstonecraft had trouble getting along with the irascible woman (an instance she recalled when describing the drawbacks of such a position in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787). She returned home in 1780 after being called back to care for her dying mother. Wollstonecraft stepped in with the Bloods rather than returning to Dawson's employ following her mother's death. She discovered during the two years she was with the family that she had more invested in traditional feminine values than was Wollstonecraft. During her life, Wollstonecraft devoted herself to Fanny and her families, often offering pecuniary assistance to Blood's brother.

Wollstonecraft had envisioned living in a female utopia with Blood; they had intended to rent rooms together and assist each other emotionally and financially; but, the dream came to an end under economic hardships. Wollstonecraft, her siblings, and Blood formed a school in Newington Green, a Dissenting neighborhood, in order to make a living. Blood soon became engaged, and Hugh Skeys, her husband, and her partner, were all hoping that it would improve her health, which had never been precarious. Despite the change of environment, Blood's health worsened as she became pregnant, and Wollstonecraft dropped the school in 1785 and followed Blood to nurse her, but to no avail. In addition, her dropping out of the school resulted in its demise. The death of Blood in Wollstonecraft inspired her first book, Mary: A Fiction (1788).

Wollstonecraft's relatives helped her become the governess to the children of the Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family in Ireland after Blood's death in 1785. Despite the fact that she was unable to understand Lady Kingsborough, the children found her a motivating instructor; Margaret King, one of the daughters', later said she'had freed her mind from all superstitions.' Original Stories from Real Life (1788), some of Wollstonecraft's year, will feature in her only children's book, Original Stories from Real Life (1788).

Wollstonecraft eloquently describes in the chapter "Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Equated, and Left Without a Fortune," the woman was dissatisfied with the few career choices open to respectable yet poor women,'—an impediment that Wollstonecraft eloquently addresses in the chapter "Unfortunately, Poor Education is Alive"—an impediment that has left her widowed, the author explores This was a radical decision because, at the time, only women could support themselves by writing. She was attempting to become 'the first of a new genus' when she wrote to her sister Everina in 1787.' She migrated to London and was aided by liberal publisher Joseph Johnson to find a home and work to support herself. She learned French, German, and translated texts, most notably The Importance of Religious Opinions by Jacques Necker and Elements of Morality for the Use of Children by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann. For Johnson's periodical, the Analytical Review, she also wrote reviews, mainly of novels. Wollstonecraft's intellectual world widened during this period, not only because of the reading she did for her papers, but also because the company she retained: she attended Johnson's popular dinners and met the radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine and philosopher William Godwin. They were dissatisfied with each other for the first time when Godwin and Wollstonecraft met. Godwin had to hear Paine, but Wollstonecraft had sailed him all night long, disagreeing with him on almost every topic. Johnson, on the other hand, became more than a friend; she characterized him as a father and a brother in her letters.

Wollstonecraft lived on Dolben Street, in Southwark, an up-and-coming neighborhood after the opening of the first Blackfriars Bridge in 1769.

And though Wollstonecraft was still married, he pursued a friendship with artist Henry Fuseli. His genius, his epoch,'the grandeur of his soul, the ease of understanding, and lovely sympathy, she wrote. She suggested a platonic living arrangement for Fuseli and his wife, but Fuseli's wife was outraged, and he broke off the friendship with Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft decided to fly to France to avoid the humiliation of the incident and to attend the revolutionary events of the Rights of Men (1790). In reaction to Whig MP Edmund Burke's political reaction to the French Revolution, she had written the Rights of Men, a novel that made her famous overnight. Reflections on the French Revolution in 1790 were published on November 1, 1790, but Wollstonecraft was so enraged that she spent the remainder of the month writing her rebuttal. A Vindication of the Rights of Men appeared in a Letter sent anonymously on November 29, 1790; the second edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Men was published on December 1890, and this time the author Wollstonecraft revealed Wollstonecraft as the author.

The French Revolution, Wollstonecraft, was described as a 'glorious opportunity to gain more virtue and happiness than the hitherto enriched our world.' 'Time will reveal', rather than Burke's dismissal of the Third Estate as men of no account,' Wollstonecraft said. Burke praised Queen Marie Antoinette, the veiled beauty of the ancien régime who was surrounded by 'furies from hell in the abused form of the vilest of women,' during the marche from Versailles to Paris by a group of irrupt housewives.' By contrast, Wollstonecraft wrote of the same occasion: 'You [Burke] means women who earned a living by selling vegetables or fish, but there were no advantages of education,' while education was never.'

Wollstonecraft was compared to such luminaries as Joseph Priestley and Paine, whose Rights of Man (1791) would be the most popular of Burke's responses. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), her most popular and influential work, she continued to explore the ideas she had presented in Rights of Women. Wollstonecraft's fame spanned the English channel, for when French stateman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord visited London in 1792, he demanded that French girls be granted the same education as French boys were getting under the French republic's new regime.

Wollstonecraft left for Paris in December 1792 and arrived about a month before Louis XVI was guillotined. When she left for Paris, Britain and France were on the brink of war, and many warned her not to go. France was in turmoil. Helen Maria Williams, one of Britain's visitors, sought out other expatriates in the area, and joined the circle of expatriates then present. Wollstonecraft spent a lot more in Paris with moderate Girondins rather than the more radical Jacobins. It was clear that when Archibald Hamilton Rowan, the United Irishman, first viewed her in the city in 1794, it was at a post-Terrorist festival in honour of moderate radical leader Mirabeau, who had been a hero for Irish and English radicals before his death in April 1791 (from natural causes).

Wollstonecraft's old king, Louis XVI, was brought to the National Assembly, and much to her own surprise, 'the tears gushed] from my eyes as I saw Louis seated, with more dignity than I had expected from him in a hackney coach's coming to die, where so many of his race have triumphed'.

In February 1793, France declared war on Britain. Wollstonecraft tried to leave France for Switzerland but was refused permission. The Jacobin-ruled Committee of Public Safety took power in March, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship that would mobilise France for the first "real war" in Europe.

In France, life for foreigners has been extremely difficult. They were put under police surveillance at first, and they were required to obtain a residency permit based on six written statements from Frenchmen testifying to their country's loyalty to the republic. All foreigners were forbidden to leave France on April 12, 1793. Despite her love for the revolution, Wollstonecraft's life became more difficult, especially as the Girondins lost out to the Jacobins. As the Jacobins set out to annihilate their enemies, several of Wollstonecraft's French friends were unable to reach the guillotine.

Wollstonecraft had just published the Rights of Women, and she felt she was ready to put her theories into practice, and she did find her most unusual romantic relationship to date: Gilbert Imlay, an American adventurer, was enthralled and fell in love with him. Even though they weren't married, Wollstonecraft put her own principles into use by sleeping with Imlay, which was intolerable behaviour for a'respectable' British woman. Whether or not she was interested in marriage, she wasn't, and she seems to have fallen in love with an idealization of the man. Despite her dismissal of the sexual aspect of Marriage in the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft discovered that Imlay revived her interest in sex.

Wollstonecraft was to a certain extent disillusioned by what she saw in France, writing that the people under the republic still behaved slavishly to those who ruled despite the government's'venal' and 'brutal', to those who remained'venal' and 'brutal'. Wollstonecraft wrote: Despite her disenchantment, Wollstonecraft wrote: "Incredible."

The Jacobins' treatment of women offended Wollstonecraft. They refused to offer women equal rights, called 'Amazons,' and made it clear that women were not supposed to conform to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideal of helpers to men. Marie Antoinette was convicted of murdering her son on October 16th, 1793; she was found guilty of doing incest with her son. Although Wollstonecraft disapproved of the former queen, she was worried that the Jacobins would make Marie Antoinette's suspected sexual offences one of the principal reasons for the French people to dislike her.

Wollstonecraft came under suspicion as the Reign of Terror's regular arrests and executions began. She was, after all, a British citizen who was supposed to be a mentor of leading Girondins. Most of the Girondin leaders were guillotined on October 31, 1793; when Imlay broke the news to Wollstonecraft, she fainted. Imlay, by this time, was profiting from France's growing inflation by chartering ships to supply food and soap from America and avoid the British Royal Navy, which could be sold at a premium to Frenchmen who still had money. Imlay's blockade-running earned the respect and help of several Jacobins, ensuring his safety during the Terror, as he had wished. Imlay made a mistaken representation of Wollstonecraft to the US embassy in Paris, thereby making her an American citizen. Some of her relatives were not so lucky; many, including Thomas Paine, were arrested, and others were even guillotined. Her sisters believed she had been detained.

The Jacobins' life was 'nightmarish,' Wollstonecraft described. There were major daytime parades demanding that everyone turn up and applaud lest they be accused of inadequate service to the republic, as well as nighttime police raids to arrest 'enemies of the republic'.' Wollstonecraft wrote to her sister Everina in March 1794: "In a letter to her sister Everina, Wollstonecraft wrote: "Adama" is the word that rhymed "in March 1794."

Wollstonecraft was pregnant by Imlay and gave birth to Fanny, her first child, on May 14th, naming her after possibly her closest friend. Wollstonecraft was overjoyed when she told a friend, 'My little Girl starts to suck so MANFULLY that her father insists saucily on her writing the second part of the R[igh]ts of Women.' (emphasis hers). Despite not only her pregnancy and the challenges of being a new mother alone in a foreign country, but also the growing French Revolution, she continued to write. An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, published in London in December 1794, while Le Havre, northern France, wrote a history of the early French Revolution. Imlay was forced to leave her after being dissatisfied with domestic-minded and maternal Wollstonecraft. He promised to return to her and Fanny at Le Havre, but Wollstonecraft discovered another woman after being delayed in writing to her and Fanny. Her letters to him are full of needy expostulations, many of whom are characterized as the expressions of a deeply distraught woman, while others claim they resulted from her circumstances—a foreign woman alone with an infant in the midst of a movement that has seen good friends imprisoned or executed.

Wollstonecraft celebrated the fall of the Jacobins in July 1794, predicting that it would be followed by a repression of press freedom in France, which led to her return to Paris. Imlay left London in August 1794 and promised to return soon. The British government had launched a crackdown on radicals, banning civil rights, enforcing radical surveillance, and attempting to treason anyone suspected of sympathy with the revolt, which caused Wollstonecraft to fear she would be detained if she returned to prison.

The winter of 1794–95 was Europe's coldest winter in more than a century, reducing Wollstonecraft and her daughter Fanny to dangerous circumstances. That winter, the river Seine became frozen, making it impossible for ships to transport food and coal to Paris, contributing to widespread starvation and deaths from the city's cold. Wollstonecraft continued to write to Imlay, asking him to return to France at once, claiming she had faith in the revolution and did not want to return to Britain. And to her sisters, she continued to refer to herself as 'Mrs Imlay' after leaving France on April 7, 1795, in order to bestow legitimacy on her child.

An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution by Tom Furniss was the most neglected of Wollstonecraft's books. It was first published in London in 1794, but a second edition did not appear until 1989. Later generations were more interested in her feminist writings than in her account of the French Revolution, which Furniss has dubbed her "best work." Wollstonecraft was not trained as a historian, but she did a good job showing how ordinary people in France responded to the revolution. Furniss was trying to combat the 'hysterical' anti-revolutionary mood in Britain, which depicted the revolt as a result of the entire French nation's going mad. Instead, Wollstonecraft argued that the revolution arose from a series of socioeconomic, economic, and political circumstances that left no other way out of the 1789 crisis that gripped France.

