Edward Wollstonecraft was a silk weaver, and his offices were located in the area where the family lived, so these very first years of Mary’s life were full of bustle and noise. The area where the family lived in Spitalfields was busy, even overcrowded, and full of manufacturing businesses that transported their wares to the nearby market. Wollstonecraft remembered him for his temper, which he would lose suddenly and on little basis. The most serious of these was her father’s abusiveness towards her mother, and sometimes, also, to Mary and her siblings.

The couple had more children in the years that followed, and Mary would eventually be one of seven.Īs an adult, Wollstonecraft told her husband, William Godwin, about her childhood, particularly its unhappy elements. She was the second child of Edward Wollstonecraft, an English weaver, and Elizabeth Dickson, an Irish woman from a wine-merchant family. Wollstonecraft was born in her grandfather’s house on Primrose Street, in Spitalfields, East London, close to where Liverpool Street Station is now. By looking at this part of her life, we gain a fuller picture of how she came to be an influential feminist thinker and writer. The radical ideas contained within it were informed and fomented by the circumstances of her youth in London, and the people who surrounded her there. Having been unpopular in the decades after her death as details of some of her more unconventional attitudes and actions came to light, she only began to gain proper recognition for her contribution to feminism one hundred years after A Vindication was first published. But fewer of us know much about the woman herself, or the circumstances of her early life in particular. This most famous of her works is well known as one of the earliest examples of feminist philosophy and continues to be read by many people today.

Mary wollstonecraft