Mary Wollstonecraft’s achievement was to extend the commonwealth analy sis of male corruption and programme for male reform to women (BakerBenfield 1989: 95).
While Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is rightly regarded as a classic text of liberal feminism, it had little practical influence on mainstream political or the liberal tradition (Leach 1991: 182).
What Mary Wollstonecraft herself advocated were not so much political rights as emancipation from the drudgery, the social and economic inferiority, which was women’s lot. If that could be achieved they could contribute in their own way s more fully to society (Heater 1991: 42).
In understanding the British political tradition, Whiggism was of crucial significance as liberalism essentially developed out of the Whig tradition. It was not primarily an economic doctrine though it definitely served the economic interests of the middle class. Whiggism forcefully pleaded for parliamentary supremacy, consent as the basis of legitimate government, freedom of conscience and religious toleration, and the famous slogan that mobilized the American people in their fight for independence ‘no taxation without representation’.
Alongside this Whig tradition developed the radical opinion that shaped and influenced British liberalism. “These radicals considered themselves to be ‘Real’, ‘True’ and ‘Honest’ Whigs and tried to evoke the spirit of commonwealthmen of the English revolutions of the seventeenth century” (Baker-Benfield 1989: 95). However, unlike Whiggism, which emerged as a coherent doctrine and with a party to advance its ideas the radicals were an amorphous group without a common binding force. The term ‘radical’ came to signify a wide range of thinkers, politicians, non-conformists and pioneers. The most important among these radicals was Paine.
Although the mainstream Whig politicians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tended to interpret their proclaimed principles in way s which preserved their own property and privileges, it was alway s possible to give these same principles a far more radical interpretation as Thomas Paine did” (Leach 1991: 65).
Paine carried forward the egalitarian and rationalistic assumptions of Locke by pleading convincingly for political equality and full manhood suffrage without any kind of property restrictions. Many within Britain advocated the need for a more democratic constitution. From the 1760s to 1790s, there were demands for democratization of the parliament, abolition of second class status to Dissenters and by some, to women. These demands got strengthened and influenced by the revolutionary events in France in 1789. Through arguments like Locke’s natural rights theory, the nature of a freer and more equal Anglo-Saxon age and the utilitarian belief that political enfranchisement would lead to a rational and just society, the reformers defended the widening of suffrage. Their other demands included annual elections, equal electoral districts, secret ballot, abolition of property qualifications for MPs, payment to MP’s and manhood suffrage.
It was in this context that Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) advocated rights for women being close to the leading Protestant Dissenters, Price and Priestly. Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) henceforth referred in the text as A Vindication has been aptly described as the first classic work in feminist thought. For the last two hundred years, it has generated many debates and controversies and, has been vilified and eulogized. In the background of the enlightenment and the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft extended the radical opinion of the Dissenters like Paine and Price and brilliantly exposed the myth of equality which had ignored half of the human race. Even the mighty Rousseau did not escape her well-reasoned criticisms, as she skilfully demolished his arguments in his treatise on education Emile.
The whole extent of the feminist ideal is set out and the whole claim for equal human rights is made; and ... it has remained the text of the movement ever since (Stratchy 1978: 22).
LIFE SKETCH
Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in a house in Primrose Street, Spitalfields in London. She was the second child and eldest daughter in a family saddled with difficulties. Her mother Elizabeth Dickson Wollstonecraft bore seven children. Though submissive to her husband she was domineering towards her children. Edward John Wollstonecraft never settled down to a regular job with a steady income. He quit his job after receiving an inheritance. He drank a lot and became increasingly violent and brutal at home. In 1768, the family moved to a farm in Yorkshire. Wollstonecraft’s formal education was meagre and she was self taught. In 1788, she left home in search of financial independence. She became a journalist and also a paid companion to an elderly widow Mrs. Dawson at Bath. She returned home to nurse her ailing mother in the later part of 1781. After her mother’s death in 1782, she lived with the Bloods, the impoverished family of her dearest friend Fanny. She left them in 1783 to attend to her sister Eliza and her newly born daughter. In January 1784, the two sisters went into hiding leaving behind Eliza’s baby. Wollstonecraft took on the responsibility of taking care of her father. She also financed the education of her younger brothers and sisters and found them suitable employment.
In 1784, Wollstonecraft established a school at Newington Green in London with the purpose of providing informal education for young untrained teachers. This venture enabled her to grow intellectually even though she was beset with personal problems and economic instability. Her close friend Fanny Blood died of tuberculosis. She found out that the school did not do well. She was also in serious financial difficulties. On a suggestion by her neighbour she took to writing and publishing in order to settle her debts. She published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life in 1787. Meanwhile in 1786, she took up a job as a governess in Kingsborough family with large tracts of estates in Ireland. This was her first encounter with the leisurely class. In 1788, she published her first novel Mary.
In 1787, Wollstonecraft returned to England. In the same year, she wrote for the Analytical Review of Joseph Johnson and translated The Female Reader. In 1790, she became an editorial assistant to the Analytical Review and wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men. She began writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1791, which was published in 1792. In December 1791, she met William Godwin (1756–1836). In 1792, she met Talleyrand and travelled to France. In 1793, she met Gilbert Imlay with whom she shared a happy but stormy relationship. She began writing A Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794). She registered herself in the US Embassy as Mrs. Imlay and gave birth to a daughter, Imlay’s child in 1794. In 1795, she returned to London and attempted a suicide. She left for a long tour of Scandinavia as Imlay’s agent. In 1796, she published Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden. Having parted with Imlay, she resumed her contact with Godwin and became his lover. They married in 1797, at St.Pancras Church, after realizing that Wollstonecraft was pregnant with Godwin’s child. She wrote The Wrongs of Woman during this phase. Their daughter, Mary, was born on 30 August 1730. Mary was the future wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and the author of Frankenstein. On 10 September 1797, Wollstonecraft died of septicemia.
Many of Wollstonecraft’s contemporaries were critical of her personal life. She was called a ‘shameless wanton’ a ‘hyena in petticoats’ and ‘a philosophizing serpent’. They worried that her controversial personal life might hinder the cause of women that she was espousing in public. However, in the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft was described as ‘God’s angry woman’ a ‘man hater’. Emma Goldman paid tributes to Wollstonecraft by acknowledging her as the ‘pioneer of modern womanhood’.
PRICE AND THE SUFFRAGE QUESTION
Wollstonecraft became acquainted with Price when she moved to Newington Green, a town north of London, and through Price, came to know other men and women who were liberal in their orientation. “She came to see her personal struggle for independence as part of a larger political struggle and through Price, to understand that a person required freedom to cultivate reason and so achieve true humanity” (Todd 1989: 4). These Protestant Dissenters debated on the meaning of popular sovereignty and equality. The crux of the debate was that if men were equal and entitled to full citizenship rights, and if people were sovereign, then who could be denied suffrage and on what grounds. Price at a meeting of a body called The Revolutionary Society consisting of dissenters and radical Whigs remarked,
What an eventful period is this! I have lived to it, and I could almost say, lord, now lattés thou thy servant depart in peace lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever, nations panting for liberty, which seems to have lost the idea of it… . Be encouraged, all y e friends of freedom, and writers in its defense. The times are auspicious. Your labours have not been in vain (Parkin 1969: 120).
Thus, it was during the enlightenment and the French Revolution that the vocabulary and principles of what came to be subsequently styled as ‘feminism’ emerged. It could be described as a struggle for recognition of the rights of women, for equality between sexes and a re-definition of womanhood. Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication was the first tract to trigger off a debate centering on the theme of ‘equality versus difference’. She regarded sexual distinctions as arbitrary, a product of the patriarchal society, defended the need for equal and similar education for both men and women, glorified reason as the main tool for women’s emancipation and attacked the notion of women as sexual beings.
Wollstonecraft was the first major feminist and A Vindication, written when the issue of the rights of men was bringing revolution to the United States to France, and threatened to shake the venerable English Parliament, is the feminist declaration of independence. She dared to take the liberal doctrine of inalienable human rights, a doctrine which was inflaming patriots on both sides of the Atlantic (Kramnick 1982: 7).
