Wollstonecraft

Born in 1759, Mary Wollstonecraft was a writer and philosopher whose most enduring text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, laid the foundation for modern feminism. She travelled to revolutionary France as a young woman to witness and participate in the radical social change taking place there. Throughout her life she wrote in favor of equal rights and women's rational education, her work inspiring authors and thinkers including Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and Millicent Garrett Fawcett. She died aged 38, soon after giving birth to her daughter Mary Shelley, a pioneering and radical author in her own right.