Happy Birthday, Mary Wollstonecraft!

Today is Mary Wollstonecraft's 255th birthday! Women’s rights writer. She's read by heroine of my new book The Secret Bluestocking (coming soon on Kindle).

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759. She was an early women's rights activist, with a brief writing career. Her most well-known work is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argued that women were equal to men, but the fact was hidden by their lack of formal education.

She had many unconventional relationships over her life, which garnered more attention than her written works. She eventually married William Godwin, a philosopher and one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement. Wollstonecraft died ten days after the birth of her second daughter; she was thirty-eight.

Godwin published a memoir of Wollstonecraft's unconventional life. Sadly, it ruined her reputation for nearly a hundred years. However, when the feminist movement emerged early in the 1900s her thoughts on equality and femininity were once again regarded as important. Mary Wollstonecraft is considered one of the founding feminist philosophers.

An interesting aside, her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was an accomplished writer. She penned Frankenstein under the name Mary Shelley. Source: http://bit.ly/1iEgSW3