Wollstonecraft questioned the male bias in their notions of rationality and citizenship and demanded equal opportunity for women. She highlighted women’s oppression even though she lent her support to the new bourgeois order and its liberal political principles, and thus laid the foundations for her feminist political philosophy. She desired the extension of liberal value of economic independence, individual achievement, and personal autonomy to women in general and to the middle class women in particular. She established a close link between liberalism and feminism by accepting the liberal challenge to aristocratic and patriarchal rule (Eisenstein 1986: 90).
The Dissenters believed that only a free individual could be virtuous and, therefore, considered independence of mind as an essential right. They equated independence with reason. Reason was elevated to the status of a religion for it could mitigate most of the shortcomings of the society. True wisdom could be only achieved through rational thinking for knowledge could rectify prejudices and remedy social injustices. The Dissenters, unlike Burke, considered the middle class as a repository of morality and civic virtue. They defended freedom of religious conscience. The rational Dissenters as they came to be referred to were also described as a ‘pack of dirty Jacobins’ or ‘William Godwin and His Circle’ in English cultural history included besides Godwin, John Wilkes, Paine, Thomas Holcroft, William Blake, Henry Fuseli and Wollstonecraft. They represented the “radical elements in English religious dissent, moving towards rationalism; ... as a radical political grouping, concerned with parliamentary reform, the extension of education and the removal of obstacles to free intellectual inquiry... . This ... is directly connected with the most progressive elements of the industrial bourgeoisie, with their attachments to free enquiry and to a rational science (Williams 1981: 75). The Dissenters saw themselves as the true inheritors of the Lockeian heritage and were enthusiastic supporters of the American and the early phases of the French Revolution for these revolutions embodied the spirit of liberty. Price, in a letter to Burke wrote,
In order that liberty should have a firm foundation it must be laid either by poor men or philosophers (Nixon 1971: 51).
Liberty and reform were on the agenda of many writers of that time: Rousseau in France, and, Wilkes and Paine in England. In fact, Paine completed his survey of the working class in England, the defects and deficiencies of a hereditary system of government, the unequal tax structure and the impressment of sailors and soldiers in wars faced with its consequences, namely, poverty as material deprivation without any hope of relief. He championed equal rights for men, representative government and the rule of law. He debunked the hereditary system whether monarchy or aristocracy and supported a government based on a social contract between people themselves. He was critical of the British constitution for being unwritten making it unhelpful as a reference point. Its precedents were all arbitrary contrary to reason and commonsense. Though the radical intelligentsia advocated restructuring of the existing political and administrative systems, as it was unjust, yet “it was rare to find a radical agitator of really humble origins in England” in the 1780s, as England was relatively more prosperous than France and the rest of Europe. The average Englishman led a decent standard living. As a result, “revolutionary thinking was almost totally the preserve of the bourgeois intelligentsia of whom Mary was one” (Nixon ibid: 150).
Criticism of Burke
In her reply to Burke, Wollstonecraft pointed out the apparent and as it appeared to many contemporaries of her time, the contradictions of a liberal Burke supporting the American cause and the conservative Burke opposing Jacobinism in France and England, making him a virulent critic of the French Revolution. Burke’s praise of tradition and hereditary rights and his emphatic stress on the conservation of existing political relations indicated according to Wollstonecraft, a lack of reason and predominance of sentiment leading to social stagnation hindering the progressive and dynamic nature of social and political life. She primarily criticized Burke’s Reflections though she also took exception to one of his earlier and influential book on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) in which he associated beauty with women and sublimity with men. Wollstonecraft accused Burke for championing “the maintenance of unequal property, and if necessary, of despotism and tyranny’. Property, according to Wollstonecraft, not only restricted liberty by creating inequalities but also undermined sociability for ‘among unequals there can be no society, meaning friendship and mutual respect’. Burke’s conservatism and Wollstonecraft’s radicalism were at the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Wollstonecraft’s views were in congruence with that of the radicals of her time. Being close to Price, her mentor, she articulated instinctively and with conviction the ideas of the Dissenters.
Burke’s defence of the hereditary principle and traditional values, according to Wollstonecraft, impeded the progress of civilization for individuals were respected according to their station in life. Moreover, because of the institution of private property which she described as ‘demonic’, parents treated their children like slaves sacrificing the younger ones to the eldest son and restricting early marriages, thereby injuring the minds and bodies of young people by producing ‘lax morals and depraved affections’. Furthermore, property spreads discontent among the middle class who try to imitate the lifestyles of the rich. Wollstonecraft saw the church that Burke praised as an institution upholding the sacredness of traditional values, as fundamentally corrupt having secured vast property from the poor and ignorant. With the help of Hume’s History of England (1754–62), she tried to show that English laws were a product of contingencies rather than the wisdom of the ages. She insisted that only those institutions, which would withstand the scrutiny of reason and in
accordance with natural rights and God’s justice, deserved respect and obedience. Furthermore, she assailed Burke for defending a ‘gothic affability’ more appropriate for a feudal age than the burgeoning commercial age marked for its ‘liberal civility’. As against Burke’s theory of prescriptive rights, Wollstonecraft contended that human beings by birth as rational creatures have inherited certain rights, especially the equal rights to liberty compatible with that of others. She was critical of Burke’s views on women as a “symbol of man’s need for a feminine ideal, not woman for herself”. His description of women as “little smooth, delicate, fair creatures, never designed that they should exercise their reason and that they should lisp, to totter in their walk and nick-name God’s creatures”, was the view of a strong prejudiced mind. He was not a great humanist for he was indifferent to the plight and cause of women (Wollstonecraft 1970: 113 and 112).
Paine, like Wollstonecraft, was critical of inadequate parliamentary representation, primogeniture and aristocracy, and state religion and denied reverence to the settlement of 1688 and its ‘Bill of Wrongs’ enacted by a non-elected Commons. Like Wollstonecraft, he did not wish to destroy property rights completely but insisted that on the division of large estates. In ‘An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex’ (1775) Paine examined the French Declaration of the Rights of Man but “did not think to annotate the document to show the systematic exclusion of women from its principles, as the feminist Olympe de Gouges did in France. It was Wollstonecraft’s distinction that, without being the first to do so at the time, she brought the issue of women’s rights for a short moment in the 1790s into the general debate about civil rights”, (Todd 1989: xiv).
Both, Paine and Wollstonecraft, portrayed Burke as a brilliant but misguided voice of the past. Paine’s criticisms of Burke were more effective and well known, as evident from his famous phrase that Burke “pitted the plumage but forgot the dying bird” but it was Wollstonecraft who advocated a more radical stance for ameliorating the plight of the poor. Paine did not have any plan for social levelling other than taxing the rich and insisting “that the appalling conditions of the poor must be improved, but he failed to offer any economic solution to the problem” (Dickinson 1977: 267). On the other hand, Wollstonecraft suggested economic means for improving the condition of the poor by dividing estates into small farms (Wollstonecraft 1970: 140). She endorsed plans for the betterment of the working class.
Response to the French Revolution
The French Revolution, for Wollstonecraft, represented the first expression of humankind towards general emancipation and liberation. The storming of the Bastille translated abstract rights into reality. The Revolution itself vindicated some of her liberal beliefs on the brotherhood of man and the equality of sexes. In the process, she transplanted the principles for women’s rights from France to England. Within France, there were arguments for women’s equality. This was evident in Condercet’s Sur l’ Admission des femmes au droit deute (1790), Diderot’s Sur les Femmes (1772) and Holbach’s Des Femmes (1773). Condorcet argued that to deprive women of their right to vote was contrary to the notion of natural rights since women as rational sentient beings deserved the same rights that men claimed for themselves. If women appeared inferior to men in intelligence it was because of poor education. He coaxed his fellow revolutionaries to adopt a more enlightened attitude towards women. His advocacy of women’s rights was part of his plan of a rational political order based on complete equality between the sexes in political rights and educational opportunities. He showed “how the radical opponents of monarchical despotism and aristocratic privilege are themselves still prisoners of prejudices who will ignore or even explicitly endorse the despotic powers exercised by men over women” (Evans 1986: 23). Condorcet desired to give women selfrespect and dignity, which could be possible only by public recognition of their equal rights. In 1793, he wrote his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind where he was more forthright about the status of women. He consistently insisted on the need defend sexual equality and observed,
Some philosophers seem to have taken pleasure in exaggerating these differences; in consequence they have assigned to each sex its rights, its prerogatives, its occupations, its duties, and practically its tastes, its opinions, its sentiments, its pleasures; they take the dreams of a romantic imagination as the will of nature, they have dogmatically pronounced that all is the best possible for the common good; but this optimism, which consists in wondrously finding in nature every thing as one invented it ... must be banished from philosophy (Proctor 1990: 29).
