Transcription
Mary Wollstonecraft was a moral and political philosopher and an early advocate for the rights of women. She lived an unconventional life for a time and defied the typical customs of middle-class eighteenth-century women. She participated in the pamphlet war surrounding the French Revolution and was a strong critic of Edmund Burke's conservatism and Rousseau's patriarchy. In *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman*, she argued that women were naturally equal to men but would deform through a lack of rights and education. As a Republican, she believed strongly in the power of human reason to curb the passions and to reform society. She extended Republican concerns over arbitrary power to argue that women required education and rights to achieve proper independence and escape the arbitrary power exercised over them by men. Against their social inequalities and aristocratic values of more conservative 18th-century writers, Wollstonecraft argued for social reforms that would enable men and women to live more independent and virtuous lives in a republic characterized by political and social equality.
I'm James Muldoon. I'm a lecturer in political science at the University of Exeter, and this is an introduction to Mary Wollstonecraft's political thought.
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Wollstonecraft's Life
Mary Wollstonecraft was born on 27th of April 1759 in London. Her father was a violent man who would beat his wife and squandered the family's money on financial speculation. She was intellectually curious as a child and had strong female friendships in her youth. Her first move out of her unhappy home life was to accept a position as a lady's companion to a widow in Bath in 1778. Following this, she opened a school with one of her close friends, Fanny Blood. Fanny soon married and moved to Lisbon to care for her failing health. When Blood's health didn't improve, Wollstonecraft left the school in 1785 to care for her, but her friend passed away, and the school they founded was soon disbanded.
Wollstonecraft took up a position as governess for a family in Ireland, but she was dissatisfied with this life and the limited options open to women during her time. Despite the enormous obstacles facing women in public life, she soon quit to become an author. Her early writings, such as *Thoughts on the Education of Daughters*, largely addressed pedagogical issues. She was heavily influenced by John Locke and developed the idea that reason must be supreme and govern our natural instincts and passions. She argued that girls should be educated to acquire the necessary resources to live independent and virtuous lives. The goal of education for both sexes should be the formation of a strong character able to face life's adversities. Her writings can be distinguished from other Enlightenment writers by her belief in a providentially ordained world and her religious faith. One of her early novels, *Mary: A Fiction*, was inspired by her friendship with Fanny Blood.
To become a writer, she moved back to London. She learned French and German and started translating texts to earn an income. She was assisted by liberal publisher Joseph Johnson, for whom she also wrote reviews. In 1790, she published *A Vindication of the Rights of Men* in response to Edmund Burke's criticisms of the French revolutionaries. This pamphlet made her an overnight sensation. In 1792, she followed up this important work with a second essay, *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman*.
Wollstonecraft moved to Paris in December of 1792, only a month before King Louis XVI was guillotined. She associated mainly with Girondins rather than the radical Jacobin faction. As France and England prepared for war, she was also placed under surveillance by the French regime, and a number of her close friends were killed during the Reign of Terror. Wollstonecraft was critical of the Jacobins' fanaticism and their lack of a feminist politics. They refused to educate girls alongside boys, and they hadn't granted women full citizenship and equal rights. Despite the difficulties of living in an increasingly nightmarish Jacobin France, Wollstonecraft gave birth to her first child with her lover, the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, during this time. She also wrote *A History of the French Revolution*, which was published in 1794. Her historical account of the revolution drew extensively on first-hand accounts and sought to counteract the widespread view in Britain that the revolution was based on a kind of collective madness of the French people. She showed how the social and economic conditions of the late 1780s left few other options than widespread revolt.
Her lover, Gilbert Imlay, left her to move to London, leaving Wollstonecraft alone with her daughter in Paris. When she joined him in London, she found him living with an actress and showing little sympathy for their child. After two failed suicide attempts, Wollstonecraft returned to the literary circle surrounding Joseph Johnson and began a courtship with philosopher William Godwin. She fell pregnant with her second child, and Godwin and Wollstonecraft decided to marry and live together. She died at the very young age of 38 during the birth of her second child.
Following her death, William Godwin published *Memoirs of Her Life*, including details of her illegitimate children, her love affairs, and her suicide attempts. At the time, these were considered scandalous. This publication sunk her reputation during the 19th century. Very few people of her time took her seriously as an intellectual. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a man's contribution to feminism, that of John Stuart Mill's *The Subjection of Women*, was given more prominence in debates on feminism during this period. It was only in the latter half of the 20th century that Wollstonecraft began to be recognized as one of the first feminist philosophers and most important voices of the Enlightenment. Rather than being seen as a forerunner to later theories developed better by others, Wollstonecraft is now known as a moral and political reformer who set out the necessary changes for men and women to live virtuous lives in a modern republic.
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
Wollstonecraft first gained a reputation for an attack on Edmund Burke's *Reflections on the Revolution in France*. Burke was a liberal conservative who defended tradition, customs, and social hierarchies. Wollstonecraft's text was a Republican defense of civic virtue and a criticism of a constitutional monarchy and class system supported by Burke. She argued that Burke denigrated human reason and relied too much on prejudices inherited from the past. In opposition to his defense of custom and tradition, Wollstonecraft argued for the capacity of reason to order Republican societies. For her, Burke's defense of the rights of Englishmen was simply a defense of landed property and social hierarchy. She contrasted the vain and corrupted layers of the rich with the honesty and genuineness of self-sufficient artisans and farmers. She launched a full-scale attack on the issue of social classes and rank. She argued these deformed the natural sentiment of people and distorted their human nature. By not having to work for a living, the rich became lazy and decadent. Inequality also bred vain attempts by the middle classes to appear richer than they were. She also argued against Burke's defense of a patriarchal order in which women were figured as mere passive onlookers of political life. The essay was an instant hit when it was first published anonymously, but when Wollstonecraft's name was attached to the essay in a second publication, reviewers began to speak more negatively of the emotion and irrationality of the piece.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Wollstonecraft started working on her second essay only a few months after the publication of the first. She began from a position that we might now call equality feminism: the idea that women share equally in the gift of reason with men. She didn't attempt to underline women's essential difference or uniqueness. Appearance of women's lack of rational capacity, force, and craft, and their immature behavior, was a result of men's degradation of them and their lack of education and rights. Women's dependence on men and their confinement to the private sphere was what restricted their growth and development. She argued for full civil and political rights for women and thought that boys and girls should be co-educated. She also argued for men and women to share equally in parental responsibilities.
One of her main targets in this essay was Rousseau, who argued for a natural difference between the sexes and thought that men were more intelligent and active than women. Rousseau claimed that dependence was a natural condition for women. He thought that it was not human institution that produced this inequality but a difference in men and women's capacity for reason. Wollstonecraft challenged Rousseau's story of civilization. She thought that women were educated into dependence and that this wasn't a natural state. In opposition to Rousseau's position that civilization was entirely corrupting, she argued that it was simply incomplete and had to be further perfected through the rational development of society. Until women were more rationally educated, the progress of human virtue and the improvement of knowledge would be slower. She argued that if women were able to exercise their rights, it would foster in them a greater sense of civic virtue.
One aspect of Wollstonecraft's feminism that makes her a controversial figure for contemporary thinkers is that she was critical of women's weakness and their tacit participation in their own oppression. She argued that men had rendered women alluring mistresses rather than rational beings. Women were brought up to be fickle, vain, pleasure-seeking, and ultimately dependent on men. Wollstonecraft asserted that women should be considered as human beings first, who had the same capacities and abilities to develop as men. She had a perfectionist account of human nature and thought that the idea of human development should be applied equally to both sexes. But because of their lack of power in patriarchal society, women had to try and benefit from what little advantages they had.
Wollstonecraft was against the arbitrary power that was exercised over women due to their dependence on men. She thus extended Republican arguments against arbitrary domination from the political sphere into the sphere of the household. In marriage, a woman would disappear as a separate legal entity and would be subsumed into the legal existence of her husband. Married women couldn't own property or sign legal documents. Wives were also required to relinquish their wages to their husbands. Married women were thus denied a civil existence, except in criminal cases. Against the unequal marriages that existed in Wollstonecraft's society, she argued for a new conception of marriage based on friendship and equality. This would eliminate women's subjection to the arbitrary power of men through the creation of a rational fellowship. She thought an idea of love based on beauty and physical attraction was too transitory to be the basis of such an important human relationship.
Her writings on pedagogy and politics sought to show how women could be prepared for the rights and responsibilities of full participation in a Republican society. She wanted women to be changed into rational and independent people whose sense of self-worth came from their accomplishments and sense of self-mastery rather than their looks. Criticisms of Wollstonecraft from feminists are most often leveled at this vision of the mastery of reason over the passions and the idea that Wollstonecraft herself adopted an overly masculinized view of morality.
Later in life, after the publication of the two *Vindication* essays, Wollstonecraft started to mellow on her account of the dominance of reason over the passions. In *Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark*, she wrote about her travels in a way which defined a new genre of writing and inspired the emergence of the Romantic movement. In these writings, she developed a more fluid account of the relationship between reason and emotions, and she reconsidered her views on the supremacy of reason. The controversies of her personal life often overshadowed her contribution to moral and political philosophy, and it's only been recently that feminist scholars have gained a greater appreciation for the force and the originality of her political thought. She's now considered one of the first modern feminists. Wollstonecraft's an important influence on the feminist movement and one of the key thinkers of the Enlightenment.
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