Women and work and women and marriage cannot be separated in much of history because marriage was seen as the proper role for women, and the work done in the home was considered the proper form of work for a woman to undertake as her life's occupation. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some women writers found ways to suggest that women should have more rights, that they should have more occupational opportunities than they did, and that marriage might or might not be the proper role for a women. In any case, whether or not to marry should be her choice and not that of society or her family. Some of these ideas are found in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and in Charlotte Brontd's Jane Eyre.
Mary Wollstonecraft was as famous a writer as her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, would become, but today the daughter is much the better known of the two largely because of her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley and because of her creation of the story embodied in her novel Frankenstein. Both mother and daughter were important proponents of the rights of women, both in their writings and in the way they lived, and served as role models for other women of their time. Much of their work as writers and political thinkers developed from and represented the spirit of the Romantic era in which they lived.
Mary Wollstonecraft's best-known work is her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a work in which she expounded on the ills facing women and on the need for justice for women. Specifically, such justice would be found when women were educated as were men and when women could use their education for more than gracing the home. Wollstonecraft saw women and men as equal, yet she was fully aware that fiction reflected the prejudices of society and showed that society did not see men and women as equal:
For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same; yet the fanciful femal...