Initially, Condorcet seemed more concerned about political rather than social rights but subsequently, began to articulate a viewpoint similar to that of Wollstonecraft. He wrote,
Among the causes of the progress of the human mind that are of utmost importance to the general happiness, we must number the complete annihilation of the prejudices that have brought about an inequality of rights between the sexes, an inequality fatal even to the party in whose favour it works. It is vain for us to look for a justification of this principle in any differences of phy sical organization, intellect, or moral sensibility between men and women. This inequality has its origin solely in an abuse of strength, and all the late sophistical attempts that have been made to excuse it are vain (Todd 1989: xv–xvi).
Like Wollstonecraft subsequently, Condorcet believed that women’s equality would improve human relations within the family. Except for brute strength women were equal to men. The brightest of women were superior to men of limited talents and that improvement in education would narrow the existing gaps. A more rational government would work towards ensuring a better status for women. Thus the radical liberal opinion within France inspired Wollstonecraft though she did not discuss or read Condorcet’s works. However, he paid tributes to her as a historian who ought to express her views in the Parliament rather than remain a writer of women’s rights and education. Wollstonecraft, unlike Condorcet in his early writings, focused more on social rather than political degradation. By doing so, she “suggested a more intractable problem than Condorcet addressed in his earlier works and was forced to castigate not only male intransigence but also women’s collusion in their own oppression” (Todd ibid: xvi).
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83) reacted sharply to Rousseau’s tirade against women. He attributed the cause of their apparent inferior condition to “slavery and type of disparagement” that women were subjected to. The other advocates for women’s rights in France included Madame de Stael, Marie-Jeanne Philipon (1754–93) also known as Madame Roland remembered for her famous statement while facing the guillotine ‘Oh! Liberty what crimes are committed in thy name?, Olympe de Gouges (1748–93) (who dedicated her book The Declaration of the Rights of Women —La declaration des droits Des femmes—to the Queen) and Theroigne de Mericourt Poulain de la Barre accepted the intellectual equality of the sexes and that a woman ought to play a more active role in the society since their natural powers were so far uncontaminated. Condorcet and Voltaire used logic and biting satire to critique the French unequal adultery laws and pleaded for the need of divorce laws.
De Gouges tries to organize women’s societies that were both intellectual and political. Her Letter to the People or Project for a Patriotic Coffer by a Female Citizen (1788) urged women to demonstrate their patriotism by voluntarily contributing to the state coffers for that would bring about an egalitarian redistribution of wealth and repay the national debt. Her Reflection on Black Men (1788) argued that there were no innate differences between blacks and whites, and hence, no justification for slavery. In the Project for a Second Theatre and for a Maternity Hospital (1789) she insisted on a need to set up a women’s hospital. In The Call of the Wise by a Woman (1789) she instructed the clergy, nobility and land owners convened by Louis XVI not to take covertures for granted. Her well-known and philosophical tract The Rights of Woman (1791) laid down the constitutional principles—natural law and laws of logic as the basis of the rights of women. She advocated full political equality, equal opportunity for employment, education and holding public offices, equal access to women to public programmes, right to outright ownership and control of property if married. She called for a marriage to replace conventional marriage vows as a way of proving legal paternity of illegitimate children. The Well-being of the Nation (1793) formed the basis for her advocacy of general social reform. This pamphlet was seized and de Gouges was imprisoned for her criticisms of the revolution and the subsequent terror. She was declared a reactionary royalist and guillotined the next day after the trial ended.
Marquis de Sade, a defender of the woman’s question raised some psychological and ethical questions regarding man’s nature thereby undermining preconceived notions about sexuality and the ‘natural’ relations of the sexes. He defended the need for absolute equality of right in sexual matters between men and women. Being a militant atheist and a philosophical materialist, he opposed the tyranny of the church and the repressive Christian doctrines. The Christian God with his threat of divine retribution in his opinion was too immoral and base to be acceptable. He replaced God with Nature and looked upon the latter as the prime mover of the Universe. Anticipating Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) De Sade defined property ‘as a crime committed by the rich against the poor’. Property originated in usurpation and theft with law protecting the wealthy. He rejected laws as being detrimental to human passions. He had a poor opinion of individuals with weak passions regarding them as mediocre beings. He regarded crime as an outcome of passions or want and that kindness and honour could provide an effective deterrent. He advocated the abolition of death penalty. He defended women’s equal opportunity with men to satisfy their desires and wrote,
No act of possession can ever be exercised on a person; it is as unjust to possess a woman exclusively as it is to possess slaves; all human beings are born free and with equal rights; let us never forget that, consequently no sex can have a legitimate right to the exclusive possession of another and no sex or class can possess the other exclusively (Marshall 1992: 148).
Interestingly, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 referred only to universal manhood suffrage. The National Assembly recognized male voters. On 28 October 1789, it refused to entertain a petition from the Parisian women who demanded universal suffrage in the election of national representatives. In fact, the revolution withdrew some of the rights that a woman enjoyed under the Ancien Regime. For example, a noble woman as a landowner had rights similar to those enjoyed by feudal lords. She could raise and levy taxes, and administer justice. Women could become peers, diplomats and own large tracts of land. In the guilds, women exercised their professional rights as voters. The abbesses enjoyed the same powers as the abbots. The French Revolution, though libertarian in most respects, was conservative on the gender issue. The proponents of gender inequality studied the animal kingdom to support their contention that everywhere it is the male who reigned supreme. Men in the revolution continued to regard the home as the rightful place for the woman since the domestic environment offers the best possibilities for freedom. The revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity did not include women. The position of the women became more restrictive in post-revolutionary period. The civil and criminal codes that Napoleon promulgated placed the woman under the guardianship of a man, which meant that she could initiate legal transactions only under his tutelage. Only after 13 July 1807, could a married woman have an independent control over her earnings and savings. The July 1830 revolution and the February 1848 revolution took a more favourable view regarding the question of women’s rights. Women finally secured suffrage under the Fourth Republic (1946–58).
In volume one of An Historical and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution, a narrative account of the events in France written in 1793–94, Wollstonecraft cautioned her readers to rationally judge the revolution. She empathized with the poor and the politically underprivileged, and opposed tyranny of all hue and colour. In spite of the ‘reign of terror’ in France, she continued to retain the belief that the revolution represented the culmination of the intellectual movement towards general social advancement. She remained still convinced of the intrinsic rightness of the principles of the revolution and blamed the French people for not having sufficient strength of character to carry forward the task of liberating humanity. She agreed with Price when he observed,
I see the ardour of liberty catching and spreading, a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws and dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience (Wardle 1952: 112).
Wollstonecraft, like Paine and Price, regarded the French Revolution as the beginning of a new dawn in the chapter of human history. “Mary can be called a child of the French revolution. Its philosophy inspired her and was the foundation of her hopes for the future” (Nixon 1971: 250). In her classic A Vindication, she extended the prevailing arguments on the rights of man to include women and affirmed the principles of “true whiggery and political radicalism” (Barker-Benfield 1989: 106). This singular achievement of Wollstonecraft was of major significance in comprehending the gender question in political philosophy.
WOLLSTONECRAFT AND CONTEMPORARY FEMINISTS
Wollstonecraft’s tract was rightly hailed as the “first classic work in Feminist thought” (Charvet 1982: 6). She applied Locke’s individualistic political and social theory as modified by his radical and dissenting followers in the eighteenth century to the woman’s question. She was not the first in this endeavour as there were others but hers remained the most substantive effort and contribution to individualist Feminism (Charvet 1982).
Mary Astell’s (1666–1731) Reflections upon Marriage (1700) was historically recognized as one of the earliest tracts on education and women’s rights. Astell noted that male arrogance and pride were responsible for women’s oppression and subordination. Influenced by Locke she argued that there were innate ideas which men and women possess in equal capacity. Astell had an interesting exchange in print with Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham (1658–1708), the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, an eminent Cambridge Platonist on the relative merits of Locke’s empiricism and Platonism. Like Locke, Astell contended that judgement was usually on the basis of what was perceived so it was not the idea but the judgement that was false. She accepted Descartes’ definition of clarity and distinction and claimed that one had a clear but not a distinct idea of God and individual souls. She agreed with Locke that ‘not all truths are equally evident because of the limitations of the human mind’.
