Mary wollstonecraft

The Anglo-Irish feminist, intellectual and writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, was born in London, the second of six children. Her father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, was a family despot who bullied hiswife, Elizabeth Dixon, into a state of wearied servitude. He spent a fortune which he had inherited in various unsuccessful ventures at farming which took the family to six different locales throughoutBritain by 1780, the year Mary's mother died.
At the age of nineteen Mary went out to earn her own livelihood. In 1783, she helped her sister Eliza escape a miserable marriage by hiding her from abrutal husband until a legal separation was arranged. The two sisters established a school at Newington Green, an experience from which Mary drew to write Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: WithReflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (1787). Mary became the governess in the family of Lord Kingsborough, living most of the time in Ireland. Upon her dismissal in 1787,she settled in George Street, London, determined to take up a literary career.
In 1788 she became translator and literary advisor to Joseph Johnson, the publisher of radical texts. In this capacityshe became acquainted with and accepted among the most advanced circles of London intellectual and radical thought. When Johnson launched the Analytical Review in 1788, Mary became a regular contributorof articles and reviews. In 1790 she produced her Vindication of the Rights of Man, the first response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. She was furious that the man who hadonce defended the American colonies so eloquently should now assault the sacred revolution and libel Richard price, a close friend of her Newington days.
In 1792, she published her Vindication on theRights of Woman, an important work which, advocating equality of the sexes, and the main doctrines of the later women's movement, made her both famous and infamous in her own time. She ridiculed...