Mary Wollstonecraft: life of the week | HistoryExtra podcast

Summary

The episode examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s life, political writing, and legacy. Guest Bee Rowlatt presents her as an Enlightenment thinker who argued for women’s equality and helped shape ideas about human rights, while emphasizing that Wollstonecraft’s unconventional and often difficult life informed her work.

Early life and self-education

• Born in Spitalfields in 1759, Wollstonecraft grew up in a family whose finances and social standing were declining. Her father was violent and did not believe girls needed an education.
• While her brother received formal schooling, Wollstonecraft was largely expected to stay quiet and conform. Rowlatt connects her early exposure to injustice and women’s lack of power with the force of her later writing.
• Wollstonecraft educated herself by making use of other people’s libraries and literary connections. She worked as a governess and companion before establishing herself as a writer.
• Rowlatt describes her as an autodidact who absorbed the argumentative styles of prominent male writers and used them to make her own case.

Radical politics and the French Revolution

• Wollstonecraft joined a community of radical dissenters in Newington Green. At the time, dissenters faced barriers to university education, political participation, and public influence.
• In 1790, she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men in response to Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution and on Reverend Richard Price, one of her mentors. The work defended revolutionary ideals and established her as a public political writer.
• In 1792, she travelled to Paris to witness the Revolution firsthand. She met political thinkers, including Thomas Paine, and experienced the violence and instability of the Reign of Terror.
• Although increasingly disillusioned by events in France, she continued to defend the Revolution’s ideals. Rowlatt says Wollstonecraft later looked to the American Revolution as an example of how oppressive systems might be overturned.
• Her account of her experiences made her, in Rowlatt’s description, an early female war correspondent.

Wollstonecraft’s arguments for equality

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) rests on two central claims:

• Women are human beings capable of reason and rational thought.
• Women must therefore be educated. Education is essential to equality and to women’s ability to participate fully in society.

These arguments challenged a society in which women had few legal rights and could lose much of their independence through marriage. Wollstonecraft compared women’s subordination to forms of slavery.

Rowlatt characterizes Wollstonecraft as a feminist, an early advocate of human rights, and an abolitionist. Wollstonecraft argued for rights and political recognition beyond the narrow group of privileged men.

Relationships and the Norwegian journey

• Wollstonecraft’s personal life often defied the conventions of her era. Rowlatt describes her as having intense attachments to both men and women, and says that simply visiting people without a chaperone could provoke social disapproval.
• In Paris, Wollstonecraft had a relationship with the American Gilbert Imlay and gave birth to their daughter, Fanny, outside marriage. Imlay later left her.
• Imlay persuaded Wollstonecraft to travel with Fanny to Scandinavia to search for a missing shipment of silver connected to his dealings. The journey inspired the letters later published as Letters from Norway.
• The book combines travel writing, memoir, political and economic observations, and descriptions of the people and places she encountered. It does not find the silver, and her relationship with Imlay ends.
• Rowlatt describes this period as a severe low point for Wollstonecraft, who attempted to take her own life. She later returned to London and rebuilt her writing career and independence.

Later writing and marriage to William Godwin

• Wollstonecraft later formed a relationship with philosopher William Godwin. They initially tried living in separate homes, but married after she became pregnant, in part because they had seen the stigma faced by unmarried mothers.
• Her later novel, Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, examined women’s oppression, including the lives of women trapped in sex work and women confined to institutions by their husbands. The novel remained unfinished at her death.
• Rowlatt also highlights Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, an early work that reflects Wollstonecraft’s longstanding interest in education.

Death and damage to her reputation

• Wollstonecraft died in 1797, aged 38, after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley. Rowlatt says infection following complications of childbirth caused her death.
• In his grief, Godwin published a biography that disclosed details of Wollstonecraft’s relationships, her child born outside marriage, and her suicide attempts. Rowlatt argues that this exposed her to years of public condemnation and damaged her standing as a political thinker.
• Her reputation suffered for roughly a century, even as her writing continued to be read and cited in other places.

Rediscovery and commemoration

• Wollstonecraft’s work was revived in Britain through the suffragist movement and later attracted renewed attention from second-wave feminists in the 1970s.
• The episode discusses Maggie Hambling’s 2020 sculpture commemorating Wollstonecraft in Newington Green. Rowlatt, who was involved in the project, explains that it was intended to represent the emergence of a movement rather than to serve as a conventional likeness or statue.
• The work drew criticism, including objections to its nudity and its departure from traditional commemorative statues. Rowlatt acknowledges that more conventional statues of women are also needed, while arguing that Wollstonecraft herself was unconventional.
• Rowlatt’s closing message is that Wollstonecraft’s core idea remains relevant: all people are capable of reason and can be educated. She quotes Wollstonecraft’s statement:

“I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves.”

Speakers and sources featured

Speakers

• Ellie Cawthorne — host and interviewer.
• Bee Rowlatt — guest and author of In Search of Mary.

Works and people discussed or cited

Mary Wollstonecraft’s works discussed include A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Letters from Norway, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, and Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman.

Historical and literary figures mentioned include William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Gilbert Imlay, Henry Fuseli, Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, William Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Maggie Hambling, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, John Adams, and Abigail Adams. These people are discussed or cited; they are not speakers in the episode.