Astell contended that there was absolute authority in the patriarchal family and in An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1694) she observed that conjugal power was based on force and not on the Law of Nature or ‘natural’ inequalities of capacities. She argued that if more attention was given to women’s education then ‘marriage might recover the dignity and felicity of its original institution’ and men would be very happy in a married state. Marriage failed because most men did not look for proper qualifications in their wives. She instructed women to marry not because they wanted to please their friends or escape from the hardships of life but because they could enjoy an equal status in marriage. She wanted women to regulate their wills and be governed by right reason. Subjection would only enhance the pride and vanity of those who wield power. If all were born free then it did not make sense to treat women as slaves of men. Since arbitrary power was protested against when exercised in the public realm there was no justification of it as a governing principle in the private sphere.
Masham was critical of the inferior education provided to women as that made them unfit for educating their children. Ill education made women and children take to Christianity out of habit or rote rather than out of understanding. She blamed men for feeling threatened by educated women and that explained the dismal state of affairs. She was critical of the double standards in sexual morality seeing women’s virtue as primarily in chastity. To give undue importance to chastity lowered the self-esteem of women and made them think of men as unjust. It also made women vain and conceited. True virtue for Masham was action in accordance with ‘right reason’ and not the strict observance of customs or civil institutions. Virtue was not mere adherence to rules.
Catherine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749), initially a playwright turned to philosophy with A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding (1702). She prepared the case for justifying equal rights for women and men towards perfectionist goals of self-development. She argued from liberal principles for equal and fair treatment of women. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) was another theorist who upheld the right of education for women. These accounts for equal civil and educational rights for men and women remained peripheral and never formed a part of mainstream eighteenth century political theory.
Wollstonecraft did not acknowledge anywhere that she had read the views of her predecessors even though her views resembled theirs in a striking manner. She acknowledged Macaulay’s views on the need for women to have a rational education before they could be judged, as moral beings for the cultivation of the female intellect would eradicate feminine frivolity and triviality. Macaulay recommended a liberal upbringing for children with ample play-time, opportunities for physical activity to develop confidence and strength and shouldering responsibility of pets in order to develop care and kindness for dependent creatures. She defended women’s equality and criticized the idea of sexual incompatibility as it ignored the immorality of the unequal treatment given to women. She regarded slavery as immoral and condemned the British slave trade in the West Indies. She was critical of the anti-libertarian and pro-monarchical philosophies of Hobbes, Rousseau and Hume and adopted a contractarian view. Her most famous and monumental work was The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line published over twenty years in eight volumes. It detailed the abuses and failures of the English monarchy at the time of its political decline leading to scathing criticisms from both Samuel Johnson and Hume. She firmly believed in the doctrine of equal individual rights, which included women also. She demanded equal educational opportunities for women. Her opposition to royal authority and rejection of any mode of dominance led her to travel to the United States to meet the antimonarchial revolutionaries, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Martha Washington, James Otis Warren and Mercy Otis Warren.
Unlike Macaulay, a Whig historian who saw progress in history, Wollstonecraft believed only in individual progress on the premise that change would improve the life prospects for everyone. Society could not progress if half of its population remained backward. For this purpose, women would have to be regarded first and foremost as human beings and then as women for the soul is unsexed. The inequality and oppression that women suffer corrupted both men and women equally. Essentially believing in the importance of environment she rejected heredity. Professing faith in the libertarian principles of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft felt the need to extend the same to women whom she considered as the cradle of the human race. The basic ideas of human perfectibility, equality of individuals and the natural right of each to determine his destiny would enable society to overcome its oppressive and unequal ways. “In doing so, she linked feminism to the general struggle for political and social reform, arguing that the abstract rights of woman were inextricably linked with the abstract rights of men and that the tyranny of man, husband, king, primogeniture and hereditary privilege must all cease, in the name of reason, a reason that was woman’s as well as man’s” (Todd 1989: xvii). Wollstonecraft basically contended that only women with independent minds could make good wives and become good mothers. “Meek wives make foolish mothers... . Speaking of women at large, their first duty is to themselves as rational creatures and the next in point of importance, as citizens, is that of a mother” (Wollstonecraft cited in Nixon 1971: 120). If women have to rise they would have to imbibe middle class values, attitudes and virtues. The domestic revolution that she aspired for ought to emulate the French Revolution and be middle class in its orientation and ideas. “The women she hoped to reach first and foremost belonged to the middle class. Her ambition was to stop them from aping their social superiors, to divert their attention away from the world of fashion to that of learning, and thereby to emancipate them from their dependence on the opinion of other vain and superficial beings” (Tomaselli 1995: x–xi).
Views on Women
Wollstonecraft believed that fulfilment, maturity and eventual emancipation would come only if women were treated as persons and not merely as sexual beings. Women like men were endowed with reason enabling them to make rational decisions and were entitled to natural rights. Extending the argument of the natural rights theorists. Wollstonecraft pointed out that the chief distinguishing trait that separate human beings from animals was the fact that they possess a reasoning faculty. If this proposition applied to men then it was equally true for women also. Women were not inferior to men and if they appear so it was because they were denied rights and training of their talents and skills. She instructed women to develop their inner resources to make themselves interesting not for others, but for themselves. She accepted that the result of generations of neglect, women’s capacities and skills have been stunted which could be remedied with sufficient opportunities, freedom and education.
Having very little faith in the women of her time, Wollstonecraft looked to assistance from enlightened men as being crucial to bring about a first generation of independent women. Subsequent generations would find it easier for they would have role models for emulation. A disciple of Locke, Wollstonecraft regarded nurture as being more important than nature for education could temper and shape human beings. Within this broad framework a major portion of A Vindication (1792) was directed to the prevailing perceptions on women and their role in society. Wollstonecraft made Rousseau, Burke, Dr. Gregory, Dr. Fordyce and Lord Chesterfield her targets for in her opinion, their texts and views presented a ‘sexual character to the mind’. These theorists saw women as artificial beings meant to pander to the egos of men, which unfortunately was endorsed by many women themselves. To this, Wollstonecraft observed
All the causes of female weakness as well as depravity , which I have already enlarged on, branch out of one grand cause—want of chastity in men (Wollstonecraft 1985: 152).
Wollstonecraft was equally critical of women for accepting their artificial and subordinate status. She asserted that they were not merely confined to household work, but were corrupted by it for making them servile as the dependent class, and arbitrary and irrational as tyrants in their sexual relationships with men. She found the idea of chaste wives and sensible mothers as absurd. As far as chastity was concerned, if discarded by their husbands they tended to look for admirers and lovers elsewhere. As far as the upbringing of their children was concerned they had no rational plan for conducting it. It was done through trial and error, by perpetuating the same techniques and values with which they were brought up without critically examining its appropriateness or effects.
Wollstonecraft was critical of Rousseau for assuming that men and women differed in their capacity for virtues. While a man’s virtue was considered to be his rational capacity a woman’s virtue was her chastity, gentleness and obedience. Rousseau was prepared to keep women in ignorance by not allowing them to gain knowledge and in the process, according to Wollstonecraft, was prepared to debase one-half of humanity without any consideration for the future of humankind. She was critical of Rousseau for regarding women as sexual beings and, therefore, not free. A man, on the contrary, was sexual only at certain times, but was free and equal for the rest of the time. Rousseau recommended little liberty for women so that her nature was good and that she could bear the insults and injustices of her husband, an imperfect being. She was supposed to be timid, weak and try and develop her beauty. To this, Wollstonecraft replied:
The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust; ... of what materials can that heart be composed which can melt when insulted, and instead of revolting at injustice, kiss the rod... . Greatness of mind can never dwell with cunning or address; for I shall not boggle about words ... but content my self with observing that if any class of mankind be so created that it must necessarily be educated by rules not strictly deducible from truth, virtue is an affair of convention... . Men have superior strength of body ; but were it not mistaken notions of beauty, women would acquire sufficient intelligence to enable them to earn their own subsistence, the true definition of independence; and to bear those bodily inconveniences and exertions that are requisite to strengthen the mind. Let us then, by being allowed to take the same exercise as boy s, not only during infancy, but y outh arrive at perfection of body, that we may know how far the natural superiority of man extends. For what reason or virtue can be expected from a creature when the seed-time of life is neglected (Wollstonecraft 1985: 92, 94).
