At the end of this first phase of the natural rights revolution, a kind of national motherhood was the ideological resolution to the problem of woman’s place. In years to come, too, wherever other revolutions triumphed, ideas about enhanced roles for mothers in the nation’s service helped to rein in the female participants whose assent—if not formal consent—to the political compact was still required.
From the first convulsions in Paris in 1789, the attention of a young writer in London, Mary Wollstonecraft, was fixed on the French Revolution and all it augured. Wollstonecraft was part of a group of English and American writers and artists, ultra-democrats and fervent supporters of the French. She was the only woman writer among them and in fact one of a handful of women in Britain earning a living with her pen. She had been churning out book reviews, essays, and political commentary since she arrived in London in 1787. In 1790 she rose to the challenge of Edmund Burke’s attack on the Revolution with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, preceding Tom Paine’s far more famous Rights of Man by a month.
In 1792 she followed with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. There had really never been anything like it in length or ambition, although it was published a year after Olympe de Gouges’ pamphlet and two years after Condorcet’s defense of women’s citizenship. It appears that Wollstonecraft had read neither, but a similar sense of urgency pervades her text: Like them, she knew she was living through a sea change in history. She did not venture as far as the French did into the subject of political rights; indeed she did not mention political rights at all. But being in London, not Paris, and having more mental space and time, she went deeper, to excavate and catalog the material of women’s subjection.
At once magnificent, impetuous, repetitive, and tedious, the book was one of many radical proposals that appeared in the early 1790s, but it was the only one that spoke to the problem of women. There was a serious male as well as female readership, radicals and enlightened Anglo-Americans who believed that the hopes of the era lay not only in perfecting government but in bringing harmony and virtue to the relations of the sexes.39 Over the next fifty years, the Vindication would acquire a reputation in Europe and America as the book of all books for those considering the plight of women. As it turned out, it laid out the themes and approaches that would structure half a century of feminist thought and more.
It is a long book, circular and rambling, written at a time when reading was a chief form of popular entertainment and readers could follow lengthy clause-laden disquisitions as easily as they could listen to two-hour Sunday sermons. Some of Wollstonecraft’s dense paragraphs consist of one sentence that unwinds for a full page. But the text retains the excitement of ideas being worked through for the first time, showstopping declarations put forth and fiercely argued. There’s a headlong rush to the prose, ideas tumbling over one another to stand up and be heard. Wollstonecraft rambles, takes up a subject, drops it, and then recurs to it four, six, eight times; she denounces, accuses, laments, complains, and blames. In a way, taking so long on the topic was in itself a form of vindication.
Wollstonecraft was little more than thirty years old when she wrote the Vindication. Born in 1759, she was slated for a life very different from the one she ended up with. Her father, a gentleman farmer, was an alcoholic who wasted his patrimony and dragged the family into poverty. She learned young about unfettered male power; an early memory was of lying outside her parents’ bedroom door pleading with her father to stop beating her mother. At nineteen, she left home to earn her own living. Had she kept to that track, the best that could have happened would have been a marriage to a kindly gentleman of modest means. More likely, she would have continued to cycle through the weary round of underpaid employments available to genteel impoverished women. Teacher, governess, ladies’ companion, seamstress: She worked in all those capacities, fearing she was becoming a “very poor creature” as she trudged through the vast, sad netherworld of nervous, obsequious gentlewomen of reduced means.
