Wollstonecraft: The First Bad Feminist
My first essay of 2020 is a chance to mention that this year is the 100th anniversary of American women getting the vote. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the grandmothers of the suffrage movement, dedicated their book, A History of Women’s Suffrage, to the philosopher I want to talk about today: Mary Wollstonecraft, who is regarded as the first feminist, but who never dreamed that women might someday be able to vote. At the time, I guess that was too much even for her to dream of.
I think that today, especially for women like me who were born in the 1970s or later, we take for granted our right to vote. It seems so obvious: we are human beings, therefore we get to vote. And we get to do lots of other things too, because we are humans and we have rights. But I’d like to take a minute, before we dive into Wollstonecraft and her work, to go over the rights that women have only gotten in the past 100 years — and all had to be legislated:
1920 — voting is legal for all women — but women of color, while technically included, are kept from voting, like their male peers, due to Jim Crow laws
1924 — Native women and men are given the right to vote
1964 — becomes illegal to discriminate in the workplace based on sex, illegal to keep any person of color from voting because of the color of their skin
1965 — contraception is made legal
1972 — becomes illegal to exclude women from educational financial assistance
1973 — Roe v Wade decision is made in the Supreme Court
1974 — becomes illegal to require a woman to have a male co-signatory on financial documents (like credit cards or bank loans)
1993 — marital rape becomes a crime in all 50 states
Obviously, it’s been a long road for equal rights under the law, for all minorities. I hope that as this century progresses, women from all backgrounds can feel that they not only are legally equal to men, but actually equal to men. We’re not there yet.
But in 1792, when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, things were far, far worse for English women.
The end of the 18th century was a time of immense upheaval. The ideas of the Enlightenment — the invention of the scientific method, reason over faith, equality among men of different classes — these were considered revolutionary ideas. They inspired two major revolutions themselves in America and France. But the Enlightenment was specifically for these white men — sons calling out their fathers’ tyranny; male citizens challenging kings. The Enlightenment changed many, many things about how power was used and shared, especially in the United Kingdom. But women were not only left out of Enlightenment arguments altogether, their rights actually contracted, and got much smaller. A jurist named Blackstone wrote his Commentaries on English Law in 1765, and his book led to the adoption of English common law across the colonies. For women, their rights as described by Blackstone were nonexistent — they had no rights at all. Their husbands subsumed all their rights under a legal doctrine called “couverture.” A married woman could not own property, make or keep money, have custody of her children, divorce her husband, vote, or be educated without her husband’s consent. Many of the rights that women have gained here in the US in the last 100 years, that I mentioned before, have been a slow repeal of couverture ideas — being able to control our own finances, our own bodies, our own political voice, and our own futures.
This would lead you (and me, when I first read about couverture) to think “wow, no ladies should have gotten married in the 18th century!” Unfortunately, being unmarried in 18th century England was very difficult for women as well. While being “feme sole” meant that theoretically a single woman held the same rights as any single man, in practice women were dismissed as being totally incapable of managing their own affairs-which was probably true, because most women were not educated enough to understand that they had rights at all; they were not taught to handle their own finances, they could not read Latin, and they were not schooled in critical thinking. So they often had their lives decided for them by their families as a result. So what was Mary Wollstonecraft even doing in 1792? How did she manage to do anything, if women were in such a bad place?
Virginia Woolf once said “Towards the end of the 18th century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle class woman began to write.”
Mary Wollstonecraft isn’t a name that everybody knows today. She’s been cited and quoted, but her works aren’t widely read. Wollstonecraft was born into a large lower-middle class family in England, with a father who drank too much and didn’t work enough. She and her brothers and sisters did what they had to do — the girls became governesses and the boys joined the navy, mostly. Based on history, Mary should have lived out her whole life in obscurity. Instead, she felt that she had a purpose and a voice. which must have seemed something like madness to her family. We have the letters she wrote to her sisters and to her best friend, saying that she felt like she was meant for something more. Once she described it as feeling like she could be “a new genus”, “the first of my kind.” She had ideas that sometimes she couldn’t even share with her family, they were too bold and too different.
