Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and early feminist. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in which she argued that women are not naturally inferior to men, but only appeared to be because they lacked education. She suggested that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagined a social order founded on reason. Among both the general public and feminists, Wollstonecraft's life has often received as much, if not more, interest than her writing because of her unconventional, and often tumultuous, relationships. After two unsuccessful affairs with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement. She was also the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight due to complications from childbirth, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts. Today, Wollstonecraft is considered a foundational thinker in feminist philosophy. Her early advocacy of women's equality and her attacks on conventional femininity and the degradation of women presaged the later emergence of the feminist political movement.
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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1472: James III of Scotland annexed the Orkney and Shetland from Denmark–Norway. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkney) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shetland)
1810: Andreas Hofer, a Tyrolean patriot and the leader of a rebellion against Napoleon's forces, was executed. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Hofer)
1913: King O'Malley drove in the first survey peg to mark the commencement of work on the construction of Canberra, Australia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Canberra)
1959: The Canadian government under Prime Minister John Diefenbaker cancelled the Avro CF-105 Arrow supersonic jet fighters programme amid much political debate. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CF-105_Arrow)
1965: The Ranger 8 spacecraft successfully transmitted 7,137 photographs of the moon in the final 23 minutes of its mission before crashing in Mare Tranquillitatis. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_8)
_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. -- Frederick Douglass (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass)
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