Wollstonecraft was also critical of the legal and educational aspects of women’s place in society, a fact that Rousseau accepted as natural. It is interesting that Rousseau was radical in many other areas of human knowledge except sexual relations. The crux of her criticisms of Rousseau was that if women did not pursue the false idea of securing beauty then they could acquire sufficient strength to be able to earn their living without which genuine independence was not possible. Like Plato, Wollstonecraft affirmed the principle of sexual equality between men and women but strove to achieve freedom, equality, and independence within the realm of the family and home. The early feminists of the nineteenth century like Fuller and Wollstonecraft respected the traditional functions that a woman performed within her home as a wife and as a mother. She not only rejected Rousseau’s Emile but also James Fordyce’s Sermons perceived as a guide to good girl’s behaviour as it does “little more then sentimentalize the teachings of Rousseau”.
I should instantly dismiss them from my pupil’s attention if I wished to strengthen her understanding (Wollstonecraft ibid: 103, 102).
Wollstonecraft was more sympathetic towards Dr. Gregory’s A Father’s Letters to his Daughter (1774) though she did not agree with his advice, for that made women lead a life without independence and dignity. She found Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1774) “unmanly and immoral” and for making the “vain attempt to bring forth fruit of experience, before the saplings has out-thrown its leaves” (Wollstonecraft ibid: 116). She questioned the proposition in the Bible that a woman was created solely for man’s convenience. A dependent woman would be docile with very little desire and understanding that was necessary to lead a social, a happy and a useful life. As a teacher, Wollstonecraft was interested in the practical implications of Locke’s theory of education. The latter’s emphasis on good example, learning through pleasure rather than the rote, sympathy, tolerance, virtue and wisdom as goals of liberal spirit were repeated with variations throughout the eighteenth century. To Wollstonecraft, the purpose of education was to cultivate the spirit of reason, an innate quality in individuals, men and women.
Role and Importance of Education
Having examined the masculine views on women, Wollstonecraft pointed out to the positive and constructive role of education in correcting these distorted views. She contended that right education would lead to creativity, critical thinking, individual excellence and a proper understanding that was nourished by experience. This would be possible only with economic freedom and self reliance. The human spirit in order to find its fullest and freest expression ought to be liberated from the claims of prejudice, greed and financial insecurity. She rejected classical education in ‘dead languages’ and rote learning, and desired a combination of information and development of rational skills.
Wollstonecraft observed that women’s education lacked the needed order, and as a result women did not have the capacity to generalize their thoughts and develop their understanding. This had led to excessive emotionalism, which was further reinforced by a lifestyle that they were made to lead. They were confined to household work and unlike men had to pursue activities and jobs that did not lead to an enlargement of understanding. She contended that an activity that one pursued shaped one’s essential character and outlook. The rich and women were generally insipid. While the rich were born with wealth and status for which they were admired, women were appreciated for their sexual charm. Reason was acquired only if engaged in the exercise of ability and virtue in useful employment. In this she differed from those politically diverse thinkers as Godwin, Coleridge, Hannah More (1745–1833) and Jane Austen who stressed on sensibility as a female quality. More accepted sexual differentiation, but rejected the idea of amoral self-indulgence that was inherent in it. I n Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799). More argued for improved education for women to enable them to achieve ‘purity of conduct’ and hoped that women of rank and fortune would show the way for the revival of morality and religion in Britain. She advocated a serious, rigorous intellectual training for women, but espoused a conventional view with regard to women’s role in society. She denounced advocates of women equality in employment and politics.
In the eighteenth century England, besides More and Macaulay, many like Maria Edgeworth, and Wollstonecraft wrote and stressed on the need to change and revitalize the intellectual and moral education imparted to the young ones, and in particular, to girls. Though these writers differed considerably in their philosophical outlooks they agreed that education was a rigorous process and that children needed a strong female figure of authority. In her review of Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790), Wollstonecraft once again reiterated the importance of education in moulding and developing the rational element in human beings and as a remedy, to most social ills. She also defended education for the under-privileged women and for all those who desired it. Education was pivotal in shaping the character and personality of the individual. She was convinced that children exposed to right and correct values would abstain from vices and other evils. Her own experience as a school teacher and governess, and, in her later years, her care in the upbringing of her daughter Fanny, further reinforced her commitment and concern in education. Thoughts on the Education of Daughter (1786), Original Stories from Real Left (1788), The Female Reader (1789), A Vindication (1792) and the unfinished manuscript Letters on the Management of Infants (1797) voiced her main concerns like the need to develop women as rational beings, the importance of entering into marriage for friendship and partnership, and the imperfect existing education system that neglected girls. She was equally concerned with social and physical misery and asserted the need to avoid misery rather than suffer it.
Educational Reforms
A Vindication was dedicated to Charles Maurice de Tallyrand-Perigord, the Bishop of Autun who had formulated the idea of free national education for boys and had placed the proposal before the French National Assembly for consideration and action. Wollstonecraft hoped that by making this dedication she could make Talleyrand extend the scheme to include girls, which did not happen. She felt that education of both boys and girls would only strengthen the New Republic and observed
If women are to be excluded, without having a voice, from a participation of natural rights of mankind, prove first, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, that they will ever show that man must, in some shape, act like a ty rant, and ty ranny , in whatever part of society it rears its brazen front, will ever undermine morality (Wollstonecraft 1985: 11–2).
Wollstonecraft contended that women must be independent of men to some degree or they will never be virtuous persons or even good wives and mothers. The meaning of independence meant that both girls and boys were to be subjected to the same discipline and study in the same school taught by the same set of teachers. She advocated co-educational schools and firmly believed that segregation between boys and girls at the level of schooling leads to acquisition of bad habits. She advocated a committee to choose teachers who were to be accountable for their performance. Children ought to dress alike for that would undermine unnatural class distinctions. Besides being a staunch exponent and defender of gender equality, Wollstonecraft also advocated class equality. Children must be allowed to play or be at the gym after each hour of sedentary work. They would be encouraged in peer inquiry of every form. The curriculum would emphasize thinking and formation of character to enable children to grow into good citizens. She also insisted on the importance of establishing early habits of reading and writing and the need to have simple attire and unaffected manners. She preferred education at home, but warned against the adverse effects of ill educated and devious servants. She also recommended a ‘course in sexual education’ during which children would be made familiar with reproductive organs and made aware of the implications of sexual intercourse. For expounding these views, Wollstonecraft was branded as an immoral author. Thomas Taylor published a rejoinder entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes.
Wollstonecraft recommended that primary school teaching ought to be made more interesting and explanatory, methods employed by kindergarten schools of today. For older classes she prescribed the Socratic method of education through dialogue and discussions. Personal opinion of the students ought to be brought into play while discussing matters relating to history, politics, and religion, thus ensuring their relevance and validity. She also prescribed sports for boys and girls, an hour of sedentary employment, and wide ranging curriculum that included the 3 R’s of education (Reading, Writing, Arithmatic), botany, mechanics, astronomy, natural history and natural philosophy. Wollstonecraft’s educational reforms took into account the different endowments and talents in different individuals. She recommended a selection process at the age of nine to separate the mechanically minded from those with logical abilities. Education would be imparted according to one’s skills, but boys and girls would study together at all times. She wanted children to be resilient so that they could face the ups and downs of life courageously. She knew that it would take a long time before “the world will be so far enlightened that parents, only anxious to render their children virtuous, shall allow them to choose companions for life themselves” (Wollstonecraft ibid 1985), and hence, was pessimistic. She was critical of the kind of education women received for it ruled out the possibilities of a life based on reason. A proper education would train girls to undertake some profession. Writing about the existing scheme she observed
the education which women now receive scarcely deserves the name. My very soul has often sickened at observing the sly tricks practiced by women to gain some foolish thing on which their silly hearts were set. Not allowed to dispose of money or call any thing their own, they learn to turn the market penny (Wollstonecraft ibid: 181–2).