When she was in her early 20s, she decided to start a girls’ school in Newington Green, which was at the time located north of London, in the country. She chose the spot because she knew a few people who lived there, and because it was far away from her father, who would have insisted she give him all her earnings. She wanted to start a school for girls that would teach them the things she felt girls needed to know, without interference. There, she met Dr. Richard Price, a Unitarian minister who corresponded with the rebels in America and worked with radical publishers in England. He was one of the “Rational Dissenters”, and Wollstonecraft attended his church while she ran her new school for girls. While Price and Wollstonecraft drifted apart over the years, he introduced her to Unitarian ideas of equality between the sexes, and to the person who would help her the most in her life: her publisher, Joseph Johnson. Joseph Johnson was also a Unitarian, who specialized in publishing works for the newest set of readers: the self-educating middle class. He published radical works, educational works, scientific works, poetry, anything that he thought might sell and do some good.
As an unmarried woman from a family with no connections and a regular job, who was expected to send her father money and help advance her brothers’ careers with her earnings as well, Wollstonecraft saw that there was something wrong with the world. She was being asked to sacrifice constantly, and she felt strongly that she was not living up to her potential. But once she found a publisher who would work with her and believed in her voice, she found her potential easily. Wollstonecraft was the perfect person to write books for Johnson to publish. She was middle-class herself. She said often that she hated the flowery style of most political writers of her day; she preferred to be plain-spoken so that anyone could understand her. She started writing about female education. Her first book was titled Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Her second, Original Stories from Real Life was about her work as a governess in Ireland. Then she wrote an anonymous response to Edmund Burke, titling her pamphlet Vindication of the Rights of Man. Her third major publication, though short, was also anonymous, and written to attack the French monarchy and the idea of hereditary wealth. It was well-received for its philosophical arguments and put Mary on the map (although a second printing under her own name was re-reviewed and found to be too “emotional”).
When she wrote that final pamphlet, something seemed to click: she wrote to her friends that she discovered her old work on women’s education and her new work on privilege should come together.
Vindication of the Rights of Woman was one of the earliest works on feminism, and totally radical when it was published. It started off like any philosophical text from the Enlightenment: it claimed to be about Reason and laid out logical arguments. One: Reason is not a masculine or feminine characteristic — it is the basis of virtue of all kinds. Two: you can’t have a good moral character without having the ability to reason. Three: Since Reason is not masculine or feminine, and people cannot be good without reason, men’s argument that women lack reason/inherent goodness must be because men refuse to educate them. Framing equality as “reason” was very common in the late 18th century. After all, the Enlightenment was also called The Age of Reason. There was an idea that if we could just formulate the right set of arguments, everything in the world would become perfectly understandable and we could fix every problem. Rationality was the most important tool to the men of the Enlightenment. Wollstonecraft’s book was a challenge to those men — if reason is the most important tool, then give the gift of reason to everyone equally. She pushed on:
• women should be able to enter the world of medicine and politics, and girls and boys should be educated equally well and for free
• women’s interest in dressing up and looking pretty is primarily a case of nurture, rather than nature — if they had other things to think about and their whole future wasn’t tied to how they looked (getting married was pretty much the only thing to do), they wouldn’t care about their appearance so much
• if women are shamed for having sex before marriage, because it’s immoral, then maybe men should be shamed as well.
• women should be able to speak their minds without worrying about being perceived as “masculine”, just as men should be able to have emotions without being perceived as “feminine.”
This last bullet feeds into what she really wants to talk about. She wrote “A wild wish has flown from my heart to my head: I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society.”
This is true feminism. The battle, to her, was not men versus women, or men “giving” women something by passing laws or “allowing” them to accomplish things. Wollstonecraft’s feminism is *all of us* against the status quo. At her time, the feminine virtues were chastity, modesty, self-control. Masculine virtues were intelligence, strength, and independence. She argued that perhaps, we could think of these as all HUMAN virtues, and ask men and women to challenge each other to be better humans in all ways. This sounds simple, but at the time, and even now, it is far more complicated to put into practice than we might realize.
Wollstonecraft was both praised and criticized for her book. Abigail Adams loved it. John Adams thought it was… okay. She was criticized for being too emotional and plain-spoken, although her works helped to launch the Romantic era, which applauded men for tapping into their emotionality (women, however, were still not applauded for that).
Later, modern female historians criticized her for not going “far enough” in calling out patriarchy. But we must contextualize a historical figure like Wollstonecraft. It’s not good enough to say that “if I were the one writing the book, I would have gone further.” History doesn’t work that way. The concepts of patriarchy and feminism didn’t even exist when she wrote her book.
