Portraits of Wollstonecraft

Portraits of Wollstonecraft
Author: Eileen M. Hunt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 745
Release: 2023-09-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350378720

One of The Tablet's Books of the Year 2021 Portraits of Wollstonecraft collects and introduces 102 texts and artifacts that document Mary Wollstonecraft's public reception in art, literature, philosophy and feminist politics. Each portrait is a milestone in her depiction in culture. From William Blake's 1803 poem 'Mary' to Maggi Hambling's contentious sculpture in 2020, these sources validate the monumental place Wollstonecraft holds in not just one but many canons. The color images in Part I: Public Sightings trace her earliest reception in portraiture, from 1785 to 1804, with detailed analysis paired with each of the illustrations. Arranged chronologically, these landmark images are followed by the reviews of Wollstonecraft's books that appeared during her lifetime in Jamaica, Madrid, Amsterdam and London. Part II: Global Afterlives, examines her multifarious posthumous reception and features diary entries, excerpts from English-language biographies, letters, articles and introductions to her books. From Olive Schreiner's introduction to the Rights of Women composed in Cape Town in 1889 to the translator's preface to the first Czech edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1904, they showcase an impressive sweep of cross-cultural perspectives on her life and writings. The sources in Part III: Making an International Icon chart the depth and breadth of her legacies on a global scale. Feminists, philosophers, and social scientists-from Ruth Benedict to Virginia Sapiro to Amartya Sen-have written and spoken with conviction about the emotional power of looking into the eyes of the author of the Rights of Woman. This section includes major thinkers from across the 19th and 20th centuries who responded to Wollstonecraft's theories on virtue, love, gender, education, and rights: Mary Shelley, Emma Goldman, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Susan Moller Okin, Barbara Johnson and Martha Nussbaum. We see how Wollstonecraft gained traction in feminist politics, both as a philosopher and as a transcultural icon of the cause, beginning with English suffragist Millicent Fawcett's centennial edition of the Rights of Woman in 1891 and extending through feminist art in The Paris Review during the age of #MeToo. Assembling responses from Ireland, Continental Europe, North and South America and across the former colonies of the British Empire, this one-of-a-kind collection tells a compelling story of Wollstonecraft's watershed contributions to human rights debates throughout the modern and contemporary world.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft
Author: Miriam Brody
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2000-12-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0195119681

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the first champion of women's rights in the modern Western world. Wollstonecraft's experience teaching young women in London led her to write her first book, in which she argued for equal education for girls and boys. The moderate success of her autobiographical novel Mary, A Fiction convinced her to start writing full-time. Under the tutelage of her publisher and mentor Joseph Johnson, she joined a circle of liberal intellectuals which included poet and artist William Blake, chemist Joseph Priestley, and political thinker William Godwin.In 1790 Wollstonecraft penned A Vindication of the Rights of Men, an impassioned reply to conservative criticism of the French Revolution and a call for social equality. She developed her ideas further in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which extended the notion of natural rights to include women's rights as well. Going so far as to suggest that women should be allowed to vote, Wollstonecraft's revolutionary ideas garnered her overnight fame--and notoriety. She traveled to Paris, lived through the Reign of Terror, fell in love with an American, and gave birth to her first daughter. Though the love affair ended tragically, resulting in her thwarted suicide attempt, she happily wed William Godwin in 1797. That year she gave birth to her second child (the future author of Frankenstein Mary Shelley). She died a few days later from complications of childbirth.Wollstonecraft's writing inspired leaders of the American woman suffrage movement, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and moved one admirer to call her a "pioneer of modern womanhood."

Romantic Outlaws

Romantic Outlaws
Author: Charlotte Gordon
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Total Pages: 674
Release: 2016-02-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0812980476

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SEATTLE TIMES This groundbreaking dual biography brings to life a pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have each been the subject of numerous biographies, yet no one has ever examined their lives in one book—until now. In Romantic Outlaws, Charlotte Gordon reunites the trailblazing author who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Romantic visionary who gave the world Frankenstein—two courageous women who should have shared their lives, but instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy. In 1797, less than two weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft died, and a remarkable life spent pushing against the boundaries of society’s expectations for women came to an end. But another was just beginning. Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary was to follow a similarly audacious path. Both women had passionate relationships with several men, bore children out of wedlock, and chose to live in exile outside their native country. Each in her own time fought against the injustices women faced and wrote books that changed literary history. The private lives of both Marys were nothing less than the stuff of great Romantic drama, providing fabulous material for Charlotte Gordon, an accomplished historian and a gifted storyteller. Taking readers on a vivid journey across revolutionary France and Victorian England, she seamlessly interweaves the lives of her two protagonists in alternating chapters, creating a book that reads like a richly textured historical novel. Gordon also paints unforgettable portraits of the men in their lives, including the mercurial genius Percy Shelley, the unbridled libertine Lord Byron, and the brilliant radical William Godwin. “Brave, passionate, and visionary, they broke almost every rule there was to break,” Gordon writes of Wollstonecraft and Shelley. A truly revelatory biography, Romantic Outlaws reveals the defiant, creative lives of this daring mother-daughter pair who refused to be confined by the rigid conventions of their era. Praise for Romantic Outlaws “[An] impassioned dual biography . . . Gordon, alternating between the two chapter by chapter, binds their lives into a fascinating whole. She shows, in vivid detail, how mother influenced daughter, and how the daughter’s struggles mirrored the mother’s.”—The Boston Globe

