Letter from Mary Wollstonecraft to Catharine Macaulay
Photograph by Robert Kato

Letter from Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) to Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791)
December 30, 1790
The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle

Letter from Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) to Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791)

“I respect Mrs Macaulay Graham because she contends for the laurels, whilst most of her sex only seek for the flowers.” Thus Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in December 1790 to the historian Catharine Macaulay, responding to Macaulay’s intervention in the “pamphlet war” provoked in the United Kingdom by the French Revolution, and sending a pamphlet of her own. Still two years away from her pioneering A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft was already a cogent feminist writer. She greeted Macaulay as a fellow contender in a struggle that is still far from won.

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