Living, Wollstonecraft opened a school at Newington Green, near London, with Fanny Blood, Eliza, and her other sister, Everina. Having undertaken responsibility for her sister, and faced with the necessity of earning a Believing that her brother-in-law was the cause of his wife's distress, Wollstonecraft arranged to remove Eliza from his house and later obtained a legal separation. In 1783 Wollstonecraft's sister Eliza suffered a mental breakdown following the birth of a daughter. Wollstonecraft remained with Fanny Blood and her parents for several years, contributing with her needlework to the family's meager income. She was obliged to return to her family in London two years later to care for her dying mother, but upon the latter's death, she immediately left again, this time living with the family of her close friend Frances ('Fanny') Blood. Resolved to become independent, Wollstonecraft left home against her parents' wishes in 1778 to accept the position of paid companion to a widow in Bath. Wollstonecraft also failed to receive emotional support from her mother, who openly preferred and indulged Mary's brother, Edward. Wollstonecraft was frequently a witness to her father's physical abuse of her mother, who meekly suffered her husband's violence. The domestic life of the Wollstonecrafts progressively worsened as Mary's father succumbed to alcoholism. The Wollstonecraft family relocated frequently during Mary's childhood, living at various times in London, Yorkshire, and Wales, but nowhere did Edward John Wollstonecraft succeed in his chosen career. BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATIONīorn in London on April 27, 1759, Wollstonecraft was the daughter of a would-be gentleman farmer and his wife-her father having abandoned the prosperous family trade of weaving

In support of Wollstonecraft's own claim that she was 'the first of a new genus' of female advocates, many academics now consider her controversial manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) the first modern feminist tract.

An accomplished essayist and novelist, Wollstonecraft was influenced by such Enlightenment figures as Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but unlike most thinkers of the period, she extended the radical doctrine of the rights of man to include the rights of women. She additionally emphasized the natural rights and reason of men and women as the foundation of personal liberty. Resembling other progressive figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era, Wollstonecraft supported both political and social freedom in her polemic prose, calling for greater social justice and individual autonomy. Wollstonecraft has been labelled by several scholars as one of the founders of modern feminism.

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