Mary Wollstonecraft
Her Influence on American Women's Rights Activists
Mary Wollstonecraft's writings helped influence the attitudes and philosophies of nineteenth-century women's rights activitsts despite her radical and scandalous life.
Mary Wollstonecraft is arguably one of the most influential of women thinkers in history. She not only brought to public consciousness radical ideas about the equality of women within democratic government in Europe, but also helped to influence nineteenth-century women’s rights activists and suffragists.
Lucretia Mott
Lucretia Mott, famous for being the Quaker minister turned women’s rights activist was a great disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft. In a speech delivered in 1866 at the National Woman’s Rights Convention, Mott encouraged women to study the writings of Wollstonecraft and described her as a Christ-like figure who though initially scorned, would eventually save them all.
Mott’s defense of Wollstonecraft was spurred on by the ridicule which the pioneer garnered after her death. When she died from complications following childbirth (the child was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley), her husband William Godwin published what he believed to be a wonderful biography of Wollstonecraft. Instead, it served to scar her reputation by bringing to light her scandalous past and sexual liberty.
Mott agreed with Wollstonecraft’s criticism of vain pursuits which occupied so many young women in both of their times. They disapproved of cunning behaviors, sentimental novels and frivolous social graces which did nothing to stimulate the mind or activate the natural reason of young women.
Mott is perhaps the first of the nineteenth-century activists to study Wollstonecraft’s works deeply and extract real meaning from them, though she would not be the last.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
In the early years of the women’s rights movement, when it was just emerging from the abolitionist movement, Stanton met Mott in London at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention. It was at this time that the two women discussed Wollstonecraft as a great visionary philosopher.
Like Mott, Stanton defended Wollstonecraft’s reputation. She contended that it was men who did not like Wollstonecraft’s ideas that dragged her name through the mud, so to speak.
Stanton’s 1891 essay entitled Patriotism and Chastity lauded Wollstonecraft as one of the great women in history, alongside other notables such as Cleopatra. Stanton’s praise of Wollstonecraft no doubt grew because of the high opinion held of the philosopher by another great lady, and close friend, involved in the women’s rights movement: Susan B. Anthony.
Susan B. Anthony
Anthony believed as Wollstonecraft did that all individuals are equal and should share not only equal rights, but also equal education. She also advocated economic independence as it would ennoble women, just as Wollstonecraft had argued.
When Stanton and Anthony founded their women’s rights newspaper, The Revolution, they hung a picture of not only Lucretia Mott, but also Mary Wollstonecraft on the wall to honor them as the founding mothers of their movement. Within the first issues of the newspaper, essays and letters were dedicated to the analysis and interpretation of Wollstonecraft’s writings, namely A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
It is clear that Mary Wollstonecraft’s philosophy withstood the test of time to influence women to whom great thanks are due today. Without the revolutionary thoughts of Mary Wollstonecraft, who knows upon which philosophy these women and many others would have based their movement?
Botting, Eileen Hunt, Christine Carey “Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights’ Advocates” American Journal of Political Science. Vol. 48, No. 4 (Oct., 2004), pp. 707-722.
