How Did Mary Wollstonecraft Impact On The Enlightenment

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Impact on the Enlightenment Have you ever wondered why women have political rights? Women who support women having political rights are called feminists. They are the reason why women can have political rights. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the many feminists who planted the seeds of feminism and fostered the growth of feminism during the social upheaval. She became a feminist due to her brutal formative years that empowered her to play an important role in feminism by pushing her to respond to the social uprising during the French Revolution. Mary's early childhood was pleasant. She liked to explore the elaborate countryside and she liked school. This all changed by the age of nine when she realized that her family was disintegrating. Her father frivolously spent the family’s money for a love of horses and alcohol. Because of this his temper became uncontrollable and very abusive to

This book therefore inspired Mary to write A Vindication of the Rights of Men. It “made up in passionate conviction for what it lacked in reasoned argument.” (Heaman 708) The second edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Men was used as a response to Burke’s book. This book made Mary very famous. Inspired by Rights of Men by Thomas Paine, Wollstonecraft worked to improve her reputation as a feminist by writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She spent at least six weeks on the book using her whole life as a preparation. In this book Wollstonecraft argues “that women are human beings before they are sexual beings, that they have the same rational capacity to effect their moral perfectibility as men, and that the social, economic, and political inequities and disadvantages under which they live result from social conditions and customary assumptions about the natures of women and men, not from inherent ‘inferiority’.” (Heaman