Mary Wollstonecraft
27 April 1759 - 10 Sept 1797
Mary Wollstonecraft was born into a large, improvident family, and was therefore thrust upon her own resources at an early age. She owed most of her education to the assistance of friends that she made, especially the Bloods and Clares.
Wollstonecraft's first assay into self-support was a position as paid companion to a merchant's wife. This demeaning work was unsatisfying, and, after helping her sister Eliza to escape an unhappy marriage, Wollstonecraft, Eliza, another sister named Evelina, and Wollstonecraft's best friend, Fanny Blood, set up a school together (one of the traditional, but often unsuccessful, career moves for single women - the Brontes made a similar attempt, with depressing results). After Fanny's marriage, emigration to Portugal, and death, the school failed. Thereafter Wollstonecraft became a governess (another of the limited career options available to women). This also proved disappointing (for more on the dismal situation of governesses, read Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey), and Wollstonecraft, after being dismissed, finally became a journalist and professional writer. She worked for the newly formed Analytical Review as a translator, reviewer, and editor. In addition to seeking a career for herself, Wollstonecraft (apparently one of the few members of her large family with any sense of familial responsibility) also made efforts to place her numerous siblings. Between Wollstonecraft's many experiences in the job market and her vicarious experiences through her siblings, the writer became intimately aware of the many impediments to survival for independent women, and of how hopelessly inadequate most female education was in preparing women in function in the public sphere. These two facts were to become recurring themes in her writing.
Wollstonecraft's literary efforts were varied in genre: in addition to her journalistic writings, she also produced two novels (one-and-a-half, really, since Maria, Or The Wrongs of Woman is incomplete), a series of short, didactic stories for children, translations of Continental educational texts, and book-length political essays. Her children's stories, Original Stories from Real Life were illustrated by the famous poet and artist, William Blake.
Wollstonecraft
first achieved public attention as a result of her Vindication of the Rights
of Man, written in defense of the French Revolution and refuting the
arguments of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.
In doing so, Wollstonecraft attacked the class-based inequalities of England and
delineated what she considered to be the "natural" rights of
man. She protests against the abuses of the monarchy and the wrongs of the
poor. Although she believed that natural rights could be established by
reference to God, she attacked the established Church, which colluded with
property owners in the exploitation of the poor.
While the issue of the oppression of
women did come up in her first Vindication, it was in the second Vindication, A
Vindication of the Rights of Women, that Wollstonecraft turned her full
attention to women's issues. While the first work established her
contemporary fame, it is the second that has built Wollstonecraft's lasting
reputation. Like the first Vindication, the Rights of Women was
written in part as a refutation of the arguments of another writer; in this
case, Rousseau. Rousseau was an Enlightenment thinker whose brilliant and
iconoclastic writings were widely revered. Unfortunately for women, these
writings included theorizing as the the nature and role of women, and Rousseau's
conclusions on the subject were illiberal, not to say insulting. (It is
interesting and perhaps not irrelevant to note, a la Christine de Pisan, that
Rousseau, who was a self-confessed spanking fetishist, never managed to have a
satisfying sex life.) His most problematic statements on the subject come
from his novel Emile, wherein
Rousseau decrees the immutably separate spheres for men and women. His
philosophy is that women were created to please men. While men exist on
their own account, the only justification for the existence of women is to
please men and to bear their children. Therefore every aspect of their
education and leisure is properly spent in honing those skills that make women
both alluring and sexually faithful. Wollstonecraft, although her stance
on this issue varies in the course of her text, suggests, radically, that women
exist for themselves, and that their purpose is, just
like men's, self-improvement. She claims that the same knowledge,
education, and activities are healthful for both sexes, and bases her arguments
on her belief that both sexes are moral and immortal souls, and that the only
rational aim for all moral creatures, whatever their abilities be, is perfection
of the mind and spirit.
Rights of Women was dedicated to Charles-Maurice de Tallyrand-Périgord, the Revolution-era French minister responsible for education. Wollstonecraft's essay is therefore not only a reply to Rousseau (as well as other male writers on education), but is intended to generate practical reform in the real world.
Wollstonecraft continued writing on political and feminist issues. She fell passionately in love with the American Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had a tempestuous and unhappy relationship, and by whom she had a daughter out of wedlock. His desertion of Wollstonecraft initiated two suicide attempts before she finally achieved a measure of equilibrium. She then began a happy affair with radical William Godwin. Neither party believed in marriage, but they made their relationship legal when Wollstonecraft became pregnant. Nonetheless, the two continued to live (apparently quite happily) in separate residences. Unfortunately, Wollstonecraft contracted puerperal fever in delivering the baby (who grew up to be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein), and died a few weeks later.
In addition to A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft's other major works include 2 novels: Mary, a Fiction, and Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, both explicitly feminist, the travel memoir Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.
Her reputation, already fairly tainted during her life, plummeted after her death, the consequence of the violent turn taken by the French Revolution (with which Wollstonecraft's reputation was associated) and of her biography published by Godwin. He had intended it to be a justification of her life, but its frankness about Wollstonecraft's sexual practices offended the public's sensibilities for the next 100 years, and her works quickly went out of print, to be secretly and guiltily cherished by those of the next generation of proto-feminists who were fortunate enough to find a copy.
While there were emancipation-minded women before Wollstonecraft, she is considered the Mother of Modern Feminism, being the first woman to make a systematic survey of the ways in which society handicaps and penalizes women. She also recognized early on the artificiality (or constructedness) of gender, and the pitfalls inherent in women's sexual drives. Her emphasis on education as the principle solution to society's ills remains an important piece of most 21st-century feminist philosophies. Wollstonecraft inspired and provided the backbone for a movement that revolutionized social, sexual, marital, business, and legal codes throughout the Western world and beyond. Her importance in catalyzing the present contours of history cannot be overrated.
Links:
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley & Mary Wollstonecraft
