Mary Wollstonecraft

Wollstonecraft was born in London in 1759, grew up in poverty and domestic violence, and educated herself. She worked as a teacher, a governess, and a writer, and in 1792 published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a systematic argument that the exclusion of women from education and civil life was not natural but manufactured. She had watched the French Revolution promise universal rights and then quietly omit half the human race, and she was not content to be quiet about it. She traveled to Paris, witnessed the Terror, and fell into a profound depression. She survived two suicide attempts, fell in love with the political philosopher William Godwin, became pregnant, and died of puerperal fever eleven days after giving birth to the daughter who would write Frankenstein. She was thirty-eight.