In Search of Mary

by Bee Rowlatt

  This light was lent to me for a very short period, and is now extinguished for ever!

  In his diary that night, shattered Godwin writes only the words “twenty minutes before eight”, followed by three straight lines of his pen.

  Still grieving, Godwin begins writing the biography that will unleash a storm. In a bitter twist, he will be accused of causing another death: that of her reputation. The world is not ready for her experimental life – the affairs, the illegitimate pregnancies.

  Enemies pick over his work with howling glee: proof irrefutable that she was a whore and a bitch. Former friends back away, shaking their heads. Onto the historical scrapheap she is thrown. It took her ten days to die – the death of her reputation was more effective. And this is why Mary Wollstonecraft isn’t as famous as she should be.

  Godwin’s account of her doomed fight for life is agony. The tears keep on flooding my eyes. Doctors have messily introduced the fatal infection with the attempted placenta removal, and I can scarcely stand the part where they apply puppies to her breasts to reduce the engorgement. What the fuck. She’s trying her best to live. We lost one of the greatest women – we lost her young, and for no reason at all. The unnecessary, lingering loss is more enraging than if she’d slipped and fallen down a hole. It is a trivial, preventable, commonplace and utterly stupid death. She dies a woman’s death.

  Something I share with Wollstonecraft, and would very much prefer not to, is that I too had a retained placenta after the birth of my second daughter. I’ve always given the topic a wide berth, not out of squeamishness, but because of the war-correspondent tone that these conversations take. They tend to be less than sisterly:

  “I was in labour for twenty hours.”

  “Twenty hours? I was in labour for three days and had thirty stitches.”

  “Thirty stitches? My womb fell out.”

  “Mate, you got off lightly…”

  There’s quite enough of that placenta banter going round. So suffice to say that two years after the event itself, I’m at a party with helium balloons. Everyone starts inhaling, and squeaking in comedy voices. I too inhale a deep gasp, but suddenly everything flashes straight back to the gas and air used in labour. I can taste and smell that moment, and immediately feel my imminent and certain death.

  Everything shuts down. I’m unable to breathe or talk. I silently sink down to the floor. I think I’m there for quite some time – it’s hard to know. Sooner or later I start breathing again, and then get myself up off the floor, and eventually I become able to talk again. Standing there, confused and smitten with fear. It’s pretty freaky, and I wholeheartedly do not recommend it. Where did this come from?

  From the manual removal of the placenta. Briefly, then: the birth was just the usual pulsing, primeval madness: wild clawings, donkey noises, you know. The widening pool of blood was strangely hypnotic as it sped across the floor, but it was way too fast for me to register any danger. After all, the baby was out, and she was fine. So surely everything was ok? But suddenly it wasn’t. Manual removal of the placenta. In these words is the nightmare. It was the cursed placenta that did me in. Not even the baby – just its lumpen used-up afterbirth.

  Manual removal doesn’t sound like much. And perhaps there’s a way of doing it well. But in this case it involves being punched repeatedly in my already shattered vagina by a male registrar who is shouting: “DO YOU WANT ME TO GET THIS OUT OR NOT? GIVE HER MORE GAS.” Followed by stitches, thrombosed haemorrhoids and panic attacks. Followed by years of not telling anyone about it. Not until now anyway.

  Of course, I was massively lucky: I survived and my baby survived. And we’ve thanked god for the NHS an infinite number of times during the having of all these babies. Yet that weird, strangling terror was able to crash into my life at random. The panic attack, or whatever it was, came back to me a couple more times until I had another baby. This baby politely made her entrance in a much more safe and unkilling manner, and that seems to have been the cure.

  Wollstonecraft, however, never got another chance. How many women still die in childbirth today? Too many. If it takes you an average five hours to read this book, in the same period of time one hundred and sixty women around the world will have died like this. Each cut down at her toughest moment, each leaving an orphan or devastated family behind. Retained placenta is still life-threatening. Death in childbirth remains widespread.

  We lost her all too early, with her unfinished works and projects still in a heap. And her unfinished children, who suffered the loss so much harder than anyone. What else could she have crammed into even just a few years more? Could Mary Wollstonecraft have sustained that hurricane existence over a full lifetime?

  We don’t even know what we lost.

  Here we are, Will and I, in the heart of the world’s super-power, nestled among the wealthy techno-future, and a woman screams in raw terror, unsupported in her most basic of human needs. Oh, Wollstonecraft, I never should have taken my eye off you! When I was swanning around that literary lunch back in west London, you felt odd and old-fashioned, and I feared you might recede from view. And sure enough, here among these generous Californian beaches and people, I confess I forgot you a little. While all the time I was standing on the shoulders of your shortened but gigantic life.

  Revolutions, France, old Europe – they all feel so far away from here, like a 1940s BBC voice on a crackling wireless. But they are very much closer than I thought. “Good evening. The Olden Days calling here, from London. We regret to report that certain women are bleeding to death in childbirth. However the magnificent men of the future will see to that, just as soon as they’ve made the flying automobile.”

  There’s a passage in her fictional work The Wrongs of Woman. This is the last book that Wollstonecraft wrote and if you dig around, everything is here. The politics of the Vindication meets the more personal, inward voice of Letters from Norway. In the story a woman is imprisoned, “buried alive” in a lunatic asylum by her husband, who has also taken away her daughter. From her “darkened cell” the woman writes a letter to her child.

  She could just as well be writing to the future, to centuries of daughters and great-granddaughters; to me. If it’s not too much of a Gothic leap, I like to read it as Wollstonecraft’s voice from beyond the grave – as her manifesto and permanent legacy.

  She is

  … a mother, labouring under a portion of the misery, which the constitution of society seems to have entailed on all her kind[.] It is, my child, my dearest daughter, only such a mother who will dare to break through all restraint to provide for your happiness, to ward off sorrow from your bosom. From my narrative, my dear girl, you may gather the instruction, the counsel, which is meant rather to exercise than influence your mind. Death may snatch me from you before you can weigh my advice or enter into my reasoning. I would then, with fond anxiety, lead you very early in life to form your grand principles of action, to save you from the vain regret of having, through irresolution, let the spring tide of existence pass away, unimproved, unenjoyed. Gain experience – ah, gain it! – while experience is worth having, and acquire sufficient fortitude to pursue your own happiness; it includes your utility, by a direct path… Had I not wasted years in deliberating, after I ceased to doubt, how I ought to have acted – I might now be useful and happy.

  Like Wollstonecraft’s life, the work ends prematurely. It’s unfinished, and we’ll never know how she intended to leave it. I hug the book. We’ve been through so much together that surely it’s now time I called her Mary. But finally I realize I never will. It has to be the implacable, irreplaceable, unspellable Wollstonecraft. Woll. Stone. Craft. I’ve long imagined some future encounter where I overcome my girl-crush, we get on first-name terms and become BFFs. But that’s just another treasure trail led astray. That closure will never happen, not even here in California. There are millions of Marys. There is, and will only ever be, one Wollstonecraft.

  The next morning I take Will back to
the diner. All I want to hear is that someone helped the woman, that she had a baby and they’re both safe, that a partner’s stroking her hair, that the girl will get to hold her sibling. Please, please. We hover anxiously by the counter in front of a row of intimidating multi-coloured doughnuts. Some are wet-look, some are studded. They are like British doughnuts gone to a specialist nightclub.

  It’s a different waiter at the diner today. The name badge on her uniform says Soraya. She’s small and tired, with a scraped ponytail, gold hoop earrings and mauve lipstick. I ask her about the woman and yesterday’s waiter, but Soraya doesn’t know. She doesn’t even know whose shift it was yesterday: “Sorry ma’am”. Today is just another long day at work. The city streams on, and life is quietly hard, and no one can change what happened. Right here is the cruelty of non-fiction. I buy a frosted doughnut that will make me feel even sicker. We leave a huge tip that in no way makes up for yesterday’s failings.

