Mary
Wollstonecraft died aged only 38, after giving birth to a girl, in 1797. She has
been described as “England’s first feminist”. The ideas in her book The Vindication of the Rights of Woman written
in 1792, including that men and women have equal ability to reason, and an
equal right to education were considered outlandish and extraordinary by her
contemporaries, both men and women.
Wollstonecraft was at least a
century ahead of her time. Her contribution to the cause of women’s equality
was not widely recognised until the 1960s.
Advances in women’s rights in
Western countries are still very recent.
The words feminist and feminism were
not coined until the 1890s. Take
the crucial example of voting: women
got the vote in the USA only in 1920; all women in UK in 1928; in France it was
not until 1944; and in Switzerland it took until 1971.
Like many others who have challenged
the accepted wisdom and standards of their age, Wollstonecraft paid dearly for
it. In her case, she was the target of sustained misogynistic abuse. Horace
Walpole, a leading Establishment figure of the time, described her, in one
notorious example, as “a hyena in a petticoat”.
The abuse
intensified after Wollstonecraft’s
death. Her grieving husband of a few months, William Godwin, a radical
philosopher who believed in the paramount importance of truth-telling, wrote a
biography which was loving but revealed scandalous facts, including Wollstonecraft’s
illegitimate child and her two suicide attempts. Godwin’s book provided the
enemies of Wollstonecraft’s ideas with sufficient ammunition to blacken her
name for decades.
In The
Vindication, Wollstonecraft
made the revolutionary claim that men and women were equal “in reason” and equal in their ability to
be “fully human”. The fact that this appeared to many people not to be the
case was, she said, because women were deprived of the education which men
received. “Until
women are given the tools of reason, their minds valued as well as their
bodies, they cannot be free, or even fully human.”
In
the words of Godwin, when Wollstonecraft wrote The Vindication, “She stept forth boldly, and singly, in defence of
that half of the human race, which by the usages of all society, whether savage
or civilised, have been kept from attaining their proper dignity – their equal
rank as rational beings.”
The
key for Wollstonecraft was education. “I
have a profound conviction that the
neglected education of my fellow creatures is the grand source of the misery I
deplore.”
Education
is to be understood here as far wider than the classroom. It also means addressing
the cultural conditioning imposed on girls and women.
Wollstonecraft
is clear that The Vindication is
particularly aimed at middle class women. She is scathing about rich women and
hardly mentions poor women.
Wollstonecraft
argues that women were being educated to be “convenient domestic
slaves” or “alluring mistresses”.
Society was using a disguise to “place on
women the silken fetters which bribe her into endurance, and even love of
slavery.”
In order to be “fully human” she argued, women had to be
independent of a man. “I love man as my
fellow; but his sceptre real or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason
of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason,
and not to man.”
She challenged women,
as well as men. “My own sex, I hope, will
excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their
fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of
perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone”.
Women,
Wollstonecraft argued, could pursue careers should they so choose, "women might certainly study the art of
healing, and be physicians as well as nurses . . . they might,
also, study politics . . . Business of various kinds, they might
likewise pursue." It was not until
1876 that the first woman was admitted as a doctor in the UK and it was many
decades after that before such a thing was common.
Wollstonecraft was
born in 1759 in London into a world in which it was accepted as the natural
state of affairs that women were inferior to men. That had been the position
for almost all of recorded history. As the leading twentieth century feminist,
Simone De Beauvoir observed, “Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers,
and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed
in heaven and advantageous on earth.”
It was generally accepted
that women were too emotional, too hysterical to be capable of rational
thought.
Wollstonecraft understood well the power of
the consensus view. “Men, in general, seem to employ their
reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they cannot trace how,
rather than to root them out. The mind must be strong that resolutely forms its
own principles; for a kind of intellectual cowardice prevails which makes many
men shrink from the task…”
Wollstonecraft had been born into a middle-class family which
got steadily poorer throughout her childhood. She ended up supporting the
family. Her father drank and could be violent and her mother gave her little
attention or love. As Godwin wrote “Her
father was a despot and her mother was one of his subjects”.
Her schooling was basic; she was effectively self-taught. She
first left home to earn her way in the world at the age of 16. She tried a
number of ways of making money including setting up a school and being a
governess. However, aged 28, she found herself homeless, with no job and in
debt.
It was at this stage that, in a life-changing move, Wollstonecraft
was helped by Joseph Johnson, a radical publisher with a shop near St Paul’s
Churchyard in central London. She began work as a reviewer, and editorial
assistant. It was Johnson who later published The Vindication and who provided Wollstonecraft with an entry into
the world of radical literary London.
The French
Revolution of 1789 was a seismic event for the radicals in London. Once the French people had successfully
attacked the “sacred majesty of kings”,
anything seemed possible. It did not, however, live up to its initial heady expectations. Any hopes that the cry of liberte, egalite, fraternite would extend to the rights of women were
dashed by the time Wollstonecraft wrote The
Vindication.
It was this failure of the
Revolution that caused Wollstonecraft to write The Vindication in a remarkable period of only 6 weeks.
The book attacks at length
the ideas on education of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He had been the principle
intellectual force behind the Revolution but his ideas about the place of
women in society were anything but revolutionary. He argued that women should be educated
for the pleasure of men, to be docile and sweet and to be good wives and
mothers.
A few months after she wrote The
Vindication, Wollstonecraft went to Paris, which was still very much in the
grip of revolutionary turmoil. It was a characteristically independent step. In
Paris, she saw the doomed King Louis XVI pass by in the street.
She also met a man there whom she fell passionately in love
with. Gilbert Imlay was an American adventurer and businessman. Wollstonecraft and
Imlay had a baby girl, but Imlay did not reciprocate Wollstonecraft’s passion
and he deserted her. She left Paris to follow him. Time and again, in France
and then in London, Imlay treated her, now with their baby girl, appallingly.
Twice, in despair over Imlay, Wollstonecraft
made suicide attempts. In the first, she swallowed an overdose of opium. In the
second, she threw herself off Putney Bridge into the Thames.
Wollstonecraft’s critics were to later gleefully
point out that the woman who in The
Vindication had sternly advocated that women be independent of men had not lived
up to her own advice.
Eventually Wollstonecraft moved on from Imlay
and eventually married William Godwin. The
couple had the baby girl whose birth led to Wollstonecraft’s death, and who grew
up to be famous herself. She was Mary Shelley, who wrote the famous novel,
Frankenstein.
Wollstonecraft’s message resonates in
the twenty first century far more than in the eighteenth. “Rights of man and rights of woman are the same.”
Wollstonecraft
was clear eyed about the resistance her ideas would encounter. She wrote these
lines of herself a few months before her death, "Those who are bold enough to advance
before the age they live in, and to throw off, by the force of their own minds,
the prejudices which the maturing reason of the world will in time disavow, must
learn to brave censure. We ought not to be too anxious respecting the opinion
of others... Those who know me will suppose that I acted from principle. - I am
easy with regard to the opinions of the best part of mankind - I rest on my
own."
She urged women
to be strong and independent, for their own sakes, “I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.”
In the end, it was
a matter of justice. “It is justice not
charity that is wanting in the world!”
