Mary Wollstonecraft
Wollstonecraft is usually considered a liberal feminist because her
approach is primarily about the individual woman and about rights. She
could be considered as a difference feminist in her honoring of women's
natural talents, and insistence that women not be measured by men's
standards. Her work has a few glimmers of some modern sexuality and gender
analysis, in her consideration of the role of sexual feelings in the
relationships between men and women. She can be claimed with some
legitimacy by more communitarian feminists: their critique of a "rights"
approach echoes in Wollstonecraft's emphasis on duty in the family and in
civic relationships. And she can also be seen as a precursor of the
political feminists; her
Vindication and perhaps even more her
Maria: The Wrongs of Woman link women's oppression to the need for
men to change. Like several other women of the time (Judith Sargent Murray in America,
Olympe de Gouges in France, for two examples), Wollstonecraft was a
participant and observer of a remarkable series of social revolutions. One
was Enlightenment thought in general: a skepticism about and revisioning
of institutions, including the family, the state, educational theory, and
religion. But especially that part of Enlightenment thought that put
"reason" at the center of human identity and as the justification for
rights. But these ideas seemed in stark contrast to the continuing realities of
women's lives. She could look to her own life history and to the lives of
women in her family. Abuse of women was close to home. She saw little
legal recourse for the victims of abuse. For women in the rising
middle-class, those who did not have husbands (or reliable husbands) had
to find ways to earn their own living or a living for their families.
The contrast of the
heady talk of "rights of man" with the realities of the "life of woman"
motivated Wollstonecraft to write her 1792 book,
A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman. Tracts and ideological books had been exchanged in
the war of ideas around rights and liberty and freedom and reason for
several years before; writings on the "rights of man" including one by
Wollstonecraft were part of the general intellectual discussion in England
and France before, during, and after the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft
moved in the same circles as Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley, Samuel
Coleridge, William Wordsworth, William Blake, William Godwin.
It was in that atmosphere that
Wollstonecraft wrote her
Vindication, taking chapters to the
printer as she wrote them (she was still writing the end after the first
chapters had been printed).
She later (1796) published a travel book,
about a trip to Sweden, in which her descriptions of another culture were
full of feeling and emotion -- something which her more rational-oriented
critics deplored.
In that same year she renewed an old
acquaintance with William Godwin. They became lovers a few months later,
though they lived separately, to focus on their separate writing careers.
Both were philosophically opposed to the institution of marriage, and for
good reason. The law gave rights to a husband and took them away from a
wife, and both were opposed to such laws. It was decades later that Henry
Blackwell and Lucy Stone, in America, integrated into their wedding
ceremony a disclaimer of such rights.
But when Wollstonecraft became pregnant,
they decided to marry, though they continued their separate apartments.
Tragically, Wollstonecraft died within two weeks of delivery of the baby,
of "childbed fever" or septicemia. The daughter, raised by Godwin with
Wollstonecraft's older daughter, later married the poet Percy Bysshe
Shelley in a shocking elopement -- and is known to history as Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of
Frankenstein.
Godwin published his "Memoirs" of
Wollstonecraft, and her unpublished and unfinished novel, Maria: or the
Wrongs of Woman, shortly after her death. As some have argued, his honesty
in his memoirs of her troubled love relationships, her suicide attempts,
her financial difficulties, all helped conservative critics to find a
target to denigrate all women's rights. The most vivid example of that is
Richard Polwhele's "The Unsex'd Females" which criticized Wollstonecraft
and other female writers.
The result? Many readers steered away from
Wollstonecraft, and few writers quoted her or used her work in their own,
at least they did not do so publicly. Godwin's work of honesty and love,
ironically, nearly caused the intellectual loss of Wollstonecraft's
ideas. A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman
: Mary
Wollstonecraft
The Context
In 1789, Dr. Richard Price, a Unitarian
minister in England, preached a sermon "On the Love of Country." In this
sermon he congratulated the French National Assembly, for the Revolution
had opened up new possibilities for religious and civil freedom. The
French Assembly's "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen"
was, indeed, a landmark in world history, especially following the 1776
American Declaration of Independence. Price spoke of being a citizen of
the world -- with the rights that citizenship implied. He fleshed out
further his doctrine of
perfectability -- that the world can be
made better through human effort. This doctrine was the theological and
philosophical justification for social reform, for striving in this world
for social change.
