Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  ‘I had little curiosity to see Mrs Wollstonecraft’, * Godwin said, ‘and a very great curiosity to see Thomas Paine.’ Paine turned out to be rather quiet; Mary, not. ‘I…heard her, very frequently when I wished to hear Paine,’ Godwin repeated.

  He had glanced at the first Vindication, ‘displeased as literary men are apt to be, with a few offenses against grammar and other minute points of composition’–the common response of a thinker who sights a woman of no importance advancing on his territory. (Virginia Woolf spoofed such rebuffs when she pictures the dismay of an educated man to find the housemaid browsing in his library and Cook composing a Mass in B Minor.) Godwin was three years older than Mary, a bachelor aged thirty-five, who earned his living by the skill of his pen. He was hardworking, prolific, and soon to formulate ideas of political justice that were to make him the leading radical thinker for his own and the next generation. The Romantics didn’t have to be revolutionaries (as Byron, for instance, was not) to respect the stand Godwin took against the injustice of power. His arguments were rational to the point of coldness–not a man to cultivate disciples, though he had them. Godwin prided himself that though he disagreed with ‘Mrs Wollstonecraft’, he did grant her independence of mind. It annoyed him to find this act of justice was not reciprocated. ‘Mrs Wollstonecraft’, he heard, made it known that she disliked him. He would have condoned disagreement, but dislike was irrational. When they met two or three times in the course of 1792 they agreed no better.

  The second Vindication (published in January 1792 with the author’s name) asks legislators to turn their attention to women, demanding ‘JUSTICE for one-half of the human race’. The French constitution of 1791 did away with aristocratic privilege in the name of the Rights of Man, but denied women equal citizenship. Following a Declaration of the Rights of Woman by French feminist Olympe de Gouges in 1791, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman deplores the relegation of her sex to a state of ‘ignorance and slavish dependence’, encouraged to see themselves as silly creatures trapped in sensibilities.

  An alternative in the late eighteenth century, the woman as preacher, was visible in society–not in Wollstonecraft’s immediate milieu, but taken for granted by the Dissenters with whom she mixed. A memorable instance was Elizabeth Evans, George Eliot’s aunt whom she would immortalise as the preacher on the green in Adam Bede. Her eloquence is of a different kind from doctrinal preaching, in that it is attentive to the lives of her listeners, and at the same time she displays none of the affectations of femininity: ‘there was no blush, no tremulousness,…no casting up or down of the eyelids, no compression of the lips, no attitude of the arms that said, “But you must think of me as a saint.” She held no book in her ungloved hands, but let them hang down lightly crossed before her, as she stood and turned her grey eyes on the people. There was no keenness in the eyes; they seemed rather to be shedding love than making observations; they had the liquid look which tells that the mind is full of what it has to give out, rather than impressed with external objects.’ Such women, whose faith granted them a speaking role, did not formulate this as a cultural expression; it remained for Mary Wollstonecraft to shape public words to conscious effect.

  As many before her, she scorned the wiles women had to adopt for the marriage market, and gallantry as the manipulations of male ascendancy. True civility, she believed, can only exist between equals. This sweeps aside a distinction between decent and rakish gallantry championed by the mid-century philosopher David Hume and other members of the Scottish Enlightenment who did, in fact, go some way towards Wollstonecraft’s position. They did look to women as bearers of social sympathies, and concede women’s apparent weakness as a consequence of external pressures like education. To Wollstonecraft, though, gallantry in any form is condescension; it puts women in a false position–reality and rhetoric diverge–and she calls on ‘reasonable men’ to eschew it. In February 1792 she told Everina of a proposal: ‘my book &c &c has afforded me an opportunity of settling very advantageous in the matrimonial line, with a new acquaintance; but entre nous–a handsome house and a proper man did not tempt me’.

  The writer Joan Smith has pointed to the similar enclosures of land and women’s bodies in the eighteenth century. Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act was designed to ensure the transmission of property to the rightful heir in the next generation. Women’s bodies were therefore policed by laws preventing adultery. As Dr Johnson put it: ‘The chastity of women is of all importance, as all property depends on it.’ From 1753 no marriage was legal except the formal, indissoluble one that controlled the passage of property. The Act outlawed all alternative forms of union: cohabitation by mutual agreement, like the partnerships of today, or clandestine marriage without parental consent, an escape route for a girl whose father or guardian was forcing on her a suitor of his choice. The new marriage laws were really property laws: a wife, her money and her children being the property a man gained in perpetuity–divorce was virtually impossible. A legal decision of 1782 entitled a husband to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than a thumb, and an earlier judgement by Sir Matthew Hale established that rape in marriage was no crime.

