A review by xole
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

4.0

How little things have changed over half a century... My last handful of books have focused on women in the Renaissance, and I was stunned (though sadly not surprised) that in reading about the lot of women two hundred years later things had not only not gotten better, in some ways they’d gotten worse. The enforced helplessness of women, the terror inflicted on them by men wanting to maintain control, the sexual slavery, financial slavery, abuse and humiliation, social shunning, and the accepted political and scientific belief that women are creatures less evolved than men... It’s utterly horrifying (even more so because some of these things are still going on today). And then, there were the examples of how men reacted to both Wollstonecraft’s and Shelley’s writing - those same hateful, reductive criticisms are still levelled at women today. I can only hope that some day, people will read books like this, and shake their heads at the appalling historical treatment of women, rather than have to see themselves in it.