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Mary Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London, the second of seven children of Edward John Wollstonecraft, a weaver's son turned gentleman farmer who squandered a substantial family inheritance on a succession of failed agricultural ventures and who was given to violent outbursts that his wife and children lived in fear of. The insecurity of Wollstonecraft's childhood — marked by poverty, her mother's submission and decline, and the privileges routinely extended to her elder brother Ned that were denied to her — became the biographical substrate of her philosophical life, making questions of women's dependency, unequal education, and the moral consequences of powerlessness urgently personal as well as theoretical. She worked successively as a lady's companion in Bath, a schoolteacher and school proprietor at Newington Green (1784–86) — where she encountered the Dissenting intellectual community centred on Richard Price, whose rationalism and commitment to religious and political liberty shaped her own thought — and a governess in Ireland for the Kingsborough family, before establishing herself in London as a professional writer and translator for Joseph Johnson, the Dissenting publisher who became her intellectual patron and who published her early educational writing. Her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and the novel Mary: A Fiction (1788) preceded her entry into political controversy in 1790, when she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men — one of the first published replies to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France — and then, in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her masterwork, which argued that women's apparent inferiority was the product of defective education rather than natural incapacity. She travelled to Paris in 1792, witnessed the Revolution, formed a relationship with the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay and bore their daughter Fanny in 1794, survived two suicide attempts following Imlay's abandonment, and in 1796 began a relationship with the philosopher William Godwin, whom she married in March 1797 after discovering she was pregnant. She died on 10 September 1797, eleven days after the birth of her daughter Mary — who would become Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein — from septicaemia following childbirth. Her unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria was published posthumously by Godwin in 1798, together with his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which disclosed the facts of her unconventional life and temporarily damaged her reputation.

Wollstonecraft's earliest sustained educational writing, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), established the critical framework she would develop throughout her career: a rejection of the education then offered to middle- and upper-class women — centred on accomplishments such as music, dancing, needlework, and the management of personal appearance — and an insistence that such education, far from preparing women for life, actively disabled them by cultivating vanity, dependence, and the incapacity for rational self-direction. Drawing on the Dissenting tradition's emphasis on reason, virtue, and improvement, she argued that women required the same intellectual formation as men — systematic training in reasoning, moral reflection, and the habits of independent thought — if they were to fulfil their responsibilities as mothers, companions, and moral agents. This critique anticipated and shaped the central argument of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and remained the cornerstone of her educational philosophy.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is Wollstonecraft's most important and far-reaching contribution to educational and political thought. Its central argument — that women are not naturally inferior to men but are rendered apparently inferior by an education that systematically denies them the exercise of reason — was simultaneously an educational manifesto, a critique of Rousseau's Émile (which had prescribed a fundamentally different and subordinate education for girls), and a political argument for the inclusion of women in the rational civic order of Enlightenment liberalism. Wollstonecraft insisted that “the most perfect education… is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart” — an education that develops independence, self-reliance, and the capacity for rational moral judgment rather than the passive compliance and ornamental virtue that existing women's education cultivated. She advocated for co-educational day schools in which boys and girls would study the same academic subjects together, reasoning that separate education produced the separate, unequal, and mutually corrupting character types that sustained gender inequality. The Vindication has been described as one of the founding texts of liberal feminism, and its arguments were invoked directly at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 — the foundational event of the American women's rights movement — and have continued to shape feminist educational philosophy to the present day.

A central strand of Wollstonecraft's educational philosophy was her sustained and direct engagement with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Émile (1762) had shaped European educational thinking profoundly while prescribing for girls an education designed to make them pleasing, compliant, and emotionally dependent rather than rational and autonomous. Wollstonecraft accused Rousseau of a fundamental philosophical inconsistency: having grounded his entire educational and political philosophy on the premise that reason and virtue are the distinguishing marks of humanity and the foundation of legitimate authority, he then excluded women from the domain of reason, treating their apparent irrationality not as the product of defective education but as a natural and permanent condition. She argued that this was not only philosophically incoherent — if women were not rational agents, they could not be moral agents either, and could not bear the moral responsibilities that Rousseau and others assigned to them as wives and mothers — but politically dangerous, since a society that cultivated irrationality and dependence in half its population would suffer for it in the quality of both its citizens and its families. Her critique of Rousseau established the terms of a debate about nature, nurture, and women's education that has continued into the twenty-first century.

Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798) represents the most radical development of her educational and political thought, extending her critique from the formal education of middle-class women to the structural conditions that condemned women of all classes — including working-class women — to a state of legal, economic, and sexual dependency from which no individual act of self-improvement could free them. Where A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had argued primarily for educational reform, The Wrongs of Woman argued that educational reform alone was insufficient: women's subordination was maintained not only by defective schooling but by the laws of property and marriage that made women economically dependent on men, by the double standard that tolerated in men the sexual conduct that it punished in women, and by the social structures that left women with no recourse against abuse or abandonment. This structural argument — that women's condition could not be addressed by individual education alone but required political and legal transformation — anticipated feminist analyses of the relationship between education and social structure that would not become central to mainstream feminist theory until the twentieth century.

Wollstonecraft's influence on feminist and educational thought was suppressed for much of the nineteenth century by the scandal attached to the details of her life disclosed by Godwin's Memoirs — particularly her illegitimate daughter, her suicide attempts, and her unmarried relationship with Godwin — and she was not fully reclaimed as a foundational feminist thinker until the twentieth century, when her arguments about education, reason, and women's rights were recognised as anticipating almost every strand of subsequent feminist educational philosophy. The Vindication's arguments for co-education, intellectual equality, and the rational formation of women's character shaped the campaigns for women's higher education, the arguments for women's suffrage, and the feminist critiques of schooling that emerged throughout the twentieth century. Critics have identified significant limitations in her framework: Susan Gubar has written of a “feminist misogyny” in Wollstonecraft's tendency to devalue the feminised traits — sensibility, emotion, beauty — that she associated with women's current degradation even as she sought women's liberation; Elissa Monroe has argued that her analysis fails to address the economic structures that constrain women's choices; and she has been criticised for treating the middle-class professional woman's aspiration to rational independence as the universal norm of women's education while leaving largely unexamined the conditions of working-class women. These tensions — between equality and difference, between individual improvement and structural transformation, between the ideal of rational citizenship and the realities of classed and gendered social life — remain the generative fault lines of feminist educational theory.

• Wollstonecraft, M. (1787). Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life. Joseph Johnson.
• Wollstonecraft, M. (1788). Mary: A Fiction. Joseph Johnson.
• Wollstonecraft, M. (1790). A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Joseph Johnson.
• Wollstonecraft, M. (1792). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. Joseph Johnson.
• Wollstonecraft, M. (1798). The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria: A Fragment (W. Godwin, Ed.). Joseph Johnson. (Posthumous)