Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London in 1759. In 1784 Mary opened up a school with her sister Eliza and her friend Fanny Blood in a small village named Newington Green. It was here that she befriended Richard Price. Price and his friend Joseph Priestly were leaders of a group known as Rational Dissenters. Price had written a book called Review of the Principal Questions of Morals (1758) in which he argued that individual conscience should be consulted when making moral choices, and rejecting the Christian ideas about sin and punishment. Though Mary was raised Anglican, she soon began attending Price’s chapel. It was at Price’s home that Mary met Joseph Johnson, a publisher, who commissioned her to write Thoughts on the Education of Girls, and two years later helped Johnson to found the journal Analytical Review. 

            In 1789 an argument broke out when Price preached a sermon praising the French Revolution. Edmund Burke, who was greatly angered at this, wrote in response Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which he argued for the rights of the monarchy. Mary, upset by the attack on her friend, in turn wrote a pamphlet called A Vindication of the Rights of Man. It was this pamphlet that brought Mary to the attention of other radical thinkers such as Tom Paine, John Horne Tooke, William Godwin, and William Blake.

            In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her most important work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In the book Mary attacked the institutions and educational restrictions that kept women in slavery. She called marriage little more that legalized prostitution and argued vehemently against a society that taught women their personal appearance was the height of importance.

            In 1793 Mary moved to France with the American writer Gilbert Imlay, and a year later gave birth to her first daughter Fanny. After her relationship with Imlay was finished she moved back to London and in 1797 married William Godwin. Her second daughter, Mary (the author of Frankenstein) was born but Mary Wollstonecraft died of complications during the birth.

            Below is a quote from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:

            “Ah! Why do women condescend to receive a degree of attention and respect from strangers different from that reciprocation of civility which the dictates of humanity and the politeness of civilization authorize between man and man? And why do they not discover, when, "in the noon of beauty's power", that they are treated like queens only to be deluded by hollow respect. Confined, then, in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch.” 1