The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft Read online

  Godwin had just started work on his own Political Justice; he was living meagrely on a publisher's advance – not Johnson's - and had given up his journalistic work entirely to devote himself to slow and concentrated composition, at the rate of a few paragraphs a day. Paine was also absorbed in writing the second part of his Rights of Man. Mary may have talked more because she had less on her mind. At all events the gathering, which should have been a remarkable one, failed to come to life and the guests found themselves resorting to ill-natured gossip. They parted company none too pleased with one another.*

  But it is possible that Paine dropped into Mary's mind at about this moment the idea of a book on women's rights. In Paris, where he spent half his time, he was on terms of intimacy with Condorcet, and must have known something of the philosophe's vehement advocacy of the idea of equal education and civil status for women. The subject was in the air and needed an outspoken champion in England; why should Mary not produce a second Vindication for her own sex?

  Ever since Montesquieu French writers had been nibbling at the question from a theoretical viewpoint, but Condorcet had given unequivocal support for a programme of immediate advancement of women to equal rights in his Lettres d'un bourgeois de Newhaven, published in 1787.2 The arguments advanced in this essay were clearly an extension of the arguments used by English political writers of the Seventies in their demand for universal suffrage: the same current of thought that had impelled the Dissenters and their associates to advocate political reform had arrived at its next perfectly logical objective. However, it had needed the mind of a man freed from all religious fetters to reach it; Condorcet, who loathed his Jesuit schoolmasters and had been charmed, soothed and re-educated in the salons, had no fear of women. The situation was different in England.

  English Dissenters were still held to the concept of a patriarchal system with a male God at its head; the Unitarians denied the divinity of Jesus but not (of course) the masculinity of his father. God was responsible, they thought, for inflicting various physical penalties and humiliations on women which no amount of goodwill could overcome. (Condorcet dismissed menstruation as of no more account than fluctuations in the general health of men.) It was almost impossible to approach the question of sexual feelings without guilt in England or Scotland, amongst the thinking classes at any rate; even freethinkers were troubled by it. Hume, for instance, had categorized the sexual appetite as obviously the most gross and vulgar of all. From such a perspective, women, who aroused (as a rule) the gross appetite, were all too easily held to blame for it and consigned to the role of temptresses and distractions from the serious business of life. The Dissenting love of domesticity and early marriage was one way of dealing with the problem, since a woman placed in the context of family life was less disturbing than one removed from it, standing alone as a claimant to an individual voice amongst the individual voices of men. The hold of Paradise Lost over the Dissenting imagination was very powerful.

  So that while Mary had been encouraged to think adventurously by the Dissenters, they were not prepared to put forward any directly feminist claims themselves or (on the whole) support her when she came to do so.* The subject had in fact been raised once and allowed to lapse. John Cartwright, one of the reformers associated with Price, Burgh, Priestley and Jebb, had actually discussed the question of female suffrage in the Seventies, though only in response to a joke made by one of his opponents. He regarded the idea as preposterous, and claimed that women themselves found the suggestion absurd. His remarks led to no further discussion at the time.* More recently, in the winter of 1788, Jeremy Bentham had also turned his independent and systematic mind to the subject of suffrage and prepared a series of notes intended for the use of Mirabeau. In them he set out all his objections to women's suffrage. He listed five: their involvement in necessarily absorbing occupations that must distract them from political thought; their inevitable economic dependence on the male sex which might make it hard for them to express disagreement; the difficulty of pursuing their education when they were obliged to lead domestic lives; the small need they had of a vote when they were already so powerful through man's sexual dependence on them; and the domestic strife that might arise as a result.

  It was a curious list, and Bentham was too logical not to find answers to all the objections; by suggesting a secret ballot and a literacy test, and by pointing out that the distractions to which women were subject were no greater than those of the labouring classes in general, he demolished the case against female suffrage. He did not however choose to publish either his queries or his conclusions, and it seems unlikely that they ever reached Mirabeau either.*

  Condorcet returned to the subject in his essay Sur l'admission des femmes au droit de Cité in 1790: ‘Either no member of the human race has real rights, or else all have the same; he who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, thereby abjures his own.’3 And if women tended to put personal considerations before general social justice, this was the result of their deficient education and social conditioning, he said. He invited serious replies to his claims on their behalf: he had had enough of the jokes and ranting that were the usual response.

  Condorcet's arguments remain the classic feminist ones. But they did not reach England, and Mary herself was either wholly ignorant of his work (in spite of Paine) or preferred not to mention it. She could scarcely have known of Bentham's, and in any case the suffrage issue was not in the forefront of her mind. She thought of herself as a philosopher, and to some extent as a political theorist, no doubt; but her most effective claim to a hearing was one that neither Cartwright, nor Condorcet, nor Bentham, could make: she knew the subject from inside.

