Teen Sleuth Haunted Library

If you are going to only read one weighty tome this National Women’s Month, try this one, written 218 years ago. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects written in 1792 by British philosopher, travel writer, novelist and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy and one of the most original books of the 18th century. In it she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be because they lack education, and that both men and women should be treated as equal, rational beings. It’s said that Mary wrote to relieve her wounded spirit. She had a difficult childhood, the victim of poverty and an abusive, alcoholic father. From an early age, Mary decided, “I must be independent and earn my own subsistence or be very uncomfortable.”

Uneducated but ferociously auto-didactic (she was no “Bluestocking”), Mary believed in defining femininity and marriage for herself. Both of Wollstonecraft’s two novels criticize what she viewed as the patriarchal institution of marriage and its deleterious effects on women. In her first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), the heroine is trapped in a loveless marriage and finds love and affection with two passionate romantic friendships, one with a woman and one with a man. Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), an unfinished novel published posthumously and considered Wollstonecraft’s most radical feminist work, tells the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband, where she has an affair with a fellow inmate.

Mary’s first published work (in 1787) was an early version of the modern self-help book, Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life. Thoughts was a “conduct book” that offers advice on female education to the emerging British middle class.The book was not successful, and was not republished until the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s.

A “hyena in a petticoat” is how Horace Walpole described Mary Wollstonecraft. Many more were even meaner. I was sad to read that she was pilloried by, among others, Maria Edgeworth, whose work I love. Apparently she patterned the outlandish and “freakish” Harriet Freke in Belinda (1801) after Wollstonecraft.

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