Not all English writers agreed with Dr.
Price. The responses to the sermon are better known to history than the
initial sermon itself. Edmund Burke, appalled at the substitution of the
rights of man for the rights of kings, for the institution of liberty at
the expense of traditional authority, responded with his
Reflections on
the French Revolution. Burke argued that the overthrow of authority in
France would bring on chaos and disorder. His arguments answered and
denied Price's assertions of natural rights and Price's doctrine of
perfectability.
Thomas Paine's answer was
The Rights of
Man. Burke's and Paine's responses are today considered classics of
political philosophy. Few have read Mary Wollstonecraft's initial answer
to Burke:
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, published in
1790.
In this angry rebuttal of Burke,
Wollstonecraft, a member of Price's congregation, argued for what she
considered God-given rights of civil and religious liberty. She spoke of
the aristocracy that was being displaced in France as decadent. She
criticized Burke's sympathy for the women of the displaced aristocracy in
France as selective, ignoring the many more thousands of women who
suffered under the old regime:
"your tears are reserved, very naturally
considering your character, for the declamation of the theatre, or for the
downfall of queens, whose rank alters the nature of folly, and throws a
graceful veil over vices that degrade humanity; whilst the distress of
many industrious mothers, whose helpmates have been torn from them, and
the hungry cry of helpless babes, were vulgar sorrows that could not move
your commiseration, though they might extort an alms" (from
A
Vindication of the Rights of Men).
She followed this argument with another
response in 1791, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The second edition
in 1792, including her revisions, is the edition available today. Here
Wollstonecraft extended her arguments about the need and value of female
emancipation.
(In 1792, Olympe de Gouge, a Frenchwoman,
also called publicly for the extension of the rights of man to woman, in
her
Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen. I've been
unable to learn whether she was influenced or even knew of
Wollstonecraft's
Vindication.)
Wollstonecraft's visit to France in 1792,
as her husband William Godwin later wrote, challenged her own earlier
arguments and resulted in more reserved optimism. She published
An
Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French
Revolution, an attempt to reconcile her horror at the blood of the
Revolution with her faith in perfectability. She integrated into her
political ethics an acknowledgement that along with human potential for
becoming good was also a potential for viciousness. But she remained
confident that the essence of humanity was good, and that even the
"chaotic mass" could result in "a fairer government."
The Argument in A
Vindication
In her 1791-92
Vindication, now
considered a classic of feminist history, Wollstonecraft argued primarily
for the rights of woman to be educated. Through education would come
emancipation.
In defending this right, she accepts the
definition of her time that women's sphere is the home, but she does not
isolate the home from public life as many others did and as many still do.
For Wollstonecraft, the public life and domestic life are not separate,
but connected. The home is important to Wollstonecraft because it forms a
foundation for the social life, the public life. The state, the public
life, enhances and serves both individuals and the family. Men have duties
in the family, too, and women have duties to the state.
She also argues for the right of woman to
be educated, because she is primarily responsible for the education of the
young. Before 1789 and her
Vindication of the Rights of Man, she
was known primarily as a writer about education of children, and she still
accepts this role as a primary role for woman as distinct from
man.
Wollstonecraft also argues that educating
women will strengthen the marriage relationship. Her concept of marriage
underlies this argument. A stable marriage, she believes, is a partnership
between a husband and a wife -- a marriage is a social contract between
two individuals. A woman thus needs to have equal knowledge and sense, to
maintain the partnership. A stable marriage also provides for the proper
education of children.
She also acknowledges that women are
sexual beings -- but so are men. Thus female chastity and fidelity,
necessary for a stable marriage, require male chastity and fidelity too.
Men are required, as much as women, to put duty over sexual pleasure.
(Perhaps her experience with Gilbert Imlay, father of her elder daughter,
made this point more clear to her, as he was not able to live up to this
standard.) Control over family size, for instance, serves the individuals
in the family, strengthens the family, and thus serves the public interest
through raising better citizens.