  Johnson, perceiving that she had the perfect theme, urged her to set to, and she began immediately. The speed at which she worked may have owed something to pressure from him. She made no attempt to study the history of the subject or do any special reading or research. In fact she spent something like six weeks in all upon Vindication of the Rights of Woman; ‘would she had blotted a thousand' is a phrase that haunts the air as one reads. There is no doubt that Condorcet's ten pages pack more logic than Mary's three hundred; but on the other hand she hit the exact tone of righteous indignation that is still effective – indeed it has become the staple tone of much successful journalism. Her book is still read, his essay has never been reprinted.

  She intended to take her work up again and produce a more leisurely second volume, well aware herself of the deficiencies of the first, but the final sheet of this first, and as it turned out only, volume was handed to the printer on 3 January 1792. She sat down and wrote to Roscoe:

  I am dissatisfied with myself for not having done justice to the subject. – Do not suspect me of false modesty – I mean to say, that had I allowed myself more time I could have written a better book, in every sense of the word… I intend to finish the next volume before I begin to print, for it is not pleasant to have the Devil coming for the conclusion of the sheet before it is written. Well, I have said enough of this said book – more than is civil, and not sufficient to carry off the fumes of ill humour which make me quarrel with myself.4

  The Vindication is a book without any logical structure: it is more in the nature of an extravaganza. What it lacks in method it makes up for in élan, and it is better to dip into than read through at a sitting. The theme is this: that women are human beings before they are sexual beings, that mind has no sex, and that society is wasting its assets if it retains women in the role of convenient domestic slaves and ‘alluring mistresses’, denies them economic independence and encourages them to be docile and attentive to their looks to the exclusion of all else.

  Mary declared her allegiance to the doctrines of social equality: society must rid itself of kings, armies, navies and church hierarchies; and of perfectibility: God meant us to be happy, and ‘all would be right’ in the future. She drew the classic comparison between women and a subject class of men, such as
slaves: they were property, and ‘from the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind’. Her feminism was presented not as an adornment or improvement upon the existing structure of society so much as an aspect of an ideal future society. Woman's perfectibility was to go hand in hand with man's; the rights of man and the rights of woman were one and the same thing. It was as bad for men to be domestic tyrants as to be kings; ‘all power inebriates weak men’. Women ‘may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent’.

  Total financial dependence by one sex on another robbed both of dignity and made it almost impossible for women to act as free moral agents. Mary was the first person to apply the phrase ‘legal prostitution’ to marriage. She also discussed straightforward prostitution, which was a major problem in the society she lived in. Magistrates were obsessed with it as they are with delinquency today; they were constantly suggesting ways of clearing the streets of women, both by rigorous punishment and offers of re-education in institutions. In the face of this Mary bravely stated her view that prostitutes were ignorant and underprivileged rather than wicked, and made a classic attack on the attitude of well-intentioned reformers: ‘Asylums and Magdalenes are not the proper remedies for these abuses. It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world!’

  But at this point she went off into a discussion of chastity that reads a little oddly. If prostitutes could be said to save the virtue of good women (a point of view much favoured and advanced with complete confidence by Lecky in the middle of the nineteenth century) they were also, said Mary, responsible for undermining the chastity of good women, because they put into their heads the idea that they should attempt to hold their husbands’ affections by sexual means. And to Mary this was a bad thing; she adopted the view, shared later by many suffragettes, that sexuality was wrong in itself, redeemed only by parenthood; and largely imposed on women by men. She even went so far as to speak disapprovingly of husbands who ‘seduce’ their wives, and expressed the view that it was better for marriage to exclude passionate love.

  Her view may have been based in part on ignorance of the sexual nature of women, though it seems unlikely: Fuseli's conversation alone should have enlightened her. More probably it was something she felt she ought to say, an accepted view amongst her more innocent and respectable friends. Or again, it may have been what the vast majority of women really felt in an age when there was no effective birth-control.* After the first excitement and flattery of young love, sex was indeed something imposed by men upon women, which they chiefly wished to avoid because of its likely consequences. The greater sexual enthusiasm of French women and English prostitutes probably rested on their command of a simple birth-control device: the sponge.†

  But Mary was certainly ignorant of any means of birth-control other than the one referred to in the Vindication, which is the suckling of one baby to prevent the conception of another. It was not reliable, but it was time-honoured and carried the extra appeal of seeming to be a self-rewarding procedure: the baby's benefit was also the mother's. (Suckling was the fashion amongst radicals, and Mary's friend Roscoe had enormous success with his translation of The Nurse, a long Italian poem in its praise.)

  Mary's opinions on sexual matters were to be wholly altered by her subsequent experiences, though whether to a more or less realistic point of view is open to some doubt. But it is certain that, had she stuck to the prim attitude expressed in the Vindication, she would have been much more acceptable to the British public than she became.

