ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Mary Wollstonecraft, a feminist thinker. Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century English political theorist who is most well known for two political pamphlets, both of which were published in the single most significant public intellectual debate around the French Revolution in Britain. Wollstonecraft was obliged to self-educate, a herculean task that she accomplished not only by reading books but by endearing herself, from a young age forward, to various people from whom she might learn. Even those women who were sympathetic kept some distance from Wollstonecraft out of fear that the potential negative reaction to her political radicalism, which was inextricably linked to the way in which she flouted gender norms, would be redirected toward them. After Wollstonecraft's death, the defeat of radical reform in Britain and the publication of the memoirs of her widower, William Godwin, conspired to turn Wollstonecraft into a symbolic scapegoat for political radicals.