  Wollstonecraft had witnessed the dangers of these laws in her father’s licensed violence to her mother, and in her sister’s indissoluble marriage to Meredith Bishop. ‘From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain,’ she wrote in the Vindication of 1792, ‘most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.’ The injustice of English law for women was to be the subject of a sequel. In the meantime, she questioned the association of morality with women’s subordinate behaviour and sexual reputation, as a misconception of morality itself–the focus on women’s sins and virtues deflecting attention from a wider morality of tolerance and compassion ignored by those in power.

  Women’s bodies were not only turned into sites for public morality, they were also pathologised. Wollstonecraft opposed a system which defined women as weak, and women themselves for foolish complicity. They tended to pore over such nonsense as The Ladies Dispensatory; or, Every Woman her own Physician (1740, republished many times): ‘The delicate Texture of a Woman’s constitution…subjects her to an infinite Number of Maladies, to which Man is an utter Stranger,’ women were told. ‘That lax and pliant Habit, capable of being dilated and contracted on every Occasion, must necessarily want that Degree of Heat and Firmness which is the Characteristick of Man.’

  Wollstonecraft’s alternative model of womanhood resembles the rational, moral Mrs Mason in Real Life. Much that is sober in this model was designed to counter the coquette trained to live through her sexuality, and we need no longer debate what seemed to modern women prudish advice that they should surrender expectations of sexual pleasure in favour of friendship in the course of marriage. Friendship was–and remains in certain cultures–an obvious way a wife can rescue her self-respect from sex-based subordination reinforced by legal, religious and educational disabilities. This is really not about prudery nor about Wollstonecraft herself; it’s about coping with a lifelong prospect of inferiority.

  At the heart of her argument is the revolutionary idea she had first put out as a practising teacher in her Education. Here, again, she insists on an education in domestic affections as opposed to governance based in contests of power. Domestic affections cut across distinctions of gender, offering a basis for a common morality. It is easy to pass over this domestic ideology as a plea for old-fashioned femininity, but nowhere does she dare more the judgement of her reader. By domesticating an aggressive order she wants to change the whole world. The resistance then and now comes from a fear of feminisation as effeminacy, including fear of the ‘queer’, rather than what Wollstonecraft actually advocates: the political empowerment of gentleness, nurture, compromise and listening–all traits which the civilised of both sexes already share.

  Two other questions remain at issue: sex education and the unresolved nature of gende
r. The transparency prompted by the Enlightenment led Wollstonecraft to propose sex education instead of filling children’s heads with ‘ridiculous falsities’. Although she is of her time when she warns against homosexuality and masturbation, she is beyond her time in her 1790 preface to Elements of Morality, where she asks parents ‘to speak to children of the organs of generation as freely as we speak of the other parts of the body, and explain to them the noble use, which they were designed for’. There is no precedent for Wollstonecraft’s proposal, nothing beyond Locke’s general recommendation that children’s curiosity should be answered. At the time, the human sex organs were revealed in the only explicit book, Aristotle’ s Complete Master-Piece, a seventeenth-century compilation that claimed to be intended mainly for practitioners of midwifery, and as such ‘for public benefit’. It was not intended for ‘some lacivious and lewd persons’ who might ridicule ‘the secrets of nature’. In fact, the book was read widely, and reprinted about three times a decade. What was permissible for midwifery was not permissible for advice literature, the popular eighteenth-century genre from which almost all Wollstonecraft’s writings, including the second Vindication, stem. For Wollstonecraft to fuse sex education with the proper-lady tradition of the advice book was shocking to many of her generation, as to several generations that followed. Even now, sex education in schools can be minimal and often embarrassed, but back in 1790 dignified words came easily to Wollstonecraft.

  Children, she said, should know about the ‘germ of their posterity, which the Creator has implanted in them for wise purposes’. Two years later, in the second Vindication, she builds on what children already know: ‘Children very early see cats with their kittens, birds with their young ones, &c. Why then are they not to be told that their mothers carry and nourish them in the same way?…Truth may always be told to children, if it be told gravely; but it is the immodesty of affected modesty that does all the mischief; and this smoke heats the imagination by vainly endeavouring to obscure certain objects.’ This truth should accompany instruction in anatomy and medicine, ‘not only to enable [women] to take proper care of their own health, but to make them rational nurses of their infants, parents, and husbands; for the bills of mortality are swelled by the blunders of self-willed old women, who give nostrums of their own without knowing anything of the human frame’.