  And on we go.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I’ve Drunk of These Cups and I’m Walking away

  Back to the dazzling murals and gracious sweep of the Women’s Building. Walking up Eighteenth Street I get a rush of affection when we see the building from afar, with its bonkers rainbow exterior. “Look, Will: we’re back again – remember this place?” He runs in the large door, where the Spanish-speaking receptionist and the purposeful buzz welcome us back in. Kids spill out of a quinceañera party with music in the main hall, people are queuing for tax-advice sessions and the computer-skills area is bustling. There’s even a place to change Will’s nappy that doesn’t involve public toilets. It’s a grounding place, if that’s not putting it too Californianly.

  It’s also a place where I hope I can take my questions forward a generation: we’ve come to meet Bettina Aptheker’s notional granddaughters: the Goddess Grrrls. Tina and Heidi are my generation, just-forties women, running a course for girls. The leaflet has a big love heart and the words “Activate. Enlighten. Empower: A rite of passage training, for girls aged 10 to 13”. Tina is a dancer, Heidi is a child psychologist. Tina twists around, moves her hands and perches lightly on a bent-under leg as she speaks.

  “I used to work with Planned Parenthood. The doctor I worked with in upstate New York was murdered by anti-abortion campaigners. I’d been there three years, and suddenly we were being trained how to deactivate bombs and deal with anthrax. We were a roomful of health educators, nurses and midwives, with this secret-service guy who’s teaching us about bombs. I totally lost it. I returned to dancing, but still wanted to work with health and empowerment for girls. And right here is where that comes together: with Goddess Grrrls!”

  Will is pottering round the room, finding small spaces to hide the car keys in. “So is the course a modern-day version of consciousness-raising?” I ask. “A way to introduce girls to feminism?”

  “Well, I completely identify as a feminist,” says Tina. “But it’s been made to look angry and unglamorous. The movement has also had its own changes and challenges. If we called this” – she waves a hand around her – “a Feminism course, then I think the girls and maybe even the parents would be suspicious. This has always been a problem.”

  “Feminism by stealth – has the label become so toxic?”

  “Well, even as it evolves there are new problems,” says Heidi. “Take the Third Wave, with things like burlesque and feminist porn. There’s a lot of play with exploitation and experimentation. Sometimes this is problematic. I studied with someone who said: ‘I’m going to sleep with hundreds of men: this is my feminist performance art.’ We were kind of worried about that. But I guess it all comes under the wider umbrella—”

  (Will stoops down and lets out a noisy fart. We burst out laughing and lose our thread. Keep your opinions to yourself there, sonny.) This is a tricky one to untangle. For me, the showgirl roots run deep: I enjoy some camp sparkle and a high heel just as much as the next rebellious child of the bare-foot, straggly Seventies. But feminism with tassles? Perhaps the Third Wave has gone to some unexpected places. I resolve to ask Wollstonecraft’s advice at the first opportunity.

  “So this umbrella – if it keeps on getting wider, that’s bound to cause internal problems, isn’t it?”

  “No,” says Tina. “These debates should happen. I’m glad there are places to keep the discourse going. Young people need information, to approach the media critically. And they need to respect their bodies, which is the opposite of the images that inundate them daily. And that’s why we’re here.”

  Heidi and Tina have to get their classroom ready before the trainee Goddess Grrrls arrive. But they ask if I’d like to come back and give a short talk about ‘Following Your Dreams’. I’m flattered. Training young Goddesses? “I’d love to!” I offer to tell them all about the short but extraordinary life of the great Mary Wollstonecraft, and how you too can hit the road and explore the world, even with a baby. Especially with a baby.

  While they prepare the room, Will and I head to the nearby Bi-Rite Creamery. It smells of a bygone sugary heaven, has slightly too fashionable deli tiles and is full of thin people eating fat food. We get a large ice cream for Will. That ought to keep him occupied during my goddess lecture. And we scamper back over to the Women’s Building, where the girls are sitting ready in a circle. They’re a sweet collection of awkward pre-teens, with an air of resignation about what their parents have gone and signed them up for now.

