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

_______________________________ 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

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

superadd (v): To add on top of a previous addition http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/superadd

___________________________ 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.