But putting duty above pleasure did not
mean that feelings are not important. The goal, for Wollstonecraft's
ethics, is to bring feeling and thought into harmony. The harmony of
feeling and thought
reason. Reason was of primary importance to the
Enlightenment philosophers, a company to which Wollstonecraft belongs. But
her celebration of nature, of feelings, of "sympathy," also make her a
bridge to the Romantic philosophy and literary movements which follow.
(Her younger daughter much later married one of the best-known Romantic
poets, Pshelley.)
Wollstonecraft sees women's absorption in
such purely sensing and feeling activities as fashion and beauty
denigrates their reason, makes them less able to maintain their part in
the marriage partnership and reduces their effectiveness as educators of
children -- and thus makes them less dutiful as citizens.
In bringing together feeling and thought,
rather than separating them and dividing one for woman and one for man,
Wollstonecraft was also providing a critique of Rousseau, another defender
of personal rights but one who did not believe that such individual
liberty was for women. Woman, for Rousseau, was incapable of reason, and
only man could be trusted to exercise thought and reason. Thus, for
Rousseau, women could not be citizens, only men could.
But Wollstonecraft, in her
Vindication, makes clear her position: only when woman and man are
equally free, and woman and man are equally dutiful in exercise of their
responsibilities to family and state, can there be true freedom. The
essential reform necessary for such equality, Wollstonecraft is convinced,
is equal and quality education for woman -- an education which recognizes
her duty to educate her own children, to be an equal partner with her
husband in the family, and which recognizes that woman, like man, is a
creature of both thought and feeling: a creature of reason.
Today, it may be naïïve to imagine that
simply equalizing educational opportunity will ensure true equality for
women. But the century after Wollstonecraft was a progression of newly
opened doors for women's education, and that education significantly
changed the lives and opportunities for women in all aspects of their
lives. Without equal and quality education for women, women would be
doomed to Rousseau's vision of a separate and always inferior
sphere.
Reading
A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman today, most readers are struck with how relevant some parts are,
yet how archaic are others. This reflects the enormous changes in the
value society places on women's reason today, as contrasted to the late
18th century; but it also reflects the many ways in which issues of
equality of rights and duties are still with us today.
A short
note
The title of Wollstonecraft's
A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman is often mis-stated as
A
Vindication of the Rights of Women. I've found several publishers who
list the title correctly on their book, but in their publicity and in
their own book catalog, list the incorrect title. Because there are subtle
differences in the use of the terms Women and Woman in the time of
Wollstonecraft, this mistake is more important than it might
seem.
Part 3: Thirty-Eight
Years
Experience as
Fundamental Mary Wollstonecraft believed that one's life experiences had crucial
impact on one's possibilities and character. Her own life illustrates this power of experience. Commentators on Wollstonecraft's ideas from her own time until now have
looked at the ways in which her own experience influenced her ideas. She
handled her own examination of this influence on her own work mostly
through fiction and indirect reference. Both those who agreed with
Wollstonecraft and detractors have pointed to her up-and-down personal
life to explain much about her proposals for women's equality, women's
education and human possibility. For instance, in 1947, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham,
Freudian psychiatrists, said this about Wollstonecraft: Mary Wollstonecraft hated men. She had every personal reason possible
known to psychiatry for hating them. Hers was hatred of creatures she
greatly admired and feared, creatures that seemed to her capable of doing
everything while women to her seemed capable of doing nothing whatever, in
their own nature being pitifully weak in comparison with the strong,
lordly male. This "analysis" follows a sweeping statement saying that
Wollstonecraft's
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(these authors also mistakenly substitute Women for Woman in the title)
proposes "in general, that women should behave as nearly as possible like
men." I'm not sure how one could make such a statement after actually
reading
A Vindication, but it leads to their conclusion
that "Mary Wollstonecraft was an extreme neurotic of a compulsive type....
Out of her illness arose the ideology of feminism...." [See the
Lundberg/Farnham essay reprinted in Carol H. Poston's Norton Critical
Edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman pp. 273-276.) What were those personal reasons for her ideas that her detractors and
defenders alike could point to?
