Sophie Gee

The saddest thing about Mary Wollstonecraft and actually about Mary Shelley is that Mary Wollstonecraft died just a few days after giving birth to Mary Shelley from what must have been absolutely agonizing complications from childbirth.

And she was in her late 30s at the time.

Before that happened, before she died, she had done a truly extraordinary range and performance.

kind of intellectual breadth of projects, and here are some of them.

So she's born in the mid-18th century, in 1759, to a well-educated, reasonably well-to-do, but not particularly exalted family.

She ends up being quite well-educated, and she, from the outset, just has this...

sort of passion for doing what's right, for following the path of truth and for seeking out, you know, deeper realities, deeper truths that go beyond the platitudes and the sort of received social and moral wisdom of her day.

She's an immense intellectual and literal journeyer.

So her most famous book, of course, I think, is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which she publishes in 1792.

And it's in response to Thomas Paine and to many other male writers who are reacting to the French Revolution by celebrating it as this expression of unprecedented liberty, of a...

casting aside of tradition, of ancien regime oppression and hierarchies.

And, you know, they're celebrating this new dawn of European freedom and enlightenment.

And Wollstonecraft writes about the pressing need for the rights of women to be defended and identified.

And in the book, she writes that women are not inferior to men.

They appear to be because they lack education.

So she's a passionate critic.

advocate for women's education.

It's not what we would now think of as radically feminist in the sense that it's not setting aside heteronormative relationships.

It's not pushing back against marriage, but it's calling for a radical reconception.

of what a marriage should be.