Wollstonecraft's Cultural and Moral Perspective of the French Revolution was a difficult balancing act. She condemned the Jacobin regime and the Reign of Terror, but at the same time, she said that the revolution was a major achievement that enabled her to avoid writing about the 1793-94 Terror. Edmund Burke had ended his Reflections on the French Revolution in France with a reference to the events of 5–6 October 1789, when a group of women from Paris compelled the French royal family from Versailles to Paris. Burke called the women 'furies from hell,' while Wollstonecraft defended them as ordinary housewives frustrated with the bread shortage to feed their families. Wollstonecraft depicted the queen as a femme fatale, seductive, scheming, and dangerous woman in contrast to Burke's romanticized image of her noble victim of a crowd. Wollstonecraft argued that the aristocracy corrupted women in a monarchy because women's main aim in such a society was to bear sons to continue a dynasty, which effectively limited a woman's worth to only her womb. In addition, Wollstonecraft pointed out that if a queen regnant, the majority of queen consorts were queen consorts, requiring a woman to wield her power by her husband or son, causing her to become more manipulative. Wollstonecraft argued that aristocratic values, including a woman's body and her ability to be charming over her mind and character, had encouraged women like Marie Antoinette to be manipulative and ruthless, turning the queen into a ruined and corrupting product of the ancien regime.

The historian John Adolphus, F.S.A., condemned Wollstonecraft's work as a "rhapsody of libellous declamations," in his Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolution (1799) and took particular aim at her portrayal of King Louis XVI.

Imlay, Wollstonecraft, a seeking, returned to London in April 1795, but he turned down her. Imlay attempted suicide in May 1795, presumably with laudanum, but Imlay saved her life (though it is unclear how). In a last attempt to recover Imlay, she started some company negotiations for him in Scandinavia, aiming to locate a Norwegian captain who had abducted with silver that Imlay was trying to get around the British blockade of France. Wollstonecraft survived the difficult ride with only her teenage daughter and Marguerite, her maid. During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in 1796, she recalled her travels and reflections in letters to Imlay, many of which were later published as Letters Written. She attempted suicide for the second time when returning to England and discovering that her Imlay relationship was over, she wrote a note for Imlay:

She then went out for a rainy night and "to make her clothes full of water," she walked up and down about half an hour before descending into the River Thames, but a stranger saw her leap and rescued her. After her rescue, Wollstonecraft found her suicide attempt to be highly rational.

Wollstonecraft returned to her literary life after being in touch with Joseph Johnson's circle again, especially with Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Sarah Siddons through William Godwin. The unique courtship between Godwin and Wollstonecraft began slowly, but it soon became a passionate passion affair. "If ever there was a book designed to make a man in love with its author, this seems to be the book," Godwin wrote in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In a way that fills us with nostalgia and leads to a sense of sadness, she also shows us in tenderness at the same time as she demonstrates a genius that commands all our praise." When Wollstonecraft became pregnant, they decided to marry so that their child would be legal. Wollstonecraft's marriage revealed that they had never been married to Imlay, and as a result, she and Godwin lost many friends. In his philosophical treatise on Political Justice, Godwin had advocated for the abolition of marriage. Godwin and Wollstonecraft married at 29 The Polygon, Somers Town, on March 29, 1797. As a result of a study, Godwin rented an apartment 20 doors away in Chalton Street in Chalton so that they could both maintain their independence; they often communicated by phone. They were, on all accounts, a happy and stable couple in a brief relationship.

Wollstonecraft gave birth to her second daughter, Mary, on August 30th. Although the initial delivery appeared to go well, the placenta burst apart during the pregnancy and became infected with childbed fever (post-partum fever) was a common and often fatal condition in the eighteenth century; Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia on September 10th, following multiple days of agony. Godwin was devastated: "I firmly believe there is no such thing as a woman equal in the world," he wrote to his friend Thomas Holcroft. We were all born to make each other happy, and I know it from experience. I have no intention that I will ever be happy again. "Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of A Vindication of Woman" was buried in the cathedralyard of St Pancras Old Church, where her tombstone reads: "Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman."

Educational works

The bulk of Wollstonecraft's early productions are about education; she assembled an anthology of literary extracts "for the advancement of young women" called The Female Reader, and she translated two children's books, Maria Geertruida van de Cambon's Young Grandison and Christian Gottmann's Elements of Morality. Her own writings on the subject also discussed it. Wollstonecraft's book Thoughts on Daughters (1787) and her children's book Original Stories from Real Life (1788), she believes in educating children in the emerging middle-class ethos: self-discipline, honesty, frugality, and social contentment. Both books emphasize the importance of teaching children to reason, comparing Wollstonecraft's academic history to seventeenth-century scholar John Locke's educational views. Nevertheless, her work distinguishes her work from others in the eighteenth century's discourse of sensibility. Both books also favor education of women, a contentious issue at the time and one that she would return to throughout her career, most notably in A Vindication of Women. According to Wollstonecraft, well-educated women will be excellent wives and mothers, contributing positively to the nation.

The Rev. Byron's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which was a defense of constitutional monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church of England, was released in reaction to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), as well as an assault on Wollstonecraft's friend, the Rev. A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) by Richard Price at the Newington Green Unitarian Church, Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) attacks aristocracy and promotes republicanism. Hers was the first reaction in a pamphlet war that later became known as the Revolution Controversy, in which Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1792) became the rallying cry for reformers and radicals.

Wollstonecraft sluggishly attacked not only monarchy and hereditary power but also Burke's language, which Burke used to defend and elevate it. Burke had screamed out of their scabbards to avenge even a glance at a glance that threatened her [Marie Antoinette] with insult, but the age of chivalry has passed. The majority of Burke's detractors deploded what they perceived as theatrical pity for the French queen, a pity that was out of proportion to the people's expense. Wollstonecraft's reaction to Burke's gendered words was unusual. She undermined Burke's rhetoric as well as his argument by redefining the sublime and the beautiful, terms first suggested by Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). Burke had equated beauty and femininity with strength and masculinity, with the sublime in height and masculinity; Wollstonecraft rebuts this assertion, arguing that his dramatic tableaux turn Burke's readers—the citizens—into poor women who are swayed by circumstance. Wollstonecraft scholar Claudia L. Johnson argues that Burke's defense of an unequal society based on woman passivity is unsurpassed in its argumentative power.

Wollstonecraft's arguments for republican virtue cite an emerging middle-class culture in reaction to what she sees as the vice-ridden aristocratic code of manners. She believed in change and chastised Burke for relying on tradition and custom. Burke's method, she claims, would result in slavery's continuation, simply because it had been an ancient tradition. She describes an idyllic country life in which every family can have a farm that will only meet its needs. Wollstonecraft compares her utopian vision of society, drawn from what she feels is genuine emotion, to Burke's false belief.

The Rights of Men was Wollstonecraft's first overtly political as well as her first feminist book; "it appears that in the act of writing the later portions of Rights of Men she discovered the subject that would interest her for the remainder of her life." It was this text that made her a well-known writer.

One of the earliest feminist works is A Vindication of Women. Wollstonecraft argues that women should have an education commensurate with their place in society and then go out of your way to rewrite that position, suggesting that women are more valuable to the society than simple wives because they educate its children and that they can be "companions" to their husbands rather than simply wives. Wollstonecraft insists that women are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men rather than viewing them as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage. Women's Rights are criticized by large sections of the Rights of Woman, as well as academic scholars such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wanted to deny women an education. (Rousseau argued in Émile (1762) that women should be educated for the pleasure of men.)

According to Wollstonecraft, many women are stupid and superficial (she refers to them as "spaniels" and "toys"), but that this is not due to an inherent deficiency of mind, but rather because men are denied access to education. Wollstonecraft is determined to show the deficiencies that women's deficient education has put on them; she writes: "The mind shapes itself to the body, and the body, not the physique, roaming round its gilt cage." Women could achieve a lot more if the young women are encouraged from an early age to concentrate on beauty and outward accomplishments, according to Sherry.

Although Wollstonecraft does advocate for equality between the sexes in particular areas of life, such as morality, she does not explicitly state that both men and women are equal. In the eyes of God, both men and women are equal. However, such assertions of equality contrast with her statements recognizing masculine power's sway and valour's deposition. Wollstonecraft writes ambiguously: "Let it not be found that I want to reverse the order of things; I have already granted" that, since the founding of their bodies, men appear to have been encouraged by Providence to have a greater degree of virtue. I speak collectively on the whole sex, but I see no reason to say that their virtues should be determined according to their nature. In fact, how can they be if virtue has only one eternal standard? If I reason appropriately, I must insist that they have the same straightforward course as there is a God." Wollstonecraft has since been characterized as a modern feminist, particularly because the term did not exist in the 1890s.

