Educating Women

An international and intergenerational community of learning and inquiry on women, gender and education.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

Mary Wollstonecraft author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792),had little schooling and educated herself with help from neighbors' generous mentoring in what she called women's "school of adversity," to become perhaps the first major English advocate for government-funded universal schooling.  Like Catharine Macaulay, whose Letters on Education with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (1790) she admired, Wollstonecraft is a philosophical mother of coeducation.  Her most influential critical contributions to educational thought lie in her analysis of monarchist miseducation's dehumanizing sexual essentialism, sexual economy, and sexual immorality, implicit in the Divine Right of Kings and its corollary divine rights of husbands and parents.  Her most influential constructive contribution to educational thought is her republican thought experiment in coeducation as a nonviolent revolutionary strategy—multi-institutional, simultaneously public and private, for confounding the sex distinction, fostering sex equality, cultivating mutual inter-sex friendships, and educating citizen-mothers.

Having endured an abusive childhood, during which she taught her younger siblings to read and count, she left home in 1778 to provide for her own living, resolved never to marry.  After working as a lady's companion and seamstress and developing a strong loving friendship with Fanny Blood, they collaborated with Wollstonecraft's two younger sisters to found a single women's household and a day school in Rev. Dr. Richard Price's intellectually lively community of Religious Dissent at Newington Green.  Upon Fanny's death, Wollstonecraft closed the school and wrote Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) while serving as governess to two willful daughters of frivolous Irish aristocrats; one grew up educating herself in accord with her beloved governess's theories, studied medicine among professional men, betrayed her class as a notorious rebel, and took the name "Miss Mason" as mentor to Frankenstein (1831) author Mary Shelley, William Godwin's estranged daughter, whose birth had precipitated Wollstonecraft's early death in childbed.

Originally the name of a respected staff member at the Newington Green school, Miss Mason was also the fictitious teaching figure at the heart of Wollstonecraft's popular Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788),which narrates an early critical pedagogy for girls, whose second edition William Blake illustrated (1791).   Dismissed from her governess position, Wollstonecraft found in her publisher Joseph Johnson a wise mentor, devoted friend, and generous life-long patron.  A prosperous benefactor of Religious Dissent who deployed the print medium to educate the public, he published also the works of Godwin and Blake as well as William Wordsworth, Thomas Paine, and other English intellectuals who sympathized with the American and French Revolutions.  He welcomed Wollstonecraft into their heady circle—from whose conversational life she claimed an advanced education, becoming acquainted with visual arts, learning languages, and reading voraciously.  Johnson hired her to edit and write for his Analytical Review, which documents her abolitionism, and published all her written work.   Following Rights of Woman's publication, Wollstonecraft became a war correspondent in Paris, where she observed the French monarchy's violent demise, collaborated with Paine and Talleyrand on plans for the new republic's educational system, researched An Historical View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), and survived the Reign of Terror under the false pretense of having married an American.  Lovelorn after giving birth to daughter Fanny Imlay in France, she continued her self-education as a traveling single mother, from which experience she wrote what many literati consider her finest work, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), and survived two suicide attempts.  She and Godwin subsequently became friends; although both considered themselves marriage resisters, they made a joyously passionate and rational marriage, of whose sensitively worked-out egalitarianism and preparations for parental partnership their prolific mutual correspondence and his Memoirs of the Author of "The Rights of Woman" (1798) have left a detailed record, itself a radically educative contribution to gender history.  Besides the works already named, Wollstonecraft's oeuvre of educational thought includes Mary, A Fiction (1788), The Female Reader (1789), and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), as well as her unfinished, posthumously published Hints (for Rights of Woman's second part), Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, and Lessons (1798).
 
Further Reading

Miriam Brody, Mary Wollstonecraft: Mother of Women's Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press,2000. A scholarly biography for school-aged readers, vividly and responsibly told, with excellent in-text documentary illustrations and durable, washable cover. 

Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft.  New York: HarperCollins, 2005.  The most recent scholarly biography, a well-documented historical narrative of literary quality, accessible to undergraduate readers, with illustrations.

Susan Laird, Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophical Mother of Coeducation, with foreword by Jane Roland Martin; volume 15, Continuum Library of Educational Thought, ed. Richard P. Bailey. London: Continuum, 2008.  The most recent and extensive, interdisciplinary philosophical study of Wollstonecraft's educational thought—concise intellectual biography, followed by substantial exposition of her work, its reception, influence, and contemporary relevance.

Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985, chapter 4.  The most elegant, and also the first, late modern philosophical study of Wollstonecraft's educational thought, critically examined in comparative relation to thought on women's education by Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Catharine Beecher, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.  The most thorough scholarly biography, a candid, subtle,reasonable, and riveting narrative portrait, with illustrations.

Mary Wollstonecraft, The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.  One of the eighteenth century's finest letter-writers, Wollstonecraft documented much of her life in her correspondence.

Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. London and Washington Square, NY: Pickering & Chatto and New York University Press, 1989, seven volumes.  Many cheaper, paperback anthologies, facsimiles, abridgments, and other editions of Wollstonecraft's works are also available, but this is the definitive complete collection.

© Susan Laird 2009.