Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was 28 and she’d already tried just about every job a woman of her temperament (the non-marrying temperament) could. She’d been a lady’s companion, a governess and a schoolteacher. Prostitution was the only other option, but, as she would later contentiously argue, the notion of selling your body for material gain wasn’t so different to getting married. Mary yearned for something more—something that would make use of her inquiring mind. But this was England, 1787. It wasn’t even believed a woman could possess an inquiring mind. The prevailing wisdom of the day was that all females were intellectually inferior to men. They had no legal protections. A woman’s possessions and her children were the property of her husband. Marital rape was permitted. Divorce wasn’t. Mary’s burgeoning life plan—to support herself independently as a writer in London—transcended gender norms so completely that she felt she belonged to an entirely different species. “I am going to be the first of a new genus,”