by Bee Rowlatt
I squinted back, with the distillation of radgy hindsight, into my teenage years. All those breezy assumptions about equality and worlds being oysters – how did they harden into resentment? Running headfirst into motherhood, that’s how. I was a slow and reluctant adapter to the landscape of parenting, unwilling to acknowledge that the alien force known as babies can mark a profound change in women’s lives. After having four of them, I’m still catching up with that identity split.
It first emerged long ago, on a night out with some work friends. We’re in some place near Covent Garden, and the table’s now covered in wine bottles. I’m the only one with babies. To rhyme with scabies and rabies. And I’m tired enough to feel delirious and have watery eyes, even though I’m only doing the odd freelance newsroom shift here and there. They are all caught up in the glamour of foreign news trips:
“Of course the Nigerian elections were so different this time round…”
“In Kabul we got so drunk the presenter fell in the swimming pool…”
“You wouldn’t believe how many lines dropped in my outside broadcast…”
I sit through the evening with nothing to contribute. My week was spent going to and from Ten o’Clock Club, making playdough snails and pointing at trains. I get home that night in a state of anxiety, and tell Justin I don’t like my friends any more.
He looks at me. “There’s only one thing that you needed to say, and it would’ve stopped them in their tracks.”
“What?”
“All you had to say was: I had an amazing morning, just playing with the kids.”
“Hm. That’s obnoxious,” I say, grudgingly thinking he may be onto something. If this is true, it means that despite our current differences my friends and I have more in common than we thought. We share the same ailment: the feeling of being on the wrong part of the family-work continuum. The itch of constant reminders that there’s always something else you should be achieving. But hasn’t there been ’70s feminism and “Having It All”? Who makes us feel this way? By which of course I mean: “Who can we blame for this?”
Whoever’s nearest, usually. Resentment makes you say things that, as you say them, you notice make you sound like a right cow. But it’s too late: it’s already out there. “Your problem is that you’re too selfish to pick the towel up off the floor, and now you’re doing it just to annoy me,” you shout, while your partner looks around for a towel that he wasn’t even sure existed.
He doesn’t know – and neither, perhaps, do you – that it may have taken a decade to build up the resentment centred on this towel. Or several centuries, if you count the simmering convoy of your female ancestors. There they are, glowering at the forlorn towel on the floor, grinding their medieval teeth. To that towel, add the endless battles around affordable childcare and unequal wages.
Small wonder women are leaving it later before they take the motherhood plunge. But there’s something they might not be seeing. There is another side: the joy in pulling it off. Wollstonecraft nailed it, way back in 1795. For all her torment, she was a skilled combiner of apparently conflicting forces in life. And following in her steps, I’ve made a discovery.
If you’re doing work and parenthood without doing justice to either, then reassess. They might seem like two worlds at odds. But if you have any kind of toehold in both, that’s something to celebrate. It’s only a compromise if you think it is. I used to, but something changed when I followed Wollstonecraft to Norway. Instead of “Having It All”, it feels more like just about getting away with it all.
Maybe doing some adventuring of my own addressed the resentment problem. Or maybe it was noticing too late how fleetingly baby time passes. But a notion that I’ve been hardwired to scorn now has sudden urgency: it is possible eventually to get things like careers and social lives back. You will never get the baby time back.
Check me. One quick trip to Norway and suddenly I’m all Mrs Self-Help.
I’m back from the trip. It’s taken a while to come back to writing, mostly because I couldn’t bear for it to be over. I pre-savoured that journey for so long, imagining it on buses and in bed, planning it while walking to school. It became, in the friendliest of clichés, my dream come true. Now it’s over. Clinging on is like trying to get back to sleep to re-enter a dream. It’s fading, slipping away.
And that’s not the only thing that’s stopped me from writing. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the irony of writing about motherhood: if you’re writing about it, you’re not doing it. Result? Your writing’s intermittent, and you’re a crap mum too.
Anyway, I’m back. And here I was at my laptop innocently moving documents into new folders to make life more orderly, and there was that article by Virginia Woolf. It hooks me every time. Perfect like the ultimate strawberry: it is small, pungent, irresistible. I devour it:
The staple of her doctrine was that nothing mattered save independence. Independence was the first necessity for a woman – not grace or charm, but energy and courage and the power to put her will into effect.
Of the many examples of Wollstonecraft’s independence, energy and courage, perhaps the most bonkers is when she takes off for Paris.
she had put her principle of decisive action instantly into effect, and had gone to Paris determined to make her living by her pen.
Why? For the Revolution.
The Revolution … was not merely an event that had happened outside her: it was an active agent in her own blood. She had been in revolt all her life – against tyranny, against law, against convention.
My own blood speeds, pupils dilate, and it’s time to get back out there. Back onto the rough invigorating seas of life in the company of the one and only Wollstonecraft. After all,
as we read her letters and listen to her arguments and consider her experiments … and realize the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.
