検索キーワード： "Mary Wollstonecraft" 政治学・社会科学

Mary Wollstonecraft is the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. She has been called Britain’s first feminist. Her daughter Mary Shelley is the author of the novel Frankenstein (1818). This biography was written by Elizabeth Robin Pennell. It was her first book, written before she was thirty. She was married that year to illustrator and artist Joseph Pennell.

First published in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman tackles many of the punitive patriarchal attitudes that dominated 18th-century society. With warmth and passion, Mary Wollstonecraft urges women to prioritize reason over emotion - a necessary step in building the strength of character required to break free from male notions of female fragility and foolishness. Wollstonecraft bases much of her argument in the case for women's education.

Mary Wollstonecraft is widely hailed as the mother of modern feminism. The book that made her famous, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a work of worldwide renown. Yet the range of her achievements as a thinker and writer reach far beyond this text. She was a multi-faceted author, and although the condition of women was a constant preoccupation throughout her life, she wrote on a wide variety of topics and in a range of literary forms, some of which she created herself.

Mary Wollstonecraft, often described as the first major feminist, is remembered principally as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and there has been a tendency to view her most famous work in isolation. Yet Wollstonecraft's pronouncements about women grew out of her reflections about men, and her views on the female sex constituted an integral part of a wider moral and political critique of her times which she first fully formulated in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).

One of the earliest works of feminist philosophy, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman advocates for the education of women in a time where the opposite belief was predominately held. Written during the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft's work had a significant impact on those advocating for women's rights during the nineteenth century.

Set against the backdrop of a world and society in turmoil during the various revolutions across the globe, and written before the term “feminism” had become popularized, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a treatise that explains the ways in which women were mistreated and marginalized. Specifically, this explication was writing to respond to a particular popular idea of the time: that women were unsuited for getting their own educations and were better off living private, quiet lives in service of husbands.

Mary Wollstonecraft is an undisputed icon for women’s rights, and this is not a status she earned lightly. Daring to demand equality at a time when it was incredibly risky to do so, Wollstonecraft developed a long resume of standing up to those that wished to subvert her rights and the rights of those she loved. She stood up to her own father as a teenager when he abused her mother, and she didn’t hesitate to help her sister escape from a similarly tyrannical husband.

Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner.