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About the Work

Mary Wollstonecraft was hated in her lifetime and throughout the 19th century because of her views published in A Vindication of the Rights of Women where she argued that women were not naturally inferior to men yet appeared to be so only because they lacked education. After her early death her husband published details of their lifestyle - including his wife's tumultuous love affairs. That angered many because she was now seen as a loose woman attracted to men and they to her as well as someone who had advocated more power for women in the relationship between the two.

Here is Mary Wollstonecraft following the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

Mother

The women I portrayed in this work were role models for my mother, Muriel. Together they make up her personality and like her they had charisma and chutzpah.
Muriel, a war-widow's daughter, left school at 12 to bring some money into her poverty-stricken family. Hardly able to read and write, she sold programmes and did odd jobs at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham. When she was 14 she was talent-spotted. Beginning as a hoofer in a chorus line, she became a lead dancer and singer with the stage-name Muriel Melford in a long-forgotten musical at the Prince of Wales called Bonjour Paris.
When she was in that show she met her future husband, my father. He was an Oxford-educated schoolmaster over twice her age. He introduced her to a middle-class world of unfamiliar concepts such as politics, ethics and causes. Muriel took notice. Married and back in the Midlands she spoke up about what were embarrassing issues in the provincial England of the 1940s and 50s - pacifism, the abolition of the death penalty and the sexual liberation of women.

″I still use the same approach to my work: I get an idea, think of the title and then make the work. So not much has changed since 1964″

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