Over the next few posts Tarquin O’Flaherty explores the fascinating world of philosopher William Goodwin, beginning today with a piece about his wife, Mary Woolstonecraft, the mother in law of Percy Shelley.

Mary Woolstonecraft (1759-1797) one of the legendary early pioneers of womens’ rights, famously wrote ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’ (1792) in which she argued that women were not inferior to men and only appeared so due to their lack of education.  She was married to the philosopher William Godwin (1756-1836), a believer in Utopian ideals, who argued that vice and crime could be eliminated from society simply by eliminating the appalling conditions people were being forced to endure during the Industrial Revolution.  In short he believed that the Industrial Revolution, in exploiting labour for profit, actually created crime.  He believed that if you treated people in a just manner, then their need to resort to crime (for survival) would be eliminated and, as a consequence, the conditions for an ideal society, at the very least the foundations for it, might be laid.

Woolstonecraft died at 38, a few days following the birth of her daughter, Mary.  Mary Woolstonecraft-Godwin grew up, wrote the novel ‘Frankenstein’, then went on to marry Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet.

After his wife’s death, William Godwin produced a biography to honour her memory.  The biography revealed that, prior to her marriage to Godwin, Woolstonecraft had had at least two ‘illicit’ liasons, one of which, with the American, Gilbert Imlay, had produced a daughter, Fanny.  This proved to be so scandalous in the eyes of society that Woolstonecraft (the scarlet woman!) was written out of history for over one hundred years.  She was not rediscovered until the 1920s when the fight for womens’ rights gained more ground.  Her name remains an unfamiliar one even now.