Contemporary likeness
Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 – 1797
PhilosophyPolitical theoryEducationEnlightenmentRadicalism
A radical writer who applied the age's own principles to the half of humanity it had skipped.
Contemporary likeness. Based on the John Opie portrait, painted from life.
Why they still matter
She argued that virtue cannot be gendered and that dependence corrupts the dependent — the founding argument of liberal feminism.
The world they thought in
Wrote in London and revolutionary Paris, and died at 38 days after childbirth.
What they wrote
The questions they worked on
Justice
What does a just arrangement of people look like?
Virtue cannot be gendered.
Where the thinking travelled
Each link says what kind of link it is. A documented influence and a much later echo are not the same claim, and are never presented as one.
Jean-Jacques RousseauDirect disagreement
Accepted his account of education and rejected what he wrote about women.
Written against each other.
Take this further
Ponderers is the historical layer. A rabbit hole brings the same question into what people are arguing about now.