Mary Wollstonecraft
Edna Nixon describes how Mary Wollstonecraft became a passionate believer in the education of her own sex, having herself suffered intensely as a woman.
In 1759 was born the woman who first fully expressed what it meant in terms of freedom and enjoyment of life to be born female. Her name is barely mentioned today when the economic aspects of social questions are considered.
Yet Mary Wollstonecraft recognised more clearly than any previous writer in this field that these were at the root of the trouble in the female situation. Lacking the right to employ her own money, should she have any, denied access to learning, and in legal matters most unfairly treated, she was practically helpless.
Her one loophole lay in education, in the ability to inform herself and become active in her own cause; but this too would have been out of her reach but for her own persistence.
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