By the time Mary Wollstonecraft died in childbirth in 1797 (the child in question was to write "Frankenstein" and marry the poet Shelley), the counter-revolution against the ideas that had nourished her was in full swing. The American and French revolutions had opened minds to the possibility of life without kings and priests, without slaves and slave-masters. She herself had imagined life, not exactly without men, but without marriage, an institution that defined the upbringing of girls and limited the legal rights of women so completely that an attack on it extended everywhere: from women's education to property law, from the nature of women to the nature of humanity itself.
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