ABSTRACT
Ironically, when Wollstonecraft was writing the book that would eventually earn her the title of Mother of Feminism, she was also struggling and failing miserably to mother a child that she adopted. Many of the biographies do not even mention this episode in her life. When Wollstonecraft was thirty-three, she adopted a seven-year-old child by the name of Ann. After a few months, Wollstonecraft could not tolerate the girl, so she found another home for her. As for her first biological child, Fanny committed suicide at the age of 22 on nearly the same day (but not the same year) that her mother attempted to kill herself the second time. Fanny took an overdose of laudanum, as did her mother in her own attempt at suicide. Significantly, Fanny died wearing her mother’s stays, a symbol of constraints on women. In her treatise for equality for women, Wollstonecraft provided no fewer than seventy-eight pieces of advice as to how women of her time could and should be better mothers. Although Chapter 5 focuses primarily on Ann, it investigates Wollstonecraft as a mother. What was her experience with her own mother? Was her mother an abnormal example of mothers at the end of the century and for her class? Did Wollstonecraft practice what she preached in her writing about motherhood? What was Wollstonecraft’s attitude toward her sister’s child who died before she had reached one year of age? How did she feel about Fanny Skeys’ pregnancy? Was Wollstonecraft a good mother to her own daughter? Besides answering such questions, the chapter iterates her concepts of motherhood from Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787).