Wollstonecraft accepted Talleyrand’s Report on Public Instruction, which recommended that children and youth could make their own independent decision regarding punishment. This, according to her, would instil a sense of justice, which would lead to their happiness and well-being. Many opposed this proposition particularly if it applied to women for that would make them unsexed. Wollstonecraft disagreed and observed:
It was not freedom that would unsex women...Reason and experience convince me that 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 (Wollstonecraft ibid: 194).
Faith in Reason
Wollstonecraft perceived a woman to be a rational human being with virtues that were fundamentally the same as those of a man. It was reason that enabled a human being to understand one’s virtue. Reason distinguished human beings from other living creatures and was common to both men and women. If there were human beings who did not exhibit cultivate reason this might be due to neglect or wrongful socialization by society and its institutions. She was convinced that neither sex nor class was relevant to the initial birthright of human beings as reasonable. Like Condorcet, she believed in asexual rational woman. To believe otherwise would be to believe that either human beings were not made in the image of God or that God was unreasonable. She wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Man:
But I was not with an individual when I contend for the rights of men and the liberty of reason. You see I do not condescend to cull my words to avoid the invidious phrase, nor shall I be prevented from giving a manly definition of it, by the flimsy ridicule which a lively fancy has interwoven with the present acceptance of the term (Wollstonecraft 1970: 230).
Wollstonecraft recognized that the female was inferior to the male in physical strength. All the other distinctions were a result of education and socialization. She consistently asserted that if women did not think for themselves, if they were weak-willed and vacillating or if they were preoccupied by externals of clothing and manners it was because of their training. Reason ensured the perfect development of human nature and should be the basis of human happiness. Reason according to Wollstonecraft “is the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue” and the key to independence. Education ensured the development of this reason, and therefore, perfect education was one that enabled the individual to achieve this independence. She believed that the advancement in human reason would lead to constant and uninterrupted progress and that for the first time technology would be able to ensure alleviation of mass miseries.
Wollstonecraft explained how existing social norms and outlook prevented the development of human capacities and virtues in women. Since women were primarily visualized as sexual beings they were educated in a manner to acquire qualities that ensured a relationship of dependence vis-Ã -vis men. They were brought up to learn to please men, to be charming, graceful and beautiful for men and to cultivate virtues like gentleness, docility and spaniel-like affection making them weak, dependent and emotional creatures. They were an artificial, product of male ideas and arrangements. Wollstonecraft believed in the power of education and environment as powerful and as potent determinants of human character. Individuals for her were inherently free and rational beings, and it was this potential that had to be brought to fruition.
In A Vindication Wollstonecraft appealed to the reason in men rather than in women. She told Talleyrand that from her own analysis of the social and political status of women she aimed “to prove that the prevailing notion of respecting a sexual character was subversive to morality” (Wollstonecraft 1985: 10). By relying on reason she proved the emotive and prejudicial view of sexuality. She contended that reason did not recognize sex and the mind was unaware of sex. Sexual distinction was relevant only with regard to reproduction. In keeping with the spirit of her times characterized as ‘the Age of Reason’, Wollstonecraft hoped that reason would be the governing principle of human endeavours and actions. A society to be truly rational had to be based on the needs and character of human beings allowing for the fullest development of one’s potential. She bestowed faith in the ultimate triumph of reason. She claimed that reason could help in scaling new heights. In this she is a true follower of Paine, whom she never met, but is nevertheless inspired by his ideas. Ironically, Rousseau of whom she is very critical for his sexist views also influenced her tremendously.
Rousseau and Paine were new men, Mary was the new Woman. Paine was conscious of the prison of class and ignorance in which the poor were confined, and dedicated himself to their liberation, just as Mary was to dedicate herself with equal vigour and passion to the freeing of women (Nixon 1971: 35).
Wollstonecraft was convinced that a reasonable and virtuous human being was spiritually rich. Virtue for her was to act reasonably, to use one’s own freedom and respect the freedom of others, to do productive work and to parent wisely. To fail in these virtues would be to fail in one’s duty as a human being. She was critical of both men and women if they failed to fulfill their duties. She was particularly critical of men as a group and specific thinkers for employing “their reason to justify prejudices” and for avoiding “close investigation of their vices or the partiality of European civilization. She criticized rulers who set themselves apart and limit the freedom of ordinary people; ladies and gentlemen from the upper class as being unproductive and parasitic; and parents who did not enable their children to become independent and productive, or if they neglected in their care of their children. She condemned the system of arranged marriages for it sacrificed the happiness of the children for the sake of material and social advancement of the family. She disproved of late marriages and marriages of convenience as it encouraged sexual immorality. Like Macaulay, Wollstonecraft argued that parental rights derive from a natural sentiment of care. Just as parents have a duty towards their children, similarly adult daughters and sons have a reciprocal duty to care for their aged parents unless of course parents have neglected theirs.
Liberty and Equality
Like her liberal predecessors and contemporaries, Wollstonecraft regarded the liberty of the individual as of paramount importance. She accepted Rousseau’s famous axiom that ‘Man is born free’ but was quick to realize the oversimplification of the statement, for an individual’s conduct was inevitably subject to the exigencies of society, to questions of traditions, behaviour and prevalent morality. She defined rights as ‘a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact’. She opposed blind obedience of any kind and believed that obedience should be based on reasoning and a conscious awareness of one’s rights. She was certain that reason and progress would make it possible for the realization of universal benevolence which she regarded as the first virtue of a rational person. But she could understand that generosity could not emerge out of a situation of deprivation and slavery.
Wollstonecraft was convinced that equality was the key to reform of society in general and of women in particular. Equality meant absence of dependence of one person over another either through the existence of privileged ranks, which legally subject some to others, or through extremes of wealth and poverty which reduced formal equality of rights to a farce. Like Rousseau, she gave a passionate call for human equality not only incorporating both the sexes but also the poor and the deprived. Equality would lead to the creation of better human beings and citizens. Equality of civil rights, equality of opportunity for persons to develop their talents and exercise them in any profession or activity of their choice was a fundamental requirement of a progressive free society. Wollstonecraft accepted Rousseau’s propositions with regard to narrowing the material gap between the rich and the poor, but rejected his hostility to commercial life and the market society. She was more with Locke and Smith for she supported and encouraged the spirit of free enterprise and had immense faith in the progressive outlook of the middle class. She was frank in her support for the middle class as being fully virtuous, independent, and rational.
Wollstonecraft insisted on equitable distribution of property among all the children in a family for that would ensure happiness and virtue. A property acquired by an individual’s singular efforts could be disposed off in a manner that the owner saw fit. She suggested division of estates into small farms, and forests and common land to be given to the poor for that would solve problems like lack of work, ill health and poverty. She was anguished by Burke’s contempt for the poor and the deprived and pleaded for legal reforms for that would give them a better deal. She was skeptical of large-scale capitalism, but preferred small-scale mercantilism linking it with women’s emancipation. She was appreciative of the merchant who without any aristocratic privilege succeeded by his own hard work and tenacity of purpose. She wanted the same for women too. Like Price, she feared the harmful effects of commerce, namely luxury and selfishness setting her apart from the Whig liberals who regarded trade and republicanism as compatible, or Paine, who saw commerce as an instrument of liberty. Under the influence of Wollstonecraft, Godwin revised his extreme views and conceded a right to property in the second edition of Political Justice (1796). Initially he regarded property as a positive evil and that hereditary property not only caused robbery and war, but also inculcated qualities like vice, envy, malice and revenge.
Wollstonecraft thus desired an egalitarian society and was critical of every kind of institutionalization of privilege, namely, the monarchy for hereditary rule introduced idiots into the noble stem, and a standing army being disciplined and hierarchical was inimical to freedom. She questioned every non-egalitarian arrangement in society which included the British and European schools, private and public schools for they dulled the inquisitive minds of the youngsters and corrupted their moral character. She was critical of dogmatism and classics in the educational system.
Hers was not a moral critique directed at various individuals or even at the female sex as a whole, but a more fundamental attack on the mores of her day and the institutions which she thought sustained them (Tomaselli 1993: xi).
