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Today is what would have been the 265th birthday of Mary Wollstonecraft, considered by some to be “the first British feminist” or “protofeminist,” depending on your interpretation. Either way, she was a pretty cool lady who managed to live a pretty cool life, despite only living until 38 — dying from complications after giving birth to the other Mary Wollstonecraft, the one who wrote Frankenstein.
The author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft herself was and has been vindicated, unvindicated, vindicated and unvindicated and vindicated throughout her life and after her death. Was she a feminist? Is it weird to call someone who was born before “feminist” was a word a feminist? Particularly when they were pretty clear about not wanting full equality? Who among us can say?
“Let it not be concluded that I wish to invert the order of things; I have already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue. I speak collectively of the whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I reason consequently, as strenuously maintain that they have the same simple direction, as that there is a God.”
I’m not going to lie, I have no goddamned idea why the constitution of men’s bodies would help them attain a greater degree of virtue, but I suppose we can chalk that up to “because the 18th century.”
That being said, she was a strong advocate for women’s education at a time when not a whole lot of people thought so highly of educating women or sending them to school. Sure, her reasoning for this was partly that educating women would improve their virtue and that it was necessary if they were going to be raising the young men who would later be in charge of everything, but it was certainly more egalitarianism than anyone else was pushing for (at least in Britain, the French were a little more advanced in this area).
Let us take a look at what we were working with at that time, with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile.
“The whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to council them, to console them, and to make life agreeable and sweet to them — these are the duties of women at all times, and should be taught them from their infancy.”
This nonsense was just some of what Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in response to.
To be fair, being virtuous, raising men and being companions to them was not the only argument she had in favor of education — she did, also, suggest that by educating women, they would not have to marry men for support, which she deemed “legal prostitution.”
But what have women to do in society? I may be asked, but to loiter with easy grace; surely you would not condemn them all to suckle fools and chronicle small beer! No. Women might certainly study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as nurses. And midwifery, decency seems to allot to them, though I am afraid the word midwife, in our dictionaries, will soon give place to accoucheur, and one proof of the former delicacy of the sex be effaced from the language.
They might, also, study politics, and settle their benevolence on the broadest basis; for the reading of history will scarcely be more useful than the perusal of romances. […]
Business of various kinds, they might likewise pursue, if they were educated in a more orderly manner, which might save many from common and legal prostitution. Women would not then marry for a support, as men accept of places under government, and neglect the implied duties; nor would an attempt to earn their own subsistence, a most laudable one! sink them almost to the level of those poor abandoned creatures who live by prostitution. For are not milliners and mantua-makers reckoned the next class?
I will say, our girl Mary was a tad judgy about other women.
I speak of the improvement and emancipation of the whole sex, for I know that the behaviour of a few women, who, by accident, or following a strong bent of nature, have acquired a portion of knowledge superiour to that of the rest of their sex, has often been overbearing; but there have been instances of women who, attaining knowledge, have not discarded modesty, nor have they always pedantically appeared to despise the ignorance which they laboured to disperse in their own minds. The exclamations then which any advice respecting female learning, commonly produces, especially from pretty women, often arise from envy. When they chance to see that even the lustre of their eyes, and the flippant sportiveness of refined coquetry will not always secure them attention, during a whole evening, should a woman of a more cultivated understanding endeavour to give a rational turn to the conversation, the common source of consolation is, that such women seldom get husbands. What arts have I not seen silly women use to interrupt by flirtation, a very significant word to describe such a manoeuvre, a rational conversation which made the men forget that they were pretty women.
Surprisingly, Vindication was not actually received as poorly as you might think at the time and probably wasn’t even as controversial among intellectuals of the day as her earlier support of the French Revolution was. In fact, Wollstonecraft didn’t get all that controversial until after her death, when her husband, William Godwin, widely considered the first modern anarchist, published his biography of her, The Memoir of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Now, Godwin was crazy in love with her and thought everything she ever did with her life was great and wonderful — including having her first child out of wedlock — so he shared all these very personal details of her life, thinking he was celebrating her, but “because the 18th century” … not everyone was as thrilled as he was by her relative libertinism and she was pretty much vilified for decades.
Oddly enough, Memoir was also partly inspired by Rousseau, who was rather explicit about his own sexual proclivities in his book Confessions, but he was a man, so people were just a whole lot more chill about his spanking fetish and his stories of flashing women in alleyways.
It wasn’t until much later that feminists like Virginia Woolf and Emma Goldman sort of rediscovered Wollstonecraft and her work and people began seeing her as something of a foremother of the feminist movement.
The most fair reading of Wollstonecraft, I believe, is to see her as a product of and reaction to her time and to appreciate her for that. As super cool as it would be to be able to go back 300 years in Britain and find a trove of female intellectuals who, incredibly, agreed with us on everything … that’s not going to be a thing. I mean, we don’t even agree with each other half the time.
If you haven’t actually read A Vindication of the Rights of Women, here you go! Enjoy!
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