Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman is Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished
novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman. The Wrongs of Woman was published posthumously
in 1798 by her husband, William Godwin, and is often considered her
most radical feminist work. Wollstonecraft's philosophical and gothic
novel revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane
asylum by her husband. It focuses on the societal rather than the
individual "wrongs of woman" and criticizes what Wollstonecraft viewed
as the patriarchal institution of marriage in eighteenth-century
Britain and the legal system that protected it. The novel pioneered the
celebration of female sexuality and cross-class identification between
women. Such themes, coupled with the publication of Godwin's scandalous
Memoirs of Wollstonecraft's life, made the novel unpopular at the time
it was published. Twentieth-century feminist critics embraced the work,
integrating it into the history of the novel and feminist discourse.
Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria%3A_or%2C_The_Wrongs_of_Woman>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1010:
Persian poet Ferdowsi completed his masterpiece, the Shahnameh, the
national epic of Iran and related societies.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdowsi>
1618:
German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler discovered the
third law of planetary motion.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler>
1655:
The court of Northampton County, Colony of Virginia, made John Casor
the first legally recognized slave in Britain's North American
colonies.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Casor>
1910:
French aviatrix Raymonde de Laroche became the first woman to receive
a pilot's license.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymonde_de_Laroche>
1916:
World War I: A British force unsuccessfully attempted to relieve the
Ottoman siege of Kut (in present-day Iraq) in the Battle of Dujaila.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dujaila>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
superadd (v):
To add on top of a previous addition
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/superadd>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a
chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be — that man
may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes%2C_Jr.>