Mary Wollstonecraft: A Literary Life

Mary Wollstonecraft was an extraordinary individual, yet her literary life exemplifies how many women of her time used print culture to bring about change. This study argues that Protestant society had traditionally sanctioned women's role in spreading literacy, but this became politicized in the 1790s. Wollstonecraft's literary vocation was shaped by the high expectations in both the radical circles of Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson, and the Girondins in revolutionary Paris, of the power of print to educate and reform individuals and society.