In her Pilgrim’s Progress through the trials of women, though, she veered off the track when at the age of twenty-eight and slipping past marriageability, she went to London to try her luck as a writer. She was already writing short essays on education and morals; now she intended to make a living from them. “I am then going to be the first of a new genus,” she bragged to her sister in 1787. “You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track—the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.”40 In London, her kindly editor and publisher Joseph Johnson took her under his wing and served as her protector in a city where a single woman, alone and unchaperoned, was sure to be thought a prostitute. She was energetic and argumentative enough to succeed in a world where speed, prolixity, and a polemical style brought literary assignments and reputation, and she was confident enough to function on her own. Wollstonecraft became a regular at Johnson’s dinners for his shabby, brilliant friends, a circle of radicals and rationalists that included Paine, the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), and the philosophical anarchist William Godwin.41
They were keyed to a pitch for news from across the channel. It was the high tide of hope: The Americans had just established a constitutional republic, the first in history; the Bastille had fallen, the French had drawn up a liberal constitution; revolution in Britain seemed close; and perhaps an end to despotism in human history was imminent. The Terror was not yet in sight. Having written her Rights of Men in the vein of the men around her, Wollstonecraft seems to have been freed up to bring the spirit of the day to a preoccupation that was hers alone. She dashed off A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in six weeks.
The focus of her ire was Talleyrand’s proposal to the French for a system of public education that expelled girls from school at the age of eight, to return home to apprentice in the domestic arts until they married. Her real polemical enemy, however, was Rousseau, whose views on women’s nature underlay Talleyrand’s scheme. Rousseau’s description of sexual difference was so extreme that it was as if men and women were fashioned out of different stuff altogether, with man as humanity’s standard issue and woman a grace note to complement and please him. Rousseau’s work cast doubt on whether natural rights and liberty even pertained to such docile, childish people. But though he was Wollstonecraft’s chief antagonist, Rousseau was also her inspiration. For all his certainty, his fanciful concoctions of the ideal female gave Wollstonecraft the means to show that conventional femininity was a product of male fantasy. Much of the Vindication is taken up with a point-by-point rebuttal of Rousseau’s views—difficult for us to read now, but interesting for eighteenth-century readers who could watch a female David take on the Gallic Goliath.42
The Vindication strenuously argued for education for girls in order to cultivate their reason, and thus their moral strength and virtue. Wollstonecraft decried the assumption that there was nothing wrong with leaving girls in ignorance. She picked apart the premises of a system that made women so psychologically and materially dependent on male approval that they turned into housebound ninnies. This was the point at which she took on Rousseau’s premise that female dependency was a felicitous state. “Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless.” Woman “was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.”43 It was Wollstonecraft’s brilliance both to acknowledge that there was truth in these descriptions of women’s limitations and to show that the truths were arbitrary, enforced by social arrangements and male power.
Women learned to be women, she insisted, in order to survive in a society that made marriage their sole destiny. There was nothing natural about female character; it developed out of fear of being left alone, shunned and p
enniless—a reject of the marriage market. Wollstonecraft dissected the grim psychology of seduction that Rousseau celebrated. “Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection,” she sarcastically observed, “are, on this ground, consistently recommended as the cardinal virtues of the sex.”44 The coy, yielding character that Rousseau praised was, in actuality, pounded into women and turned rancid as girls matured: Coquetry became manipulation, innocence went flaccid and became stupidity, and the obsession with pleasing men flowed into a narcissistic preoccupation with fashion and beauty fatal to a well-conducted home life and virtuous motherhood. Lassitude and vanity rendered women incapable of taking part in humanity’s great aims. The solution? Relieve women of the crippling task of being feminine. “The only method of leading women to fulfill their peculiar duties, is to free them from all restraint by allowing them to participate in the inherent rights of mankind.” Educate them, cultivate their reason, and there would be a huge payoff for humanity: “Make them free, and they will quickly become wise and virtuous, as men become more so; for the improvement must be mutual.”45
One of her most prescient and touching proposals was for bodily freedom for girls. Wollstonecraft thought girls should play with boys and run wild, not be kept indoors to play with dolls and fidget with picky needlework. When female frailty was seen to be beautiful, it followed that girls would be trussed up and tamped down: “The limbs and faculties are cramped with worse than Chinese bands, and the sedentary life which they are condemned to live, whilst boys frolic in the open air, weakens the muscles and relaxes the nerves.”46 She wanted girls to use their bodies and minds instead to develop active, vigorous reason, so that women too could take part in the world, discharging “the higher duties” to the public good.
