St. Helen Catholic Church, 2000 20th Street, Vero Beach, FL (2026)

06/19/2026

Friday Funny.

06/19/2026

Good night.

06/18/2026

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) is regarded as the single greatest influence on first-wave feminism. Wollstonecraft wrote scathing critiques of s*x discrimination, slavery, and political and religious corruption in *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.*

She also identified infanticide – both prenatal and postnatal – as an unnatural consequence of denying women’s natural rights and powers. Wollstonecraft argued that s*xual exploitation renders women of all social classes “weaker in mind and body than they ought to be.” According to Wollstonecraft, such exploitation causes women to “either destroy the embryo in the womb or cast it off when born. Nature in everything demands respect… men ought to maintain the women they have seduced.”

In her unfinished novel *The Wrongs of Woman: Or Maria* Wollstonecraft sympathetically offers the story of Jemima, abused and neglected as a child because of her “illegitimate” birth. When Jemima becomes a house servant, her master rapes her. Discovering she is “with child,” she says: “I know not why I felt a mixed sensation of despair and tenderness, excepting that, ever called a bastard, a bastard appeared to me an object of the greatest compassion in creation.”

Concerned only to avoid his wife’s and the public’s disapproval, her master gives her an abortifacient. She refuses the “infernal potion,” as she calls it. Then, the master’s wife discovers him ra**ng Jemima again. The mistress beats and verbally abuses Jemima and throws the friendless young woman out onto the street.

Jemima finally obeys her master and swallows the potion “with a wish that it might destroy me, at the same time that it stopped the sensations of new-born life, which I felt with indescribable emotion.”

Mary Wollstonecraft died at age 38, after giving birth to her second daughter. Mary Godwin Shelley, like her mother, became a radical and visionary writer, best known for her novel *Frankenstein, * a warning about the consequences of unbridled tampering with nature. (Feminists for Life FB page)