Category Archives: Social Sciences

Moving right along this morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the novel Frankenstein. This is a full-page document with a reading of five sentences and four comprehension questions.

How has what is ostensibly a horror story (which I’ve always read as an allegory on the naivete of Enlightenment notions about the perfectibility of man) to do with Women’s History Month? Well, this novel’s author is Mary Shelley, who was also known as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley after her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who was a pioneering feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

And while I am conflicted about using these women’s husbands to identify them, the two men are important for understanding the milieu in which Mary Shelley and her mother lived. Mary Shelley came by her name through her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley, the major English romantic poet. Mary Wollstonecraft married William Godwin, the British journalist, political philosopher, and novelist who, if he were alive today, would be quickly dismissed by the far right wing of the Republican Party as a man of the “woke left.”

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.