Early Life Mary Wollstonecraft was born April 27, 1759. Her father had inherited
wealth from his father, but spent the entire fortune. He drank heavily and
apparently was abusive verbally and perhaps physically. He failed in his
many attempts at farming, and when Mary was fifteen, the family moved to
Hoxton, a suburb of London. Here Mary met Fanny Blood, to become perhaps
her closest friend. The family moved to Wales and then back to London as
Edward Wollstonecraft tried to make a living. At nineteen, Mary took a position that was one of the few available to
middle class educated women: a companion to an older woman. She traveled
in England with her charge, Mrs. Dawson, but two years later returned home
to attend her mother who was dying. Two years after Mary's return, her
mother died and her father remarried and moved to Wales. Mary's sister Eliza married, and Mary moved in with her friend Fanny
Blood and her family, helping to support the family through her needlework
-- another of the few routes open to women for economic self-support.
Eliza gave birth within another year, and her husband, Meridith Bishop,
wrote to Mary and asked that she return to nurse her sister whose mental
condition had deteriorated seriously. Mary's theory was that Eliza's condition was the result of her
husband's treatment of her, and Mary helped Eliza leave her husband and
arrange a legal separation. Under the laws of the time, Eliza had to leave
her young son with his father, and the son died before his first
birthday. Mary, her sister Eliza Bishop, her friend Fanny Blood and later Mary's
and Eliza's sister Everina turned to another possible means of financial
support for themselves, and opened a school in Newington Green. It is in
Newington Green that Mary Wollstonecraft first meets the clergyman Richard
Price whose friendship led to meeting many of the liberals among England's
intellectuals. Fanny decided to marry, and, pregnant soon after the marriage, called
Mary to be with her in Lisbon for the birth. Fanny and her baby died soon
after the premature birth. When Mary returned to England, she closed the financially-struggling
school and wrote her first book,
Thoughts on the Education of
Daughters. She then took a position in yet another respectable
profession for women of her background and circumstances: governess. After a year of traveling in Ireland and England with the family of her
employer, Viscount Kingsborough, Mary was fired by Lady Kingsborough for
becoming too close to her charges. And so Mary decided that her means of support had to be her writing,
and she returned to London in 1787.
Mary Wollstonecraft,
Writer From the circle of English intellectuals to whom she'd been introduced
through Rev. Price, Wollstonecraft had met Joseph Johnson, a leading
publisher of the liberal ideas of England. She wrote and published a novel,
Mary, a Fiction, which
was a thinly-disguised novel drawing heavily on her own life. Just before she'd written
Mary, a Fiction, she'd
written to her sister about reading Rousseau, and her admiration for his
attempt to portray in fiction the ideas which he believed. Clearly,
Mary, a Fiction was in part her answer to Rousseau, an
attempt to portray the way that a woman's limited options and the serious
oppression of a woman by circumstances in her life, led her to a bad
end. She also published a children's book,
Original Stories from Real
Life, again integrating fiction and reality creatively. To
further her goal of financial self-sufficiency, she also took on
translation, and published a translation from French of a book by Jacques
Necker. Joseph Johnson recruited Wollstonecraft to write reviews and articles
for his journal,
Analytical Review. As part of Johnson's
and Price's circles, she met and interacted with many of the great
thinkers of the time. Their admiration for the French Revolution was a
frequent topic of their discussions. Certainly, this was a period of exhilaration for Wollstonecraft.
