In 1792 a young woman published a work so controversial that it is still debated two centuries later. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was not the first book to demand equality for women, but it was the first to achieve real public influence. Readers across Britain, Europe and North America discussed its arguments. Within a few years, its author, a hack writer and translator named Mary Wollstonecraft, had become an international celebrity, and ‘women’s rights’ had entered the political lexicon. If modern feminism could be said to have an inventor, Mary Wollstonecraft was that woman.

Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields in 1759, into a modestly affluent middle-class family. Her childhood was unhappy. Her father, fancying himself a gentleman farmer, dragged his wife and children from one failing farm to another, bankrupting himself in the process. He was a drunk and a bully and Mary, who often defended her mother from his beatings, loathed him. ‘[Mary] was not formed to be the contented and unresisting    subject of a despot’, her husband, William Godwin, later commented.

These wretched beginnings determined Wollstonecraft to live independently. She would never tie her fate to any man’s, she decided. She sought employment, first as a lady’s companion and then, in the mid 1780s, as a schoolteacher in Stoke Newington.

Stoke Newington in the late eighteenth century was a hotbed of radicalism. Every Sunday the Unitarian chapel on Newington Green rang with calls for political reform. The chapel’s pastor, Richard Price, was a well-known philosopher whose congregation contained many radical celebrities, including the poet Anna Barbauld. Soon after arriving on the Green, Wollstonecraft began attending the chapel (her pew can still be seen there), and joining in political discussions.She and Richard Price became friends. She was an ambitious young wannabe writer. He was old and ill, but with a powerful intellect still, and he made a great impact on her.

These were auspicious times for the radically-minded. In 1789 the French Revolution    broke out, and soon Wollstonecraft, like many of her Stoke Newington associates, was lending her pen to the revolutionary cause. She wrote a book defending democratic principles and then, even more controversially, women’s rights, which the new French government had refused to grant. Liberté and egalité did not apply to women, it seemed. ‘When men contend for their freedom…[is it] not unjust to subjugate women?’ she demanded of French politicians. ‘Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him of the gift of reason?’

At the end of 1792 Wollstonecraft went to Paris where she met and fell in love with an American radical, Gilbert Imlay, and became pregnant by him. France was rapidly skidding toward war and terrorism, and her position was soon very perilous. Imlay registered her at the American embassy as his wife, which saved Wollstonecraft from possible imprisonment or even death. But after her daughter Fanny was born, her lover began to draw away from her, leaving her heartbroken and suicidal. Alarmed at her misery, Imlay persuaded her to make a business trip to Scandinavia, which revived her spirits. But on returning to London in 1795, Wollstonecraft found him living with a new mistress and tried to drown herself in the Thames, from which she was only narrowly rescued.

By this time Wollstonecraft was Britain’s foremost female intellectual. But she was also a single mother, and lonely. Then in the spring of 1796 she fell in love again, this time with the radical philosopher William Godwin. He was a much happier choice than Imlay, and soon the couple had set up house together in Somer’s Town, near King’s Cross. Godwin was a feminist of sorts, and a public opponent of marriage. But when Wollstonecraft became pregnant, they married, to the amusement of friends and enemies alike. She gave birth to a second daughter, the future Mary Shelley, in September 1797, but died ten days later from puerperal fever.

At the time of her death, Wollstonecraft was widely respected in progressive circles. But French wars and fear of home-grown revolution were chilling the political atmosphere in Britain. Six months after her death, Godwin published a biography that revealed Wollstonecraft’s unorthodox sexual history. The reaction was immediate and savage: she was denounced as a ‘philosophical wanton’, a ‘revolutionary whore’. Both her memory and her ideas were cast into a political wilderness where they remained for many decades, scorned even by fellow feminists. But by the end of the nineteenth century her reputation was on the climb again, and by the late twentieth century she had become feminism’s foremost heroine, an icon of liberated womanhood.

Today Mary Wollstonecraft is known and celebrated worldwide. A woman whose political career began very modestly, in rural Stoke Newington, is now a global emblem of feminist struggle. It is a status she is likely to retain so long as many women lack equal rights and opportunities or, in some cases, even basic freedoms. Wollstonecraft’s feminism still has plenty of mileage left in it.

Barbara Taylor’s Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination is published by Cambridge University Press (2003). ISNB 0521004179. £16.95 paperback