Mary Wollstonecraft and the Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), born in London to a volatile and financially declining family, worked successively as a lady's companion, a school co-founder at Newington Green (1784), and a governess in Ireland before turning to professional writing in London from 1787, supported by the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, whose circle included figures such as Thomas Paine and William Godwin, whom Wollstonecraft would later marry in 1797. Her first major political intervention, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), was among the earliest published responses to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), defending the French Revolution's principles against Burke's traditionalist critique and establishing Wollstonecraft as a serious participant in the era's central political debate roughly two years before her most famous work.