Accepted into circles of intellectuals, beginning to make her living with
her own efforts, and expanding her own education through reading and
discussion, she had achieved a position in sharp contrast to that of her
mother, sister, and friend Fanny. The hopefulness of the liberal circle
about the French Revolution and its potentials for liberty and human
fulfillment plus her own more secure life are reflected in
Wollstonecraft's energy and enthusiasm. In 1791, in London, Mary Wollstonecraft attended a dinner for Thomas
Paine hosted by Joseph Johnson. Paine, whose recent
The Rights of
Man had defended the French Revolution, was among the writers
Johnson published -- others included Priestley, Coleridge, Blake and
Wordsworth. (At this dinner, she met another of the writers for Johnson's
Analytical Review, William Godwin. His recollection was
that the two of them -- Godwin and Wollstonecraft -- immediately took a
dislike to each other, and their loud and angry argument over dinner made
it nearly impossible for the better-known guests to even attempt
conversation.) When Edmund Burke wrote his response to Paine's
The Rights of
Man, his
Reflections on the Revolution in France, Mary
Wollstonecraft published her response,
A Vindication of the Rights
of Men. As was common for women writers and with
anti-revolutionary sentiment quite volatile in England, she published it
anonymously at first, adding her name in 1791 to the second edition. In
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft
takes exception to one of Burke's points: that chivalry by the more
powerful makes unnecessary rights for the less powerful. Illustrating her
own argument are examples of the lack of chivalry, not only in practice
but imbedded in English law. Chivalry was not, for Mary or for many women,
their experience of how more powerful men acted towards women. Later in 1791, Wollstonecraft published
A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman, further exploring issues of women's education, women's
equality, women's status, women's rights and the role of public/private,
political/domestic life. After correcting her first edition and issuing a
second, Wollstonecraft decided to go directly to Paris to see for herself
what the Revolution was evolving towards.
Imlay and Wollstonecraft Wollstonecraft arrived in France alone, but soon met Gilbert Imlay,
an American adventurer. She, like many of the foreign visitors in France,
realized quickly that the Revolution was creating danger and chaos for
everyone, and moved with Imlay to a house in the suburbs of Paris. A few
months later, when she returned to Paris, she registered at the American
Embassy as Imlay's wife, though they never actually married. As wife of an
American citizen, Mary would be under the protection of the Americans. Pregnant with Imlay's child, Wollstonecraft began to realize that
Imlay's commitment to her was not as strong as she had expected. She
followed him to Le Havre and then, after the birth of their daughter,
Fanny, followed him to Paris. He returned almost immediately to London,
leaving Fanny and Mary alone in Paris. Allied with the Girondists of France, she watched in horror as these
allies were guillotined. Thomas Paine was imprisoned in France, whose
Revolution he had so nobly defended. Writing through this time, she then published
Historical and
Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution,
documenting her awareness that the revolution's grand hope for human
equality was not being fully actualized. She finally returned to London
with her daughter, and there for the first time attempted suicide over her
despondency over Imlay's inconsistent commitment. Imlay rescued her from her suicide attempt, and, a few months later,
sent her on an important and sensitive business venture to Scandinavia.
Mary, Fanny, and her daughter's nurse Marguerite, traveled through
Scandinavia, attempting to track down a ship's captain who had apparently
absconded with a fortune that was to be traded in Sweden for goods to
import past the English blockade of France. She had with her a letter --
with little precedent in the context of 18th century women's status --
giving her legal power of attorney to represent Imlay in attempting to
resolve his "difficulty" with his business partner and with the missing
captain. During her time in Scandinavia as she attempted to track down the
people involved with the missing gold and silver, Mary wrote letters of
her observations of the culture and people she met as well as of the
natural world. She returned from her trip, and in London discovered that
Imlay was living with an actress. She attempted another suicide, and was
again rescued. Her letters written from her trip, full of emotion as well as
passionate political fervor, were published a year after her return, as
Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
Done with Imlay, she took up writing again, renewed her involvement in the
circle of English Jacobins, defenders of the Revolution, and decided to
renew one particular old and brief acquaintance.
