When Mary Wollstonecraft Was Duped by Love

One windy day in June 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft, her 1-year-old daughter, and her nanny, with a small crew of men, pushed off in a boat into rough waters from a port on the eastern shore of England. Wollstonecraft’s baby wriggled in her arms as the boat rocked and swayed in the gigantic gray waves of the North Sea. Yet Wollstonecraft would not be deterred by the dangers of the passage. This was an opportunity for her to write about her travels and to capitalize on her reflections by selling her stories. When the jagged shoreline of Sweden finally appeared after days of endless ocean, she began to record her observations. 

Wollstonecraft wrote about how traveling as an unattached woman could be unsettling: when she had to stay at the cabin of a strange man. It could be demeaning: During a dinner conversation, her male host complimented her for asking “men’s questions.” And it could be enraging: when she learned that men in the Swedish village she was visiting stood by unbothered as women washed linens in an icy river, causing their hands to crack and bleed. “The men stand up for the dignity of man, by oppressing the women,” Her heart was heavy when she thought of her daughter, who would one day experience being a woman in the world: “I feel more than a mother’s fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex,” she wrote. “Hapless woman! what a fate is thine!”