Mary Wollstonecraft is held as being the first modern feminist. She was born in 1759 to a gentry farmer and an unloving mother and is said to have began her protests at an early age by protecting her mother from an abusive father and resenting her brother's favored position. She worked as a governess for a number of years however she chose to make an unconventional career as an editor and a journalist. In 1786 she wrote …showed first 75 words of 543 total…

…showed last 75 words of 543 total…achieve greater economic, political, and social status. Wollstonecraft died in 1797 in the childbirth of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin later to become Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Though Wollstonecraft did not live to see her ideals in women's rights come to fruition, we are left with her vision when she states, "I have thrown down the gauntlet, it is time to restore women to their lost dignity and to make them a part of the human species."