Mary Wollstonecraft (Essay Date 1787)

SOURCE: Wollstonecraft, Mary. "Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, and Left Without a Fortune." In Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Vol. 4, edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, pp. 25-7. New York: New York University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, from her 1787 publication Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, Wollstonecraft discusses the plight of single women without an independent fortune. Too many young women, Wollstonecraft argues, receive only a token education and are therefore left unable to provide for themselves.

I have hitherto only spoken of those females, who will have a provision made for them by their parents. But many who have been well, or at least fashionably educated, are left without a fortune, and if they are not entirely devoid of delicacy, they must frequently remain single.

Few are the modes of earning a subsistence, and those very humiliating. Perhaps to...