In Women, one of Wollstonecraft's most scathing critiques of the Rights of Woman is one of false and excessive sensibility, particularly in women. Women who succumb to sensibility are "blown about by every momentary whim" and therefore, they are "the prey of their senses" and cannot reason rationally. In fact, they do harm not only to themselves, but also to the entire civilisation: These are not women who can help refine a civilisation, according to a common eighteenth-century belief, but rather women who will destroy it. Wollstonecraft does not believe that reason and feeling should act independently of each other; rather, she believes that they should inform each other.

Wollstonecraft also has a concrete educational strategy, in addition to her larger philosophical arguments. According to the twelfth chapter of the Rights of Women's "On National Education," all children should be sent to a "country day school" as well as some education at home "to instill a love of home and domestic pleasures." She also maintains that schooling should be co-educational, arguing that both men and women, who are "the glue of society," should be "educated after the same model."

Wollstonecraft addresses her text to the middle-class, which she describes as the "most natural state," and a bourgeois view of the world. It inspires modesty and industry in its readers, as well as criticizing the uselessness of the aristocracy. However, Wollstonecraft isn't just a servant to the poor; for example, she suggests that the poor, except for those who are brilliant, should be separated from the rich and taught in another school.

Both of Wollstonecraft's books criticize what she saw as the patriarchical institution of marriage and its deleterious effects on women. Mary: A Fiction (1788), the eponymous heroine, is lured into a loveless marriage for economic reasons; she achieves her desire for passion and love outside of marriage with two passionate intimate relationships, one with a woman and one with a man. Maria: Or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), Wollstonecraft's most recent book, revolves around a woman held in a mad asylum by her husband; like Mary, Maria finds meaning outside of marriage in an affair with a fellow prisoner and a close friendship with one of her keepers. Both Wollstonecraft's books depict happy marriages, though she does not endorse such fidelity in the Rights of Woman. The heroine claims she is heading "to the world where neither marrying nor giving in marriage is allowed," indicating a healthy state of affairs at the end of Mary.

Both of Wollstonecraft's books examine the discourse of sensibility, a moral philosophy, and an aesthetic that had not existed at the end of the eighteenth century. Mary is itself a novel of sensibility, and Wollstonecraft attempts to debunk sentimentalism itself, a view she believes was damaging to women because it encouraged them to rely overtight on their emotions. The heroine's in The Wrongs of Women's indulgence in romantic fantasies created by novels themselves is particularly harmful.

Both of Wollstonecraft's books are based on female friendships, but it is Maria and Jemima's relationship, not the servant charged with watching over her in the insane asylum, that is the most noteworthy. This friendship, which is based on a sympathetic relationship of motherhood, is one of the first moments in feminist literature in which a cross-class argument is suggested, namely, that women of various economic statuses have the same interests as women.

Wollstonecraft's Letters is a personal travel tale written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The 25 letters range from sociological explorations of Scandinavia and its inhabitants to intellectual and philosophical concerns about citizenship to musings on Imlay's friendship (although he is not identified by name in the text). Wollstonecraft explores the relationship between the self and society by using the rhetoric of the sublime. Letters Published in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark highlights Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782): "the quest for human happiness, the stoic rejection of material products, the ecstatic embrace of nature, and the essential role of emotion in understanding." Rousseau does not fully reject society, however, Wollstonecraft's book honors domestic scenes and industrial development.

Wollstonecraft promotes subjective experience, particularly in relation to nature, in the search of sensuality and sensibility. Many of the letters refer to Scandinavia and Wollstonecraft's desire to create an emotional link to the natural world. She gives the imagination more weight in her previous work. She favors women's liberation and education, as she has written in previous books. In a change from her earlier works, she demonstrates the damaging effects of commerce on society by contrasting the social and mercenary senses, which she associates with Imlay.

Letters were written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft's most popular book in the 1790s. Most commentators praised it because it was well-received and was praised positively. "If ever there was a book plotted to make a man in love with its author," Godwin wrote. It inspired Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who drew on its own themes and its aesthetic.

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