  I do my best sizzling hyper-account of Wollstonecraft’s life: it needs no sexing up, and I give it both barrels. The time she rushes alone to Portugal to save her best friend – the time she serves France’s top diplomat wine in a cracked teacup – the time she forces a ship’s captain to rescue some shipwrecked sailors… It’s all going brilliantly; look at their faces!

  Gradually it dawns on me that the smiles, nudges and gasps of “oh-my-God” and “aww” aren’t for me, or even for Wollstonecraft. Behind me, in his buggy, Will has been fashioning himself a large beard and moustache out of ice cream. A brown cascade has dripped all down his front and his legs, and he’s beaming. The chocolate varmint is working the crowd like a pro. Wollstonecraft never stood a chance.

  Despite the sugar rush and the tide of admiration, Will soon settles down for a nap, and I get time to have a look at the tassle question. So what would Wollstonecraft say to Third Wave feminism? I recall Roberta trying to fabricate a Wollstonecraftian social media response on the subject of the SlutWalks. And how her offer was abruptly declined.

  The fact is, Wollstonecraft was a strong believer in the now extremely unfashionable notion of modesty. I’m loath to allow her to appear fusty and out of touch, but you’re going to have to trust me here. We’ve come all this way, so please bear with her now. There’s a whole chapter full of modesty in the Vindication. It begins:

  MODESTY! Sacred offspring of sensibility and reason – true delicacy of mind! May I unblamed presume to investigate thy nature, and trace to its covert the mild charm that mellowing each harsh feature of a character renders what would otherwise only inspire cold admiration lovely! Thou that smoothest the wrinkles of wisdom and softenest the tone of the sublimest virtues till they all melt into humanity – thou that spreadest the ethereal cloud that, surrounding love, heightens every beauty…

  Flipping heck, this latter-day L’Oréal advert doesn’t half go on. She’s really not helping me out here. How, exactly, will smooth-’n’-soft modesty that “spreadest the ethereal cloud” help women get equal pay, for example? Luckily the intro soon calms down and gives way to some sense among the weirdness. Interestingly, she first discusses modesty in relation to men. No less a triumvirate than John Milton, George Washington and Jesus Christ passes the modesty test. This is because they are high achievers, without arrogance or fear.

  In fairness, if some of Wollstonecraft’s turns of phrase sound so dated as to be barely intelligible, it’s worth checking out the voices of some of those around her at the time. Such as the one that appears in her disc
ussion of women being denied access to the study of botany:

  What a gross idea of modesty had the writer of the following remark – the lady who asked the question of whether women may be instructed in the modern system of botany consistently with female delicacy!… If she had proposed the question to me, I should certainly have answered: “They cannot.” Thus is the fair book of knowledge shut with an everlasting seal!

  Were women really blocked from what appears to be an appropriately ladylike field of study? As so often happens with Wollstonecraft, I get drawn further afield by the questions she provokes. Might those poor ladies fall prey to a vagtastic orchid opening wide its provocative throat, and become irredeemably corrupted? Wollstonecraft herself was fully up to speed on developments in natural history, through her hundreds of articles and translations for the Analytical Review.

  And according to the redoubtable research team at Kew Gardens, botany was indeed “considered to be a feminine pursuit … popular among British ladies from before 1753, including Queen Charlotte”. The first woman formally to name a plant species was Elizabeth Blackwell, who published in 1757 to earn the money to get her husband out of debtors’ prison. But then, guess what? Countless women discovered new species only to have them written up and published by male authors.

  A certain youngster named Beatrix Potter submitted her research on fungus species to the then Director of Kew, William Turner Thiselton-Dyer. It was rejected, and she was barred from presenting her work. Even though she was ultimately proven right, her theories were credited to a male German scientist. Small wonder that over 97% of the plant species discovered between 1753 and 2013 are named after men. And ultimately botany’s loss was children’s literature’s gain. That’ll be Ms Tiggy-Winkle, thank you.

  Anyway where were we? Back to Wolly and Modesty. She’s going full throttle now as she moves on to examine what it means in everyday social interactions.