Considered without question the mother of the feminist movement, Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27,1759 - September 10, 1797)managed in her 39 years to write not only “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”, which was not popular until long after her death, but travel essays, several novels; and her letters from Paris during the French revolution reveal the harrowing experiences of the “reign of terror” when the Jacobins came into power. Devoted to her family as a young girl, she would sleep in front of her mother’s door to keep her father from beating her when he came home drunk. She later had a child out of wedlock and love affairs that her husband William Godwin wrote about after her death, which tainted her reputation at the time but years later, during the modern suffrage movement, became part of her story as a heroine. She coined the word “patriarchal' in describing the institution of marriage and the legal system that supported it.  She did marry William Godwin, a philosopher and writer of the essay “Political Justice,” with whom she was in agreement on social issues. The relationship was a happy one, though short. She died in 1797of septicemia eleven days after giving birth to a baby girl. The girl would grow up to become Mary Shelley, the author of the novel “Frankenstein.”