Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London in 1759, and had a difficult childhood marked by poverty and domestic violence. Witnessing her father’s brutality towards her mother had a great effect on her, particularly evident in her life through her reluctance to marry and through the subject matter of her work.
A radical intellectual, Wollstonecraft worked as a governess and 
as a lady’s companion before settling as a writer, translator, editorial assistant and reviewer for Joseph Johnson’s journal, the Analytical Review. Her life was plagued by poverty and despair, and she attempted suicide twice, once in May 1795 and again in that October, after the end of a difficult love affair. She gave birth to a child out of wedlock before finding happiness with William Godwin and marrying him in 1797. She gave birth to a daughter, Mary, on 30 August 1797. She was to die following childbirth on 10 September after inept medical care failed to expel the placenta, which became gangrenous and caused her death. Her daughter went on to write Frankenstein and marry Percy Shelley.
Wollstonecraft produced many works, but her most significant are two polemics entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Her early writings centred on education, and she also produced one novel, Mary, A Fiction (1787).
A Vindication of the Rights of Men was written by Wollstonecraft as an answer to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and shows Wollstonecraft’s passionate belief in liberty and rights. The main argument is for greater equality for humanity and the removal of traditional injustices of poverty and rank. In this way, she responds to the beginning of the French Revolution which had occurred with the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. Her writing is perhaps best characterised by her line “I glow with indignation”. She wrote with a combination of emotion and reason, using metaphorical language in an uneven style.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman logically followed two years later, extending the earlier publication to include women under the generic label of “man”. In this polemic Wollstonecraft insists on intellectual, emotional and physical development for women. She attacks equally male dominance and female acquiescence. She argued that the greatest tool for women is education, to advance themselves as well as humanity. She strongly critiques social values as they relate to women, particularly having felt the full force of those values herself. Education is posited as the key component to the process of social change.
Wollstonecraft’s work is significant in that it incorporates feminist analysis into bourgeois liberal thought. Having little formal education herself, she saw education as the cornerstone to women’s emancipation. She sought solutions to women’s psychological and economical oppression and political exploitation. Wollstonecraft influenced women writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf, and her influence still survives in feminist scholarship.
Wollstonecraft felt that woman's education was lacking:
Extract from Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, chapter 4.