Although she wrote in defense of her sex, Wollstonecraft accepted the more hateful images of women that the eighteenth century offered. For all its hopes for a better future in store, the Vindication is a highly unsympathetic portrait of actual women. The book is peopled with schemers, sluts, man chasers, sloppy housekeepers, unfeeling mothers, and faithless wives. She understood why men disparaged women, and she usually agreed with them. “Men complain, and with reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex.” “That women at present are by ignorance rendered foolish or vicious is, I think, not to be disputed.”47 Men’s absolute power over women made them tyrants, she explained, echoing the antislavery argument being broached at the time that masters’ power over slaves turned them into despots. Nevertheless, it was women who were the culprits. A reader can be forgiven if she comes away thinking that women are the crux of the problem and that the model to emulate is male.
Wollstonecraft’s own life gives depth and poignancy to these images. She knew conventional femininity and its perils intimately in the persons of her battered, humiliated mother and the forlorn sisters she left behind—usually needling and always needy. In her years eking out a living at the edges of society, she saw how low women could sink even when they had money and position. In 1786–87, before she took off for London, she worked as a governess in a family where the mother, a horsey Anglo-Irish aristocrat, cared little for her children and everything for her dogs. There’s a great deal of Lady Kingsborough in Wollstonecraft’s portraits of bad mothers (and something of the memory of the dogs in the recurrent phrase “spaniel-like affection”). As a lady’s companion at the edges of English ballrooms in high season, a spectator at the marriage mart, she watched women angle and maneuver to catch husbands. She was smart and pretty, and she would turn out to have a loving, sexual nature; yet she had to hold those qualities in check while she bided her time watching far less appealing women get on in life. It is no surprise that she harbored a sense of injured superiority. Her letters show that she felt those infirmities within herself even as she projected them onto other women; bitter self-denigration alternated with highflying self-importance.
The problem that snagged Wollstonecraft was not solely biographical, however, but intellectual. It remains embedded in the feminist tradition. How much can the feminist identify herself with her sex when she sees women swamped by infirmity? The desire to escape womanhood waxes and wanes, but it is acute in the thinker who confronts the damage. What does she lose by siding with women and acknowledging that she shares their lot?
Over two hundred years, feminists have found different solutions to the dilemma of how to write powerfully about the powerless. To simplify, one can divide them into two camps: those who liked other women and those who didn’t. Betty Friedan never much liked other women; Virginia Woolf did. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for all her towering brilliance, always wrote with women as well as to them. Simone de Beauvoir wrote majestically about the wrongs done to women, but like Wollstonecraft she held herself apart, the special one who rose above the common issue of womankind to rival men. As for Wollstonecraft, dislike of womanhood shoots through her book, and it is difficult to see, given her scheme, how such limited creatures can really change. Writing about women and for women, and seeking earnestly to improve their standing, she simultaneously distanced herself from the common lot.
Intellectually and emotionally, she identified reason and virtue as male. In her personal life, it was to men, not women, she appealed as “fellow creatures,” the makers of freedom. “I entreat them to assist to emancipate their companion.” She lived in a world that was so bifurcated by sex that it was hard to imagine ambition, drive, and a thirst for liberty as anything but theirs. Musing on the problem, she wondered if “the few extraordinary women who have rushed in eccentrical directions out of the orbit prescribed to their sex, were male spirits, confined by mistake in female frames.” But the idea of repudiating her sex altogether was not appealing either. Barbara Taylor, Wollstonecraft’s most tender and insightful modern critic, has this to say about her dilemma: “Attacking the ‘factitious’ femininity foisted on women, she tried to see herself as a woman sans Woman, a self undivided by sexual distinctions, a genderless soul forged in God’s image.”48 Her sense of superiority allowed her to draw closer to the radical brothers as a peer, assimilable to their mental world and conversations. She could foresee being a mother, and her plans for womankind depended on elaborating that role in a republican framework. But for the moment, in writing the Vindication, it was from the vantage point of the sister that she could most easily glimpse more equitable relations and a common project with men.
