Mary Wollstonecraft was a feminist advocating for women’s rights during the late eighteenth century. She travelled throughout Europe which enabled her to form new and different opinions. She was able to express her opinions through her two published works, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Wollstonecraft was one of the very first people to prove that opening women to more opportunities would not only benefit women, but the entire society; this is what set her apart from other women with the same beliefs. She attempted to convince others that school should be coeducational by saying that girls and women alike would become “better wives and mothers, good citizens, and economically independent.” Mary Wollstonecraft set the path for many women after her time. Her opinions on women’s rights were brought up and shared during major events such as the Suffrage and Feminist Movements. The Feminist Movement was a series of political movements looking to expand on the rights of women. During the nineteenth century, women’s rights were brought into the forefront throughout Europe. Women “gradually found professional and white-collar employment, especially after about 1880 in fields such as teaching, nursing, and social work.” Women made their demands public through walks, marches, demonstrations, heckling parliament, slashing paintings in London’s national galleries, and hunger strikes. One of the biggest achievements these women were able to accomplish was the right to vote in England which only came after almost 40 years of public struggle in 1919. Before 1900 in Germany, women were not able to be full-time students at any university. The Federation of German Women’s Association, “an umbrella organization for regional feminist groups,” had 470,000 members had made “substantial gains in family law and property rights.” Because of the rights they so desperately fought for, women today have much more freedom but still inspire the women’s rights movements we see today.