I see these words and they hand me a new journey. Time to move again. I will go to Paris. Paris! I too will cut my way to the quick of life. Instead of the darkness of Risør, Paris is all the bliss of a new dawn. And it’s not just political: it’s a sexual dawning too. Cue Shaggy’s ‘Boombastic’ intro; stand by for Mister Lover Lover. For it’s here that she meets Gilbert Imlay.
Talking of blokes, should I take Will again? Part of me longs to scamper around on my own, not pushing a buggy with every flight of steps a barrier to progress and not having food thrown at me three times a day. But then, why make life easy when it could be complicated – and funny – and joyful? This is what I got from travelling with Will. It didn’t make some parts better: it made everything better. He loved it, I loved him, he loved me, and everyone else loved us both. Typing this thought I have three times leapt up and paced the room in excitement and sat down again.
So, Paris it is. Paris with the baby. The baby and the discovery of a Third Way. I’m gradually convincing myself that, in trailing Wollstonecraft around, a mysterious enlightenment is taking place. Like Wollstonecraft, I too can merge the apparently polar opposites of family and career. I am on the brink of a breakthrough: two worlds becoming one. I’m doing this as a mother. As a Mother. Merging the hitherto exclusive spheres of my Venn-diagram existence. With the exception of these moments of writing furiously at my laptop, young Will is with me, and we’re a team. We will go to Paris and prove it. This time I’m not nervous: I’m confident and clear.
“But what about your daughters – why can’t they come along too?” a voice in my head demands. “No way!” I reply. I can’t possibly do interviews with four kids milling around. What about that time I had to take them all with me to a meeting, and even though I bribed them with chips, just as I began to talk, Eva swung Elsa by the arm and then they all started to scream? “You’ve got a point,” says the voice, “but that’s your fault for having
so many kids.” “I agree, Voice, but who asked you? Aren’t you the one that pops up every time my mothering isn’t up to scratch? Like, take a hike, bud!”
Here I am, doing Scooby Doo impressions to a voice in my head. Never doubt that parenting bestows the ultimate panoply of transferable skills.
PART TWO
Chapter Nine
A Hopeful Feeling
Onwards to Paris. But everyone goes to Paris. It is the place to which writers must go. This puts me off. Hoping for inspiration I head down the local high street and into Kentish Town Library to check out the Paris guidebooks. They’ve all been borrowed. All of them? “Popular destination,” remarks the librarian with a smile. “Everyone’s going there: it must be the place to be… Maybe it’s that Woody Allen film.” He’s obviously trying to wind me up.
Wollstonecraft was writing, while she was in France, her study of the Revolution. It’s not much of a thriller, but even so her life was endangered by writing it. It’s also not personal like the bursting and variegated Letters from Norway, which means it’s going to be much harder to retrace her experiences. I need the services of a pro: I need Richard Holmes. That’s the Richard Holmes; friend to the Romantics and a biographer among biographers.
Holmes is an old-school writer-in-Paris. He will have drunk pastis on a boulevard at the exact spot where Wollstonecraft cried out against the bloodshed of the Terror, I am certain. But according to his publisher, “Richard is busy working on another book and has no time for interviews”. And my letter to him, invoking the earnest goodwill of a Wollstonecraft co-fanatic, remains unanswered.
I’m miffed. Not only was it his juicy introduction to Letters from Norway that got me into this whole thing, but he has “done” the Paris-in-another’s-steps thing – and done it to perfection.
There is a strong element of the ridiculous in this Paris plan. First, a firebrand legend of a woman, the world’s first feminist. In her footsteps, a clever biographer who looks like a spoof Englishman in round spectacles. Writing a book called Footsteps. And in their combined footsteps, there’s me and Will, bouncing around grinning at each other.
Roberta the Wollstonecraft blogger comes round for some lunch. We eat toasted cheese sandwiches and I tell her about my Parisian anxieties. She listens kindly while I witter on, breaking off melty cheese bites for Will. She’s also done the “Wollstonecraft in Paris” trip. Of course she has. What’s more, she did it properly, taking a scholarly approach, and blogging this on her return:
I looked up Mary Wollstonecraft every way I could think of, and came up with a modest haul. From this I conclude that she didn’t make much of a mark in France, partly because there were times during her sojourn when she had to lie low (Imlay registering her as his wife would only protect her so far, given that British citizens were personæ non gratæ once war was declared, and the couple had never been through a ceremony of marriage), and partly because there were so many momentous events going on, and so many distinguished foreign visitors, that her presence was of small interest.
Not only is there nothing much there to find, but I’m joining a whole crowd of ghosts, bumping into each other, frowning with the effort of soaking up some authentic Mary. Do I mind following someone who is following someone else? Like someone whose hobby is walking a few paces behind those guys with metal detectors. Unlike Roberta, I don’t even have the metal-detector-like support of an archive of historical facts or place references. I just have… a hopeful feeling.
