Mary Wollstonecraft Founded Feminism, Then Was ERASED by Scandal for 100 Years

She wrote the book that launched feminism, then her name was buried in scandal for a century.

Mary Wollstonecraft grew up watching her father drink, rage, and beat her mother at night.

She taught herself, opened a school, and became a rare thing: a woman who lived by her pen.

In 1792, she wrote that women only seemed inferior because they were denied an education.

Her book demanded equal schooling and equal rights, a truly radical idea for its time.

She lived as boldly as she wrote, with love affairs and a child outside of marriage.

In 1797, days after giving birth to her daughter, she died of infection at thirty-eight.

That same daughter would grow up to write the novel Frankenstein.

Then her grieving husband published a memoir exposing her love affairs and her despair.

The scandal erased her for a hundred years, until the world finally caught up to her ideas.

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