Godwin and Wollstonecraft Having lived with and borne a child with Gilbert Imlay, and having
decided to make her living in what was considered a man's profession,
Wollstonecraft had learned not to obey convention. So in 1796, she
decided, against all social convention, to call upon William Godwin, her
fellow
Analytical Review writer and
dinner-party-antagonist, at his home, on April 14, 1796. Godwin had read her
Letters from Sweden, and from that
book had gained a different perspective on Mary's thought. Where he'd
formerly found her too rational and distant and critical, he now found her
emotionally deep and sensitive. His own natural optimism, which had
reacted against her seemingly-natural pessimism, found a different
Wollstonecraft in the
Letters -- in their appreciation of
nature, their keen insights into a different culture, their exposition of
the character of the people she'd met. "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its
author, this appears to me to be the book," Godwin wrote later. Their
friendship deepened quickly into a love affair, and by August they were
lovers. By next March, Godwin and Wollstonecraft faced a dilemma. They'd both
written and spoken in principle against the idea of marriage, which was at
that time a legal institution in which women lost legal existence,
subsumed legally in their husband's identity. Marriage as a legal
institution was far from their ideals of loving companionship. But Mary was pregnant with Godwin's child, and so on March 29, 1797,
they married. Their daughter, named Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was born
on August 30 -- and on September 10, Mary Wollstonecraft died of
septicimia or childbed fever. Her last year with Godwin had, however, not been spent in domestic
activities alone -- they had in fact maintained separate residences so
that both could continue their writing. Godwin published in January, 1798,
several of Mary's works that she'd been working on before her unexpected
death. He published a volume
The Posthumous Works along with
his own
Memoirs of Mary. Unconventional to the end, Godwin
in his
Memoirs was brutally honest about the circumstances
of Mary's life -- her love affair with and betrayal by Imlay, her daughter
Fanny's illegitimate birth, her suicide attempts in her despondency over
Imlay's unfaithfulness and failure to live up to her ideals of commitment.
These details of Wollstonecraft's life, in the cultural reaction to the
French Revolution's failure, resulted in her near-neglect by thinkers and
writers for decades, and scathing reviews of her work by others. Her death itself was used to "disprove" claims of women's equality.
Rev. Polwhele, who attacked Wollstonecraft and other women authors, wrote
that "she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes,
by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are
liable." And yet, such susceptibility to death in childbirth was not something
Mary had been unaware of, in writing her novels and political analysis. In
fact, her friend Fanny's early death, her mother's and her sister's
precarious positions as wives to abusive husbands, and her own troubles
with Imlay's treatment of her and their daughter, she was quite aware of
such distinction -- and based her arguments for equality in part on the
need to transcend and do away with such inequities. Her final novel
Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman,
published by Godwin after her death, is a new attempt to explain
her ideas about the unsatisfactory position of women in contemporary
society, and therefore justify her ideas for reform. As she had written in
1783, just after her novel
Mary was published, she herself
recognized that "it is a tale, to illustrate an opinion of mine, that a
genius will educate itself." The two novels, and Mary's life, illustrate
that circumstances will limit the opportunities for expression -- but that
genius will work to educate itself. The ending is not necessarily going to
be happy because the limitations that society and nature places on human
development may be too strong to overcome all attempts at self-fulfillment
-- yet the self has incredible power to work to overcome those limits.
What more could be achieved if such limits were reduced or removed!
Conclusions Mary Wollstonecraft's life was filled with both depths of
unhappiness and struggle, and peaks of achievement and happiness. From her
early exposure to abuse of women and the dangerous possibilities of
marriage and childbirth to her later blossoming as an accepted intellect
and thinker, then her sense of being betrayed by both Imlay and the French
Revolution followed by her association in a happy, productive and
relationship with Godwin, and finally by her sudden and tragic death,
Mary's experience and her work were intimately tied together, and
illustrate her own conviction that experience cannot be neglected in
philosophy and literature. Her exploration -- cut short by her death -- of the integration of
sense and reason, imagination and thought -- looks toward 19th century
thought, and was part of the movement from Enlightenment to Romanticism.
Her ideas on public versus private life, politics and domestic spheres,
and men and women, were, though too often neglected, nevertheless
important influences on the thought and development of philosophy and
political ideas that resonate even today.
by Jone
Johnston
Mary Wollstonecraft has been called the "first
feminist" or "mother of feminism" or at least "mother of modern feminism."
Her book-length essay on women's rights, and especially on women's
education, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a classic of feminist
thought, and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the history of
feminism. Her life and her work has been interpreted in widely different
ways, depending on the attitude of the writer towards women's equality,
and depending on the thread of feminism with which a writer is associated.
Last Update: May 22, 2001
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