Introduction. The basic Maasai political and social structure is their rigid system of age-sets (or age grades; strictly-speaking, an age-grade is a stage within the age-set).
After Wollstonecraft died in 1797, her husband William Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). He revealed much about her private life that had previously not been known to the public: her illegitimate child, her love affairs, and her attempts at suicide.
Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759-1797, novelist and radical polemicist for the inherent rights of woman and of man, was the first wife of William Godwin and the mother of Mary Shelley. She died from complications in her daughter's birth. Although Mary Shelley never knew her mother, she held her in the deepest veneration. There was probably no better student of Mary Wollstonecraft's writings than she, for she read them again and again and, when she traveled to Italy in 1818, seems to have carried something close to a complete set for reference.