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.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft
_______________________________
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)