mary

Mary Wollstonecraft is famous for her Vindication of the Rights of Women and she's famous for being Mary Shelley's mother. But I hadn't known until today that her two fames are linked in a very sad way - she died as a result of childbirth.

As a young woman caught up in the excitement of the women's movement, I was not much interested in historical feminism - or feminists. It felt to me as if we had already surpassed anything they had written about [if only, I think now] and my time was better spent reading contemporary theorists and novelists. It wasn't such a conscious and arrogant decision as it sounds - it was more that I never felt much interest in them, there was too much going on now.

Nowadays I have, I hope, a much bigger appreciation of how impressive women such as Wollstonecraft were. I feel a connection to her voice across time. And it came almost as a physical blow to me to hear that she'd died in that way. What an incredibly cruel irony that someone who argued so eloquently that women were not inferior due to their biology should have died as a direct result of her femaleness. As so many millions of women have done.

Comments

[tigtog]

I hadn't known that about Mary Wollestonecraft either. I should reread the Vindication, and knowing that will make it read differently.

[Penny]

Here's a sad list of a few more notable women who died in childbirth--much too easy to find them in biographical dictionaries--and note that a number of these are twentieth-century stories:

Jean Webster (1876-1916) American author--infection following the birth of her only child; she was 39

Pauline Gower (1910-1947) English aviator--heart attack within days of giving birth to her twin sons; she was 36

Bessie MacNicol (1869-1903) Scottish painter--eclampsia at term with her first child; she was 34

Anne Willing Bingham (1764-1801) American political hostess--she had tuberculosis, but she died within days of giving birth to her third child; she was 36

Raden Adjeng Kartini (1879-1904) Javanese feminist writer--died three days after the birth of her only child; she was 25

Caroline Miskel-Hoyt (1873-1898) Canadian actress--died giving birth to a son; she was 25