And even that doesn’t last. Compared to the Norway trip, as this one looms closer, it reveals holes and fraying seams. My attempts to contact people keep failing. Unlike helpful Norway, Paris remains indifferent to my entreaties. They slip through my fingers: famous feminists, interesting bookish people. Even the hotel replies to my tentative “le petit-déjeuner, c’est compris?” with a single word: “NON”. I can’t wimp out now, though. Of course everything’s been done before, and written about brilliantly. But once we’re there it’ll make sense. I recite once more:
A dish of coffee… recruited my spirits, and I directly set out again…
Thinking back to the Norwegian rucksack blood-blisters, I pack lightly this time, selecting my books with care. It’s just Will in his buggy in front and a small wheeled suitcase pulling behind. It involves being a bit twisted and having no hands free, but it’s doable. We’re like a small travelling circus, a three-part convoy, as we trundle our wheely way through St Pancras to the Eurostar.
We’re going back in time, to before Wollstonecraft’s treasure-hunting Norway trip. This is three years earlier. It’s December 1792, and Wollstonecraft is thirty-three. She’s a published woman and a noted thinker. She’s also a virgin. But not for much longer. Her letters hint that she’s keeping an eye out for some action. The eyes of the world, meanwhile, are on Paris: the very epicentre of human upheaval.
Wollstonecraft has just tangled with the prodigious Edmund Burke MP, and come out of it pretty well. Burke’s snappily titled Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event in a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris is an anti-Revolution bestseller. It defends “private property” and the “old institutions” against “unnatural” mob rule. He urges against copying, “in their desperate flights, the aeronauts of France”. He praises chivalry, tradition and the British sense of knowing one’s place. “All this violent cry against the nobility I take to be a mere work of art,” he pronounces. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
Our angel treads right up. She fearlessly bangs out the first among many responses to Burke, beating even Thomas Paine’s legendary riposte. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men, like much of her work, bursts out of her in one long angry breath. She demands to know
when you call yourself a friend of liberty, whether it would not be more consistent to style yourself the champion of property.
She accuses him of supporting the slave trade: “a traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason”. She mocks him for sucking up to the powerful and demolishes his “gallantry” with arguments that will later become her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Though not averse to a dash of purple herself, here Wollstonecraft skewers Burke’s florid portrayal of the mob:
“Whilst the royal captives … were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells and shrilling screams and frantic dances and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women.’’ Probably you mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had had any advantages of education.
Comparing Burke’s arguments to the Hindu caste system, she calls for people to be judged on their own merits. Given half the chance, Wollstonecraft urges, even “the obscure throng” can improve itself. “Virtue can only flourish among equals.”
And as always, she gets deliciously, extravagantly annoyed:
I pause to recollect myself, and smother the contempt I feel.
On first publication it’s a well-received sell-out. It goes to a second print run, but this time with her name on the front, and the critics realize they’re being lectured by an uppity woman. This is where it gets ugly, and the “hyena in petticoats” mudslinging begins. But her reputation is now made, and her name is out there. The ensuing pamphlet wars have the feel of a social-media storm: pamphlets too were cheap, fast and accessible. And the storm around the Revolution was all-engulfing. It’s hard to underestimate the existential threat that many felt lapping at England’s shores from just over the Channel.
Wollstonecraft brushes off inconvenient stories about prison massacres: it’s the Revolution, and she must be there. She’s also keen to escape an awkward love affair with a hot-tempered artist who already has a wife. So off she gallops, boasting in a letter:
I have determined to set out for Paris … and shall not now halt at Dover I promise you, for as I go alone neck or nothing is t
he word.
She also makes some teasing remarks about finding a hubby out there, then dumping him again. It doesn’t quite happen like that though.
The first few days are tense and fearful. The acquaintances in whose house she’s staying are away. She can’t speak the language, and she misses her cat, and she daren’t blow out the candle at night. She has a hallucinatory premonition of the Terror:
Once or twice, lifting my eyes from the paper, I have seen eyes glare through a glass door opposite my chair, and bloody hands shook at me…
During this uncharacteristic wobble she even feels sorry for the King. The monarchy has fallen, but not yet been slaughtered. Witnessing Louis XVI passing in a carriage on his way to trial seems slightly to dent her faith in the Revolution. It may well be “the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded”, but up close to the blood-slippery pavements perhaps things aren’t as clear-cut as they appeared from London.
So she’s alone, and it’s daunting in the extreme, but don’t worry. This is Wollstonecraft. Neck or nothing. Up she springs, meeting people, soaking it up in revolutionary salons and learning French. She gets teased by an unnamed gentleman who warns her not to say “oui oui” too often. This silver-tongued rogue must surely be Imlay. And only a few months later the internationally-renowned author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman will be pregnant.
Paris may be where she blossoms, produces and reproduces, but it’s also the hardest place to track her – as Roberta found, there are so few textual clues. Unlike Norway, this won’t lend itself to footstep-seeking. Our train pulls out through the gentle countryside. After a mighty struggle and a bellow, Will gives up the fight and falls asleep in my lap. I push my back into the velour Eurostar seat and make a decision: I’m not going to do any of that foot-stepping ghost-hunting stuff. I’m just going to find out the facts.