Little Women is a big deal right now. If you’ve read the book, you know that the four sisters and their mother and their housekeeper are running an entirely female household for the majority of the first half of the book. Later, in the second half, all of the surviving sisters end up married to guys and raising their kids, even though as young women they dreamed of being professional actresses, writers, and artists. Many people have criticized Louisa May Alcott for making her heroines “settle” for a typical life. Many historians have said the same thing about Wollstonecraft, who at one time thought marriage was slavery (and at the time, she was correct) but ultimately married William Godwin, an anarchist philosopher and became “a wife.” But I want to push back on that kind of criticism, both for Alcott and for Wollstonecraft. They were less like traitors and much more like the first “bad feminists,” to borrow the phrase from Roxane Gay. Wollstonecraft was quite literally inventing the idea of true equality. Alcott, writing 70 years later (and an American Unitarian) agreed with Wollstonecraft about her ideas of equality, which had been nurtured and published by English Unitarians. There’s a great quote in the Winona Ryder version of Little Women, which I think may be from another Alcott work: “we should not give women the vote because they are good, but because they are people.” This is basic feminism. But how, in a society where equality of any kind was belittled or attacked, could you talk about such things in a mixed company? And how did you sell books to “regular” people and help them understand your ideas, without pandering? Wollstonecraft, in Vindication, is constantly reassuring the men who are reading that she loves them, and that she knows they have it in them to create equality — she calls them her brothers many times. In the end of Little Women, all the wives are equal partners to their husbands — they listen to each other and act in the way that Wollstonecraft wanted English men and women to act — to educate and help one another to be better people. That was intensely radical at the time of couverture, even though it doesn’t seem very radical to us. But talking about equality from within the constraints of an unequal reality meant that both Alcott and Wollstonecraft were forced to assure readers that marriage was a good thing, that women would still raise the kids, they would not take over the government or take over the world. Without these assurances, both of their livelihoods, and probably their actual lives, would have been in very real danger. Elizabeth Robins, a 19th century suffragette, wrote “to say in print what she actually thinks is the last thing the woman author is so rash to attempt. She must wear the aspect that shall have the best chance at pleasing her brothers. Her publishers are not women.”
Though Alcott never married, Wollstonecraft found a man that she felt she was a partner to — William Godwin. He was also a philosopher and a writer, but for the first few years of their acquaintance, they didn’t like each other. Godwin thought Wollstonecraft was too outspoken and wild, Wollstonecraft thought Godwin was boring. At the time, Wollstonecraft was living with another man and had a child with him, then took her baby girl all over Europe with her, while Godwin was living in London and writing books about anarchy from his living room. They both had a point about each other, I think. But a few years after Vindication came out, after she was unceremoniously dumped and was struggling to re-start her writing career, a switch seemed to flip for Godwin: he realized that Wollstonecraft wasn’t just a radical, bossy lady — she was applying the ideas of the Enlightenment in ways that no one had done yet. She was a fighter. And as a single woman in their world, she needed men to help her spread the messages. He decided to be one of those men. And Wollstonecraft realized that Godwin could walk the walk as well as talk the talk.
She and Godwin were married, and she became pregnant. She delivered a healthy girl, but died herself 10 days later, of childbed fever. Her critics said that she got what she deserved, for living a life like hers. This daughter, also named Mary, was raised by her father according to Wollstonecraft’s teachings, and eventually married a famous poet named Shelley, and invented the genre of science fiction, with her publication of Frankenstein.
Although Wollstonecraft died young, at the age of 38, her message of sexual equality resonated with many groups — Unitarians, Universalists, Quakers, and Dissenters of all kinds. Because of these groups, her works were discussed and re-read, passed on to daughters and granddaughters in Europe and the United States. This is part of the very first principle of Unitarian Universalism — the inherent worth and dignity of every person — and her arguments resonated years before they was codified. As I said before, Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton dedicated their book to her, in 1881. Wollstonecraft was far ahead of her time, but with the help of men in the Unitarian community, her voice found a way to be heard.
Men and women have had some ups and downs over the course of our history (I’m looking at you, Blackstone in 1765). Wollstonecraft, who wanted to “confound” the notion of gender because it was standing in the way of equality, knew that men and women working together was the only permanent solution. To her, equality wasn’t just the ability to have equal pay or custody of a child. It was seeing each other as intellectual and emotional equals, each of us free to reason and grow in a fulfillment of the dreams of the Enlightenment. She would probably be excited to see how far we’ve come in giving all people the rights they need to define themselves, in gender and in relationships. I think this is how we approach a true embodiment of the first principle of Unitarian Universalism — not just acknowledging the worth and dignity of every person, but like Richard Price, Joseph Johnson, and William Godwin, actively *encouraging* every person to live their truth, and using whatever privilege we have to make sure they have the freedom to do so.
Thank you.
