Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and philosopher, one of the founders of modern feminism. Her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), written in six weeks in the heat of the French Revolution, argued that women are rational beings who appear inferior only because they are denied education and kept in dependence, trained to please men rather than to think; that virtue and reason have no sex; and that women deserve education, economic independence, and civil and political rights. She also wrote the first reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, a history of the Revolution she witnessed in Paris, novels, children’s books, and a travel book that enchanted the Romantics. Her unconventional life — her love affairs, an illegitimate daughter, a suicide attempt, a late marriage to the philosopher William Godwin — and her early death after giving birth to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, made her a scandal to the nineteenth century and a heroine to the twentieth.

Life

Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London, the second of seven children of Edward Wollstonecraft, who squandered an inheritance on failed farming ventures, drank, and beat his wife; Mary, as a girl, sometimes slept on the landing outside her mother’s bedroom to protect her. She received little formal education. At nineteen she left home to work as a lady’s companion, the only respectable occupation open to a poor gentlewoman. She nursed her dying mother, helped her sister Eliza escape a miserable marriage, and with her sisters and her beloved friend Fanny Blood opened a school for girls at Newington Green, a centre of religious Dissenters, where she met the radical minister Richard Price. In 1785 she travelled to Lisbon to nurse Fanny, who died in childbirth in her arms.

After the school failed, she worked as governess to the daughters of Lord Kingsborough in Ireland, then, in 1787, decided to live by her pen in London — “the first of a new genus”, she told her sister. The radical publisher Joseph Johnson employed her as a reader, translator and reviewer for his Analytical Review, and introduced her to his circle, which included Thomas Paine, William Blake, the chemist Joseph Priestley, the painter Henry Fuseli, and William Godwin.

When Burke’s Reflections appeared in November 1790, attacking Price and the Revolution, Wollstonecraft answered within weeks with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, the first of many replies, defending reason, liberty and the poor against Burke’s sentimental reverence for tradition and aristocracy. Two years later she published the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In December 1792 she went alone to revolutionary Paris, where she witnessed the Terror, fell in love with the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, and in 1794 gave birth to their daughter Fanny. Imlay’s affection cooled. On a business mission for him to Scandinavia in 1795 — with her baby and a maid — she wrote the letters later published as Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), a book of philosophical reflection and Romantic landscape. Returning to find Imlay with another woman, she tried twice to kill herself, once leaping from Putney Bridge into the Thames.

In 1796 she began a relationship with William Godwin, the anarchist philosopher of Political Justice. When she became pregnant, they married in March 1797, though both had criticised the institution, and kept separate lodgings. On 30 August 1797 she gave birth to a daughter, Mary; the placenta did not come away, the doctor removed it by hand, and she contracted puerperal fever, dying on 10 September 1797, aged thirty-eight. Godwin’s candid Memoirs of her (1798), revealing her love affairs and suicide attempts, destroyed her reputation for a century.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The Vindication, dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand, who had proposed a national education system that gave girls only primary schooling, begins from Enlightenment premises: human beings are distinguished from animals by reason; virtue consists in the exercise of reason; and so the same virtue, and the same education, are due to both sexes. “I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues.” Women’s souls are not different from men’s.

Why then do women appear weaker, vainer, more frivolous and more sensual than men? Not because of nature, but because of education and their dependence on men. From childhood, girls are taught that their purpose is to please; they learn manners, accomplishments, “a smattering of accomplishments” and the arts of coquetry rather than knowledge and reason; they are confined, kept from exercise, praised for delicacy and sensibility, and so become the “fair defects” men describe. “Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” Women’s weaknesses are like those of soldiers or courtiers, other classes raised to dependence and display: “the same cause accounts for their behaviour”.

She attacks the authors who prescribed such an education — above all Rousseau, whose Émile raised its hero for independence and reason while educating Sophie, his future wife, solely to please him: “The education of women should always be relative to men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them…” Wollstonecraft found this contemptible and dangerous: such women make poor mothers, poor companions and poor citizens. “I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”

Her remedies were education — a national system of coeducational day schools, in which girls and boys would learn the same subjects and exercise together — and independence: women should be able to support themselves in professions (she mentions medicine, business, farming) rather than being driven into marriage for subsistence, which she called “legal prostitution”. Marriage should rest on friendship and mutual respect between rational equals, not on passion, which fades. Women, she suggested, should also have political representation, “instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government” — though she knew this would “excite laughter”.

Legacy

The Vindication was widely read and initially well received; after Godwin’s Memoirs, Wollstonecraft was denounced as a “hyena in petticoats” (Horace Walpole’s phrase, earlier) and an immoral woman, and nineteenth-century feminists often avoided her name, though John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor knew her work. The twentieth century rediscovered her as the founding mother of liberal feminism; Virginia Woolf wrote that “she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living”. Her daughter Mary, raised by Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley and wrote Frankenstein — a novel about a creature made, educated and abandoned.

In conversation

• “I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”
• The gilt cage — how education makes women’s weakness.
• Against Sophie — Rousseau’s woman educated to please.