Rights and Representation
While women according to Wollstonecraft would be able to enjoy civil rights she was not clear with regard to their political rights. She remarked that “women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed to them in deliberations of government” (Wollstonecraft 1985: 212). But she did not explain the kind of representation she had in mind and whether it would establish a straightforward equality of political rights with men. This question, she hoped to pursue subsequently which however remained unfulfilled due to her untimely death at the age of thirty eight. She tried to enquire into the effectiveness of formal equal civil rights within the confines of marriage and family and as to how to achieve equality and independence in marital relationships.
Moreover, Wollstonecraft’s awareness of the many difficulties that lie in securing even the elementary rights for women stopped her from campaigning for equal rights for women. She was aware that even amongst the radicals there were only a few who would support the extension of suffrage to women. Most of them equated women with children and domestic servants dependent on their masters, the men, and hence as incapable of exercising their free and rational choice independently (Dickinson 1977: 252). Thus, she saw the rights of women in the larger context of human rights. The idea of liberty, equality and fraternity were to apply to women equally. The cause of women was related to the cause of men and his relationship to the state. While women were subjugated to men, men themselves were subjugated. Therefore the liberation of women was linked closely to the liberation of men. In the 1790 tract, Wollstonecraft did not discuss the role and rights of women, but she saw women as parties to the social compact. The idea that men and women did not enjoy identical social and political rights was more clearly stated in the 1792 tract.
Rejection of Patriarchy
Wollstonecraft accepted the formulation of the enlightenment that political authority was artificial and conventional, but refused to accept filial and relationships as natural. She insisted on the need to extend the belief in reason as an ordering principle in all matters and in all aspects of human existence. She was not willing to divide the private from the public sphere of human activity. The authority and the power of the male which manifests itself in a father and in a husband in the private realm were as artificial as the authority and power asserted by the royalty in the public sphere. Here, like Locke, she separated political and paternal power.
Wollstonecraft regarded royalty and aristocracy as ‘pestiferous purple’ and was opposed to it, as it limited the freedom of individuals to development and in turn, restricted the progress of society. A human life was not worth living and it would not be truly a human life if the opportunity for growth and self-improvement was not guaranteed. She essentially believed in the “Protestant notion of self-improvement” (BarkerBenfield 1989: 110). Therefore, she realized that political enfranchisement was not a singular solution. Women had to be liberated within the private sphere also. “The task undertaken by Wollstonecraft was far more complicated than those political philosophers who defended a case of equal rights for men” (Gatens 1991: 112).
Role of Women and Prescription for Change
Wollstonecraft accepted that women would have to fulfill their roles as wives and mothers. She stressed on the need for women to be granted ‘the protection of civil laws’, the freedom to follow careers that were compatible with their natural duties (for example, nurses, midwives, physicians, etc.). She was convinced that only women of superior quality would be able to lead independent and useful lives. For the majority of women the family would be the arena where they would realize equality and independence. She, like Rousseau, considered the family as the foundation of the state and marriage as the ‘cement of society’. This could be achieved by the following measures:
(i) The wife would have to be considered an equal and a responsible person and not be totally dependent on her husband with regard to property rights.
(ii) If women have the capacity to look after themselves by earning their living then marriage would not be seen as the only source of livelihood. Moreover women as wives would not be dependent on their husbands during their lifetime and after their death.
(iii) In managing their households and in rearing their children, in the exercise of their traditional roles as mothers and as wives, they would have sufficient scope for realizing their human nature and virtues.
Both the partners in a marriage would be equal and independent and would need one other. Each of them would fulfil the duties assigned to one’s station in life—the husbands as providers and the wives as managers of their households, and rearing their children. The ideal middle class family life, for Wollstonecraft, was one where the woman brought up her children with a maid to attend to domestic chores and the husband would come home after a day’s productive work to a clean household and happy children. She did not focus on poor working women except in her novel The Wrongs of Woman, wherein she described their oppression and weakness and prescribed possible solutions.
Wollstonecraft did not remove the woman out of the context of her family for she considered child rearing a unique function that a woman performed. However, this function could not be performed adequately, for the present education system did not prepare a woman for its discharge. They were not trained to rear their children because many of them were ignorant with undeveloped reasoning powers and excessive sensibilities. She wrote:
The great Principle and Foundation of all Virtue is placed in this that a man is able to follow what reason directs as best. The object of education is to make men virtuous and through virtue happy. Women should acquire human virtues by the same means as men, instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half being. Gentle women are literally speaking slaves to their bodies and glory in their subjection … . The power of generalizing ideas, of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations is the only acquirement for an immortal being that really deserves the name of knowledge. Merely to observe without endeavouring to account for any thing may serve as the commonsense of life, but where is the store laid up that is to clothe the soul when it leaves the body (Wollstonecraft 1970: 208).
Wollstonecraft’s model woman was one who would be educated with a well-developed mind, independent character and a capacity for self-reliance. She was the one who would earn her husband’s respect and affection rather than be idolized as a chaste and a weak being. This new woman would make a better companion to her husband and mother to her children. On the whole, her views on marriage as a relationship were based on compassion, partnership and companionship. She wrote
Marriage will never be held sacred till women by being brought up with men are prepared to be their companions rather than their mistresses. I venture to predict that virtue will never prevail in society till the virtues of both sexes are founded on reason, and till the affections common to both are allowed to gain strength by the discharge of natural duties (Wollstonecraft ibid: 183).
Wollstonecraft regarded motherhood as more important than wifehood. Marriage was the means for reproduction and child-rearing and not the opportunity for contractual sex. The purpose of sex was not personal gratification, but to ensure a bond between a husband and a wife for child-rearing and for creating immortal spirits. It is interesting that in her early days, observing on the relationship between her parents, she came to look upon marriage as ‘servitude-unrelieved and hopeless’. Looking to the abject position of her mother, she decided never to marry. Her views on the subject swung from virulent criticism to intense idolization. Godwin was equally critical of marriage though his ideas were not based on first hand witness to its working. It was more intellectual, derived from his concern with an individual’s liberty of action and the ability to act in society and with his progress in society, all of which depended on being free from the interference of the Church or the state. At the same time, he opposed promiscuity even though he rejected the institution of marriage as ‘the worst kind of property’. An anarchist by persuasion, he believed that the vices in the individual were wholly due to the restraining influences of the law, and, if these restraints were eliminated the natural goodness in the human person would triumph. It was for their views on marriage that both Wollstonecraft and Godwin keep their marriage a private affair and led separate lives. In fact, the news of their marriage was met with ridicule.
Wollstonecraft failed to see the sexual division of labour as socially constituted rather than dictated by nature. The picture of domestic bliss that she painted ignored class distinctions and sexual differences thereby leaving “the asymmetry between the citizen/husband/father and the citizen/wife/mother unaddressed” (Gatens 1991: 121). In the Lockean tradition, she defended the rights of women as a wife, a mother and a citizen. Like J.S. Mill subsequently, she desired to give women the freedom to choose and not accept marriage as the only option. She also realized that the law in the eighteenth century did not defend women and give them legal rights. She had an uphill task before her, a giant campaign to lead. She desired for all women a life of freedom and independence, “to be herself without any hindrance, to follow the way of her own understanding, to ask protection of no one, to depend only on the law for her rights” (Nixon 1971: 8).
CONCLUSION
The seminal importance of Wollstonecraft’s tract was in the fact that she wrote at a time when the majority of contemporary radicals were concerned with the liberty of adult males only. Hers, along with Lady Macaulay, represented the only voices that articulated the need for women as much as men for equal rights and to rectify prevailing opinions and prejudices that supported women’s subordination. The enlightenment which grappled with issues like citizen’s rights against arbitrariness, the relationship between law and liberty ignore women’s issues. In that context, Wollstonecraft’s efforts represented the first beginning in an exercise that turned out to be a long drawn one. Hers remained the first voice to espouse the cause of women’s rights, self-worth and independence.
