Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft ran a school, was a governess, and joined the radical publisher Joseph Johnson’s circle in London, where she answered Burke’s Reflections within a month in A Vindication of the Rights of Men and, two years later, extended the argument to her own sex in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the founding text of feminism. She went to Paris to watch the Revolution, had a daughter by an American adventurer, twice attempted suicide, married William Godwin, and died giving birth to the daughter who became Mary Shelley. Godwin’s candid memoir destroyed her reputation for a century.