Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft's best-known work is her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a work in which she expounded in the ills facing women and on the need for justice for women. Her stand was considered radical, and as a result she had to portray her heroine in a special way:

The exaltation of feeling prized by Romantics posed severe problems for women. However liberating, female desire was singularly hard to express. women had to survive in a culture in which the search for personal fulfillment had no ready place. Small wonder then that Mary Wollstonecraft placed her heroine Maria in a prison for the insane, the better to cast into relief the terrible tension in a woman's mind resulting directly from her powerlessness (Alexander 10).

Alexander sees a clear distinction between mother and daughter in terms of their analysis of the lot of women

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literature, and Mary Wollstonecraft was both reacting to and part of this change. Women had been treated harshly in literature prior to this period, but various factors at the time were bringing about a change. One was the abundance of female novelists like Fanny Burney, Charlotte Smith, Clara Reeve, and Elizabeth Inchbald, all of whom presented heroines of moral if not always intellectual stature. Another factor was the increase in humanitarian and enlightened sentiment concerning the poor, the weak, and the despised, categories that all included women. Another factor was the existence of the Bluestockings, a group of women who gained some position in a male world by combining piety, seriousness, and learning. They were not radical in what they wanted for women, but their stature helped form a more tolerant climate of opinion regarding women (Ferguson and Todd 60-61). Mary Wollstonecraft was dedicated to the primacy of reason, and it was her belief in reason that permitted her to conceive a world in which women might be seen in the world in a new way, a way that undid the violence of social norms requiring a simple, seemingly serene appearance in women, whose lives were thus molded to fit the dictates of masculine power in
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Approximate Word count = 1493
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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