The Vindication contain a good number of social and political proposals, which range from a detailed outline of necessary changes in school curricula to the suggestion that women not only be granted civil and political rights, but also have elected representatives of their own. It argues that women should be taught skills so as to be able to support themselves and their children in widowhood. It seeks to reclaim midwifery for women, against the encroachment of male accoucheurs, and contends that women could be phy sicians just as well as nurses. It urges women to extend their interests to encompass politics and the concerns of the whole of humanity... . But what is clear is that the extent to which she is relevant today depends on the degree to which we are prepared to conceive of reason as being genderless, to accept that the pursuit of virtue is the good life of all human beings, and to cease to regard the upbringing of children as a lesser form of existence. Above all Wollstonecraft requires us to think not only of rights, but of duties, and to examine the nature of the framework in which to conceive of them both. Hers, was most definitely not a world of selfish gratification” (Tomaselli 1993: xxvii, xxix).
Most of Wollstonecraft’s tracts were polemical. Many of her arguments were repetitive. Her essential mission was to look for the first principles of truth to dispute prevailing prejudices. She agreed with Rousseau and Paine that civilization in contemporary Europe was partial because of the many discriminations and inequities. She was equally conscious of the imperfections of her time and noted that the science of politics was very much in its infancy. She also agreed that force had been the guiding principle in the governance of the world till the modern times. But sharing the optimism of the enlightenment thinkers she was confident that a better level of politics would lead to greater diffusion of liberty and the entire humankind—men and women—would become more virtuous, free and independent. “Through all her works ran the thread of disgust at the genderizing of all people according to sex ... and by her hatred of the familial metaphors that enforced the fixed gendered view in writers such as Burke” (Todd 1993: xxv).
Wollstonecraft could easily see that the quest for the dignity of women was part of the larger process of reform that society needs. She was able to identify the two major maladies of contemporary reality— wealth and non-acceptance of the fact that women like men were rational creatures. She was equally aware of the effects of luxury, idleness and the maldistribution of power and property on the lives of men and women. The degradation of women was reflected in the trivialities by which their values were judged and in the fact that they were left out in most of the important human activities like gallantry, poetry, music, etc. She was “the first political theorist systematically to highlight and criticize the interrelationship between sexuality, marriage, the sexual division of labour and citizenship” (Pateman 2009: 339).
Interestingly, Wollstonecraft also understood that the arguments that were generally put forward against educating women was similar to those used against educating the poor. She was categorical in stating ‘respect for man, as man, is the foundation of every noble sentiment’ (Wollstonecraft 1985: 137). She asserted that even duty could be considered to be binding only when it was based on reason. She defended the cause of women cogently and proved beyond doubt, that subjugation of women was unjust even in a situation when men believed and took actions best calculated to promote the happiness of women.
Wollstonecraft as a critic was descriptive rather than prescriptive. She tried to show what was wrong with society than suggest alternatives. She “brought no women to the barricades, but she inspired passion in all her readers” (Kramnick 1972: 7). It was her controversial personal life that brought her disrepute. The Victorian feminists like Millicent Fawcett (1847–1929), France Power Cobbe (1822–1904) and Josephine Butler (1828–1906) generally ignored her. Fawcett while introducing A Vindication did not even grant her the status as a founder of Victorian feminism. However, this was adequately compensated when one of the greatest minds of the nineteenth century, J.S. Mill reiterated many of Wollstonecraft’s formulations. He praised her contributions to the growth of the women’s movement. It is a tribute to Wollstonecraft that many of her major formulations formed the core arguments of Mill’s classic work on the gender question The Subjection. Wollstonecraft not only inspired Mill but also the Owenite feminists and Wheeler. Her ideas influenced Jane Austen (1775–1813) who through her novels took up the issues of women’s equality, the plight of single women, women’s financial dependence and lack of education, women’s suffering through the English system of primogeniture, and the double standards in sexual matters. Austen did not refer to Wollstonecraft directly, but elaborated and developed many of the themes that the latter wrote about. Besides Austen, others like Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) and George Eliot (1819–80) also acknowledged having read A Vindication and being inspired by it.
Liberal feminism of Wollstonecraft and J.S. Mill traced women’s oppression to unjust laws. It focused on the subjugation of women in the private domain, which was insulated from the ideals of freedom, equality and justice that dominated the public sphere. The aim of liberal feminists’ emphasis on equal rights was to gain access to the public sphere on the same terms as men. The liberal feminists sought to reform the traditional family and accord women dignity, self-respect and independence by demanding rights of marriage, property, inheritance and custody of children. Pateman (1988) accused liberal feminism of harbouring a masculine bias, and not being gender neutral in their conception of individuality. She observed in a patriarchy, the laws reflected the basic patriarchal principle that men had sexual rights over women and this was the sexual contract. Thus, marriage contracts and the law of couverture guaranteed the control of the husbands over their wives and the latter’s subordination. The marriage contract was not one freely determined by free agents; but it was the state that prescribed its terms. It was for this reason that many feminists in the nineteenth century called for the abolition of marriage as a state certified institution. As a result, feminist jurisprudence debates on the private-public division and the traditional ascription of women to certain functional roles within the private sphere. The focus of the liberal theory was on the public sphere and on individual citizens and their rights which was why feminist theory continued to focus on the consequences of fundamental contradictions within the private sphere. Traditional liberal theory which was largely the basis for American jurisprudence did not work as it is accepted the public-private divide and the roles which women performed in the private sphere. The privatepublic distinction was criticized for not only excluding women from public activities like voting or holding public office but at the same time covering up what went on within the home, including violence against women and children from public scrutiny. In Feminist Challenges (1986) edited by Pateman and Elizabeth Gross, many of its contributors noted that not just liberal political theory but much of western philosophy was predicted upon women’s subordination. “Existing patriarchal theory has no place for women as women; at best, women can incorporated as pale reflections of men” (1986: 8). Thus, many ‘gender-neutral’ laws have failed to benefit women as it neglected the contingencies of most women’s social situations. There was, therefore, a need for a new feminist theory, according to Pateman and Gross, one that began from a recognition of difference, from an acceptance “that individuals are feminine and masculine, that individuality is not a unitary abstraction but … embodied and sexually differentiated” (ibid: 9). Pateman pointed out that sexism and the assumption of male superiority permeated the dominant culture and the political arena embodied patriarchal power. She lamented that household work that constituted the major chore for most women had no value for citizenship. Women, by and large lacked the means to be recognized as worthy citizens as they were considered as men’s dependents by the welfare state as in the case of the National Insurance Act of 1946. “Most women’s jobs are unskilled and of low status; even in the professions women are clustered at the lower end of the occupational hierarchy” (Pateman 1988: 191). The welfare provisions have been established within the two-tier system of husband/wife and worker/housewife. There were benefits that were available to individual workers and usually men claimed these benefits. There were benefits that were available to dependents of the individuals which are claimed by women, mostly as wives or mothers. Women were the majority of recipients of many welfare benefits for they were most likely to be poor and single mothers and the reason that they were poor was because most women found it difficult to secure a job that would give them a decent salary. This was because the occupational structure was sexually segregated in spite of equal-pay legislation. It was with the elimination of the patriarchal dichotomy between women and independence-work-citizenship that a welfare state could truly become a welfare society.
Across the Atlantic, long before Wollstonecraft’s tract appeared, many American women reflected on the issues that A Vindication raised namely the place and role of women in the political system and the extent to which women must be encouraged to be independent. A conservative Quaker, Elizabeth Drinker remarked after reading A Vindication “In very many of her sentiments, she...speaks my mind” (cited in Kerber 1980, xi). A Vindication was printed in Philadelphia shortly after its publication in 1792. Wollstonecraft also inspired Stanton and Mott’s discussions at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. But Wollstonecraft did not fit as the role model for the American women as most of them rejected their homes on assuming a public role. The American Revolution was purely a ‘male’ affair, but it expedited the integration of women into the civic polity. Education of women was given premium as educated mothers preserved family stability and educated future generations of sensible republicans. Women had a distinct political role but within their homes. Covertures, the absorption of a married woman’s property under the control of her husband were retained indicating that a married woman did not enjoy independent political capacity.
Wollstonecraft was critical of political legislators, preachers, school teachers, tutors and authors such as Rousseau, Dr. Gregory, James Fordyce and Lord Chesterfield. She was equally critical of women for she did not like them the way they were. She desired a complete transformation of women and be the opposite of what they were. She wanted them to be rational and independent with a sense of confidence stemming from inner perceptions of their self control. She hoped for them full citizenship. She deserved rightfully the place of a pioneer in making the women’s issue not only as a part of mainstream political theory but also in bringing it to the forefront of the political agenda.
Post a Comment