English writer, educator, and radical whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is the founding text of modern liberal feminism. Wollstonecraft's life — governess, schoolmistress, translator, traveler, eyewitness to revolutionary Paris, lover of Gilbert Imlay and then wife of William Godwin, mother of Mary Shelley — was as unconventional as anything she wrote, and for a century after her death the scandal of her biography was used to discredit her ideas.
Vindication was written in six weeks, in answer to French proposals that would exclude women from Revolutionary public education. Its central argument is simple and devastating: if the claims of Enlightenment reason apply universally — and Thomas Paine and others were asserting them loudly on behalf of common men — then there is no principled ground for excluding half the species. The supposed frivolity and emotional instability of women are not natural but manufactured, the predictable result of an education that systematically stunts their reason and trains them for decorative dependence. Give women real education, recognize them as rational moral agents, and the apparent differences largely dissolve.
She had earlier written A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a quick-response rebuttal to Edmund Burke's Reflections that beat Thomas Paine's Rights of Man into print by months. Her unfinished novel Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman extended the argument into fiction, tracing how law and custom trapped women regardless of class. She died of puerperal fever eleven days after the birth of the daughter who would later write Frankenstein.