Jeremy Corbyn: Mary Wollstonecraft is my historical hero Jeremy Corbyn has chosen the writer and early women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft as his historical hero. More history How […]

Jeremy Corbyn has chosen the writer and early women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft as his historical hero.

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In an interview with BBC History magazine, the Labour leader set aside left-wing revolutionary heroes and instead reached back further in time to the author of 1792’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

When asked what drew him to Wollstonecraft, he said: “Firstly, her opening of a school that aimed to give girls an education every bit as good as that enjoyed by boys, a novel idea at the time. Then there’s the fact that (unlike a lot of people this side of the Channel) she was excited by the radical opportunities the French Revolution could bring.”

Corbyn explained that he learned about the proto-feminist from the women’s rights movement in the 1970s, before he had become an MP, and that she had founded a school in his constituency of Islington North.

Treating people with respect

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A Vindication of the Rights of Women argued that nurture, rather than nature, was responsible for the gap in attainment between the sexes in that period. In what is regarding as one of the founding works of feminist philosophy, she argued (controversially at the time) that education could bridge the gap, and that both men and women should be treated as rational.

“It was Mary who had the vision of women leading lives every bit as full as any man,” said Corbyn, who added that he shared a belief in “treating people with respect, regardless of their gender, race or religion” with the writer.

Wollstonecraft is still studied by feminists and in the context of post-French Revolution thinking. She was married to the philosopher William Godwin, and the couple’s daughter went on to become Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.