  Her views on education were shaped, probably indirectly, by the psychological theories of the philosophe Helvéius, who preached the supreme importance of environment and expectation. If girls were encouraged from their earliest years to develop their minds, nourish ambitions and exercise their bodies exactly as boys were, said Mary, they would develop equal capacities and talents: ‘speaking of men, women, or professions, it will be found that the employment of the thoughts shapes the character both generally and individually’. Let women therefore be trained for professions and careers: medicine (not just nursing), midwifery, business, farming, shopkeeping. This would free unmarried women from the ‘bitter bread of dependence’ and enable mothers and widows to plan their lives and manage their affairs more rationally. Rousseau's contention that educated women would lose their power over men enraged her particularly: ‘This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.’

  Mary favoured coeducational day-schools, lessons given by informal conversational methods, with lots of physical exercise, both free and organized. Coeducation would lead to early marriage: preferable, she pointed out briskly, to a system that encouraged boys to sow wild oats amongst girls of a lower class whilst respectable girls were kept segregated and ignorant until they were offered in the marriage market. Her picture of an ideal family was undeniably attractive: the babies nourished by an intelligent mother, not sent away first to nurses and then to boarding school; and the fathers friends rather than tyrants to their children, who should have the right to judge their parents like anyone else. Mary understood instinctively that the emotional balance of the adult was formed in early childhood. ‘Few I believe have had much affection for mankind who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters and even the domestic brutes, whom they first played with.’ Sexual reproduction should be explained ‘gravely’ by the parents, to prevent their heads being filled with nonsense on the subject.

  To the accepted view that women should be delicate and dependent, Mary pointed out the actual conditions in which the vast majority of her sex were forced to struggle:

  ... with respect to virtue, to use the word in a comprehensive sense, I have seen most in low life. Many poor women maintain their children by the sweat of their brow, and keep together families that the vices of the father would have scattered abroad; but gentlewomen are too indolent to be actively virtuous, and are softened rather than refined by civilization. The good sense which I have met with, among poor women who have acted heroically, strongly confirmed me in the opinion that trifling employments have rendered woman a trifler.

  And she did in fact raise briefly the question of women's legal position, saying it should be revised and suggesting they should take an interest in politics with a view to parliamentary representation:

  I may excite laughter, by dropping an hint, which I mean to pursue, some future time, for I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.

  But, as the whole system of representation is now, in this country, only a convenient handle for despotism, they need not complain, for they are as well represented as a numerous class of hard working mechanics, who pay for the support of royalty when they can scarcely stop their children's mouths with bread.

  A long section of the book was given over to attacks on earlier writers who either made light of women's capacities or praised them for the very qualities Mary distrusted: pliancy, docility, cunning, timidity. Characteristically, Mary lashed out at anyone who had offended, sparing neither her friend Anna Barbauld nor her learned French contemporaries Mesdames de Genlis and de Staël, any more than Rousseau or the fatuous Chesterfield. She was not writing to please.

  The book ended abruptly, as though her indignation had boiled itself out of steam for the moment anyway. She had associated feminism firmly with radicalism and an anger directed at social conditions and assumptions, but avoided a vengeful approach to the male sex. She was prim and ignorant on the subject of the sexual relationship, but knew and insisted on the importance of the family. There is in the Vindication an absence of sourness, falsity or hysteria which has not always characterized feminist writing; her book remains remarkable both in its scope and its tone.

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  London 1792

  AT the beginning of 1792 Mary stood at the peak of her success as a writer: she had produced an original and deeply felt book, thirty years' rage distilled in six weeks' hard labour. It was a best-seller at once and established her name before the world; according to Godwin she became for a while the most famous woman in Europe. There were certainly those who scoffed at it, notably Horace Walpole, who classed Mary as a ‘philosophizing serpent’, along with Paine and Horne Tooke: it was her politics rather than her feminism he objected to. Hannah More encouraged him in his scorn, boasting that the title of the Vindication alone was enough to prevent her from reading it, and Walpole coined another, probably the most famous, description of Mary: ‘hyena in petticoats’.1

  There were others who discussed the Vindication without ever seeing a copy, as jokes about its authorship reveal;* but it was reviewed in respectful tones and circulated merrily all over the British Isles. Roscoe pressed copies on the ladies of Liverpool.2 Lady Palmerston, the meekest of wives, warned her husband that ‘I have been reading the Rights of Woman, so you must in future expect me to be very tenacious of my rights and privileges’.3 Mary Hays, a young Dissenter living in south London, wrote enthusiastically expressing her belief that the book was ‘a work full of truth and genius’;4 she had feminist views of her own, but she laid aside for the moment a half-finished attempt to cover the same subject and instead persuaded Johnson to introduce her to her rival author at a breakfast party. She became Mary's most fervent female disciple, and presently she and her youngest sister Elizabeth produced together a volume of Letters and Essays larded with respectful references to Miss Wollstonecraft and urging other women to ‘unite in intention’ now that they had been shown the way to claim their rights. The Hays sisters were on friendly terms with many prominent Dissenting ministers and scholars, notably Disney and Priestley in London, and William Frend and George Dyer in Cambridge, who appear to have encouraged them in their feminist ideas.*