When she became a mother twice over in her mid- and late thirties, she was a tender and hands-on mother, an advocate of breastfeeding and attentive parenting in an era of wet-nurses and governesses, when wealthy and middle-class parents participated relatively little in the care and instruction of their children even from infancy. After her first job as a companion, she became a teacher, first in the classroom at a school she founded with two of her sisters and her best friend, and then as a governess.

While teaching was one of the few professions open to her as an eighteenth-century woman from a respectable but impoverished background, she brought her formidable powers of reason to bear on the problems with many of the educational and child-rearing practices of her day. Wollstonecraft’s chosen role for herself was, first and foremost, a teacher, an advocate of knowledge and instiller of reason. A truly reasonable person, she thought, is kind, affectionate, and generous as well, and a passionate lover of justice, truth, and beauty. For Wollstonecraft, reason and passion are not opposites: they are two sides of the same coin. That’s because she was also deeply passionate, devoted to retaining her personal and mental freedom while abandoning herself to loves which never failed to break her heart, be they revolution, family, friend, or lover. At times, they made her an object of scandal, impoverished, or deeply depressed, even in such desperate straits that she twice attempted suicide. It’s not just because she didn’t conform to the mores of her time her life choices are still considered unreasonable and even self-destructive by many. Yet the life Wollstonecraft chose to live was widely criticized both during her lifetime and over the two hundred plus years since her death. Without reason, she thought, human beings are ruled by narrow self-interest, by prejudice born of ignorance, and by crude lust. She believed that reason should rule both individuals and societies because it’s the best tool we have to achieve justice and to perfect the self. She used reason to great effect to show why women should, and how they could, grow out of their socially constructed roles as under-educated coquettes and household drudges. Her seminal feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, champions reason as the ultimate guide for a moral and productive life. The life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of modern feminism, can seem to reveal a mass of contradictions. Mary Wollstonecraft, Champion of Reason, Passionate in Love One is the Traveling Philosophy series in which I followed the life and ideas of Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson in Revolution-era Paris, France in 2015. In honor of Mary Wollstonecraft’s birthday, April 27, 1759, I share two works about this great feminist thinker which I’ve published here at Ordinary Philosophy.

Mary wollstonecraft philosophy