Mary Wollstonecraft was a British author, philosopher, and advocate of women s rights. Raised by an abusive and neglectful father, Wollstonecraft was determined to have her own livelihood, and worked as a teacher and governess before becoming a translator and advisor for Joseph Johnson, a publisher of radical texts, in 1788. It was during this time that she wrote her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argued against the idea that women are helpless and inferior to men, which was followed by Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, which asserted that women had strong se...