This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmunds.

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She's one of the founding mothers of feminist philosophy. Mary Walsoncroft was the author

of a vindication of the rights of women. Hannah Dawson is an historian of ideas that

King's College London. Here she explains why Walsoncroft believed that the fundamental

right was still right to a particular kind of freedom. Hannah Dawson, welcome to Philosophy

Bites. Hello Nigel, it's lovely to be here. The topic we're going to focus on is Mary

Walsoncroft's vindication of the rights of women, but before we get on to the book,

could you just say a little bit about Mary Walsoncroft because she was quite a remarkable

woman. Yes, she was. She had the most extraordinary, adventurous, dramatic, tragic, short life,

and I will tell you something of that life, but I also want to be careful immediately kind

of sound a note of caution in thinking about her life because so often she and indeed

other women philosophers are reduced to the personal circumstances of their lives. We

think of Simone de Beauvoir in relation to Surtra and we think of Mary Walsoncroft in relation

to the tragedies of our life. And so I think it's important in relation to women thinking

and women philosophers that we give them the privilege that we afford to men which

is to untether them from their particular circumstances. However, it is true that she

had the most extraordinary life. Yes, so she was born in the middle of the 18th century

into a kind of classic patriarchal household with a feckless father who of course had all

the power who ruined the family financially, who favored her brother and educated him,

did not educate his daughters, his brilliant daughters, his brilliant daughter Mary, who

...