Mary Wollstonecraft, born in April 1759, near Spitalfields, London, was the fundamental writer responsible for the advocation and establishment of the individualist roots of equal rights. Through her life and works, Wollstonecraft embodied the climate of progress and liberty, demonstrated by revolutionary radicals in France and America whom she engaged with or was greatly influenced by (e.g. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Marquis de Condorcet). Mary, after being spurred to leave her family by financial problems, tried and failed to establish two schools (one in Islington and one nearby in Newington Green), before settling down in work as a governess for a family of Irish aristocrats. Her endeavours to found schools, and the role she ultimately found herself occupying, clearly exemplify her belief that women were just as entitled to an education as men; an idea she would go on to write much about.
In Wollstonecraft’s best known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. This idea addressed by Mary, although predating the publication by a century, is clearly mirrored in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Hardy presents Tess’ struggles as a result of her lack of experience and education, having only been educated in the religious ways of any Bible-loving, country folk of the time. Wollstonecraft also suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason. In Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, the signs of commonly diagnosed ‘hysteria’ are clearly displayed by Catherine Earnshaw, a Victorian woman of high socio-economic status who, due to the dominating patriarchal discourse, was expected to occupy a role of domestic felicity. However, as with in Wuthering Heights, contemporary literature depicts the nightmarish lives of house-bound women in which hysteria was a constant presence whether that be due to the restraint and denial of their true desires and character, or the confined nature of their living space, accumulating in Catherine’s desperate plea to Nelly to ‘open the window again wide’ due to an intense feeling of captivity and desire to escape onto the vast space of the moor.
Furthermore in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , Wollstonecraft denounced injustices of the British constitution which evolved during what she claimed to be the “dark days of ignorance, when the minds of men were shackled by the grossest prejudices and most immoral superstition.” She highlighted the aristocratic practice of passing family wealth to the eldest son, arguing that ‘the only security of property that nature authorises and reason sanctions is, the right a man has to enjoy the acquisitions which his talents and industry have acquired; and to bequeath them to whom he chooses.’ The issue of hereditary wealth is also discussed in Wuthering Heights through Heathcliff’s scheme to inherit the Heights on Hindley’s death, and Thrushcross Grange through his marriage to Isabella Linton. Heathcliff’s actions also explore the unjust treatment of women in marriage, forcing them to subject themselves, and all their belongings (property) to their husband, until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870. Due to this reason, Wollstonecraft had criticised marriage as a vehicle for exploitation, setting her firmly against it before she fell in love with (and subsequently married) fellow literary radical, William Godwin.
With A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft emerged in a class by herself. She went beyond her contemporary Catherine Macaulay who had written passionately about educating women. The publication sold out within a year, encouraging Johnson to issue a second edition. An American edition and translations into French and German followed. The influence and significance of Mary Wollstonecraft is undeniable, triggering controversy both in her time, and today as contemporary feminists look to her works for inspiration and guidance: as Virginia Woolf remarked about Wollstonecraft decades later, ‘we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.’ She took responsibility for her life, demanded justice for all, championed relationships based on mutual respect and love, educated herself, and showed how a woman could succeed regardless of situation.
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