The Rights of Women

The Rights of Women
Author: Erika Bachiochi
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0268200807

Erika Bachiochi offers an original look at the development of feminism in the United States, advancing a vision of rights that rests upon our responsibilities to others. In The Rights of Women, Erika Bachiochi explores the development of feminist thought in the United States. Inspired by the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Bachiochi presents the intellectual history of a lost vision of women’s rights, seamlessly weaving philosophical insight, biographical portraits, and constitutional law to showcase the once predominant view that our rights properly rest upon our concrete responsibilities to God, self, family, and community. Bachiochi proposes a philosophical and legal framework for rights that builds on the communitarian tradition of feminist thought as seen in the work of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Drawing on the insight of prominent figures such as Sarah Grimké, Frances Willard, Florence Kelley, Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Mary Ann Glendon, this book is unique in its treatment of the moral roots of women’s rights in America and its critique of the movement’s current trajectory. The Rights of Women provides a synthesis of ancient wisdom and modern political insight that locates the family’s vital work at the very center of personal and political self-government. Bachiochi demonstrates that when rights are properly understood as a civil and political apparatus born of the natural duties we owe to one another, they make more visible our personal responsibilities and more viable our common life together. This smart and sophisticated application of Wollstonecraft’s thought will serve as a guide for how we might better value the culturally essential work of the home and thereby promote authentic personal and political freedom. The Rights of Women will interest students and scholars of political theory, gender and women’s studies, constitutional law, and all readers interested in women’s rights.

100 Pioneering Women

100 Pioneering Women
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781855147461

100 Pioneering Women presents a selection of images of remarkable women, who have defied the expectations of their gender and made extraordinary contributions to British life over the past four centuries. An introduction from the Gallery's Senior Curator of Eighteenth Century Collections considers the representation of women in the Collection and the efforts being made to redress historical imbalances through the acquisition of portraits of notable women from the last four centuries. Extended captions provide context about each sitter's life and work and remind us of the impact of women in spheres as diverse as politics, science and medicine, the arts, engineering and law. This book features some of the National Portrait Gallery's most famous sitters - Elizabeth I, writer and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, scientist Dorothy Hodgkin and architect and businesswoman Zaha Hadid - as well as paintings and photographs of lesser - known women whose influence is equally significant. A recently acquired portrait of anti-FGM campaigner and psychotherapist Leyla Hussein, a bromide cabinet card of Helena Normanton, the first woman to practise as a barrister in England, and a self-portrait by Angelica Kauffmann, one of the founding members of the Royal Academy, are also included in this highly illustrated publication.

Brilliant Women

Brilliant Women
Author: Elizabeth Eger
Publisher:
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Through a fascinating narrative and 65 illustrations, including portraits, prints and caricatures, the extraordinary vigour of the bluestockings, 18th-century foremother to feminism, is rediscovered. In addition, inspirational women in the public eye today contribute their thoughts on the legacy of the bluestockings.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Author: Barnes & Noble
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Publishing
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2004
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780760754948

Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and the call for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. Mary Wollstonecrafts work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrageWalpole called her a hyena in petticoatsyet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.

The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Author: Martin Garrett
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2019-11-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137566396

This volume considers the work and life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). It looks not only at Frankenstein and its composition, sources, themes and reception but at the wide range of other work by Shelley including such novels as The Last Man and Mathilda and her tales, reviews, travel writing and the (until recently neglected) Literary Lives of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French writers. There are detailed entries on her personal and/or literary relationship with her parents Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Claire Clairmont; on her religion, feminism, politics, relation to Romanticism, portraits and representation in drama, film and television; and on the influence of her work on such writers as Poe, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, Dickens and H.G. Wells.

Rebel Writer

Rebel Writer
Author: Wendy Gunther-Canada
Publisher:
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2001
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780875802800

Blending biography, gender theory, and political analysis, Gunther-Canada charts Mary Wollstonecraft's transformation from female reader to pioneer feminist author. She shows how Wollstonecraft's pathbreaking A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and other works confronted traditional notions of femininity and authority and provided the first systematic argument for women's political rights. Wollstonecraft's writings represent a rebellion against Jean-Jacques Rousseau's portrayal of women as dangerous coquettes and Edmund Burke's vision of women as beautiful and apolitical weaklings. Her revolutionary political theory challenged the separation of public and private spheres by insisting that women could be rational players in the Enlightenment's script of liberty and individualism. Gunther-Canada gives us a Wollstonecraft who forthrightly confronted the politics of gender and genre and incited revolt against the prevailing view of women as creatures born only to "propagate and rot." Rebel Writer shows how Wollstonecraft's political ideology guided her personal life--she bore a child out of wedlock and later married amid scandal--and how her attempts to unite the personal and the political ended in 1797, with her tragic early death in childbed. For more than two hundred years Wollstonecraft's life has served as a cautionary tale of the dangers of women's participation in revolutionary politics. Now Gunther-Canada shows us how Wollstonecraft subverted the patriarchal plot of political theory and framed an alternative vision of women as citizens, making her truly a "rebel writer."