Occasionally, though, she did consolidate a sense of women as fully developed beings worthy in themselves, not creatures in need of an overhaul. Education would be the means. “I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes, but reasonable creatures,” she averred. The simple, monumental hope is tucked away in a footnote.49 Her recurrence to the Aristotelian distinction between humans and animals—“brutes”—shows just how dismal was the prevailing opinion of women. Were their minds and capacities really equal to the fullest measure of humanity’s—that is, men’s? Those mental capacities remained, we will see, an item of contention not for decades but for centuries.
“A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head,” she wrote at one juncture: She vowed she would not hold back, even if she were ridiculed.50 Her sense of a guffawing presence—it seems to be just behind her, looking down censoriously at what she’s writing—anticipates by 140 years Virginia Woolf’s image in A Room of One’s Own of an invisible committee of critical gentlemen hovering over every female writer’s shoulder.51 “I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society,” Wollstonecraft went on to state. The formulation is plain, but it is daring. Wollstonecraft ventured right up to the thought that the differences between men and women should not count at all. And then (depending on how one sees it) she pulled back, or saw the complications, or came to her senses. She backtracked and qualified: “Unless where love animates the behavior.” Sexual desire itself, the animation of love, comprised the irreducible difference.
The passage about wild wishes offers a glimpse into a less visible strain of Wo
llstonecraft’s thought, her attempt to understand the force of sexual desire between men and women. Wollstonecraft grappled as hard with the grip of passion and sexual love as any woman of her time (or ours). As much as ambition, her need for sexual happiness and men’s love pushed her on. “On examining my heart,” she once confessed, “I find that it is so constituted, I cannot live without some particular affection—I am afraid not without a passion.”52 Traveling to Paris in 1793, she fell in love with an American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, a charming ne’er-do-well and womanizer. As danger mounted in the capital, the two retreated to the countryside. There she had a child with him out of wedlock, suffered through his lengthening absences and growing coldness, tried to win him back by sailing the miserable stormy northern seas to Denmark to help his business affairs, her toddler in tow, and deluded herself for months about his devotion. In the agonizing last act of the affair, she twice tried to kill herself.
Yet something more was in store for her, a relationship that was at once a love affair and writers’ partnership. Recovering from her last suicide attempt in London, Wollstonecraft fell in love with and married the confirmed bachelor William Godwin, the ascetic middle-aged philosopher who frequented Joseph Johnson’s evenings. “Friendship melting into love” was how Godwin memorably described the affair. The union was happy, productive, and erotic, and it produced some of the most enchanting love letters a great feminist ever wrote and received. Him: “And now, my dear love, what do you think of me?” Her: “Men are spoilt by frankness, I believe, yet I must tell you that I love you better than I supposed I did, when I promised to love you forever.”53 With Wollstonecraft’s daughter, they made a family, living side by side in two little houses in London, meeting for meals, spending the nights together. In 1797, she died giving birth to their child.
The anguished Godwin paid tribute to her memory by publishing the next year a memorial biography. Blinded by grief, oblivious to convention, he thereby revealed to an appalled Anglo-American readership the scandalous facts: her passion for another man, the child born out of wedlock, the suicide attempts. Appearing as conservative reaction against the French Revolution gathered force, the book had the effect of turning Wollstonecraft into an exemplar of the low morals and dangerous excesses of the revolutionary years, an English stand-in for “the revolutionary harpies of France, sprung from night and hell”—Edmund Burke’s fevered image. Abhorrence for all things revolutionary linked ideas of sexual equality to the dreadful time when blood ran in the streets of Paris. Wollstonecraft’s life, intimately associated with that period of “wild wishes,” was treated as an instance of female passion run amuck, the author a “hyena in petticoats,” Horace Walpole charged.54
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