  These recommendations coincided with Erasmus Darwin’s demonstrations of the sexual characteristics of plants. His Loves of the Plants was a sensation when it came out in 1789, so much so that Johnson offered him the extraordinary sum of £1000 (equivalent to today’s six-figure advance) for a sequel. In 1791 the two parts were collected as The Botanic Garden with a frontispiece of Flora adorning herself with the help of the elements, designed by Fuseli. Fire–implying the heat of passion–holds up a mirror to the goddess of nature. This book was designed to overthrow unscientific myths about the source of life. Wollstonecraft was familiar with the Linnaean classification that lay behind Darwin’s popular verses–she would have seen Fanny’s botanical drawings with their delicate watercolour shadings of pistils and stamens, outlined in firm, accurate black lines. In Darwin’s eroticised science, the dramas of fertilisation are upheld by hard fact in copious footnotes. The Loves of the Plants gave new impetus to the traditionally female subject of botany, leading girls towards scientific knowledge through the amorous play of flowers, personified as wantons and virgins:

  With secret sighs the Virgin Lily droops,

  And jealous Cowslips hang their tawny cups.

  How the young Rose in beauty’s damask pride

  Drinks the warm blushes of his bashful bride.

  Nature proves at odds with the propertied control of female bodies:

  Each wanton beauty, trick’d in all her grace,

  Shakes the bright dew-drops from her blushing face;

  In gay undress displays her rival charms,

  And calls her wandering lovers to her arms.

  Not surprisingly, Darwin’s natural world driven by sex was, to many, an improper study for women for whom scientific study was, anyway, thought unsuitable.

  Wollstonecraft reports on the response of an unnamed writer to a ‘lady who asked the question whether women may be instructed in the modern system of botany without losing their female delicacy?’ The unnamed writer declares that if the lady had ‘proposed the question to me, I should certainly have answered–they cannot’. To Wollstonecraft, this presents ‘a gross idea of modesty’. She adds caustically, ‘Thus is the fair book of knowledge to be shut with an everlasting seal!’

  A backlash against botanising girls inflamed by the loves of plants continued in Richard Polwhele’s The Unsex’ d Females (1798):

  With bliss botanic as their bosoms heave,

  Still pluck forbidden fruit, with mother Eve,

  For puberty in sighing florets pant,

  Or point the prostitution of a plant;

  Dissect its organ of unhallow’d lust,

  And fondly gaze the titillating dust…

  Conservatives like Polwhele were infuriated with Mary Wollstonecraft who, they thought, promoted immodesty. In fact she urged ‘natural’ modesty as opposed to its affectation.

  Where most saw human nature as unchangeable, revolutionaries argued that political institutions made men and women what they are; change institutions, discard the mind-forged manacles, and you change human nature itself. Wollstonecraft dedicated the Rights of Woman to the French politician Talleyrand, who had just then drawn up a report on the need for national education for girls as well as boys. Talleyrand justified the usual bias when he claimed girls’ inferiority as ‘the will of nature’. Wollstonecraft refutes this: femininity is not the creation of nature, she says; it is the enfeebled consequence of miseducation. She deplores the sickly delicacy that stifles ‘the natural emotions of the heart’; the slippery language of sensibility (‘pretty superlatives dropping glibly from the tongue’); and false refinement cultivated in ‘a premature unnatural manner’. Wollstonecraft is knocking against advice books like Dr Gregory’s Legacy to His Daughters, where it’s thought indelicate for women to have what Wollstonecraft calls ‘the common appetites of human nature’; even a wish to marry was indelicate, and should be concealed. Wollstonecraft blamed women’s susceptibility to rakes on the equally pernicious influence of the sillier romantic fictions. Women, she argued, live by a stock of worn-out narratives, unable to reshape their lives. She laments there was not as yet ‘a road open by which they can pursue more extensive plans of usefulness and independence…Women might certainly study the art of healing and be physicians as well as nurses. And midwifery, decency seems to allot to them…They might also study politics, and settle their benevolence on the broadest basis.’

  On the face of it, Wollstonecraft forecasts the way we live now; but at a deeper level of implication she is raising the longer-term issue of women’s ‘nature’: that word underpins her enterprise as much or more than ‘rights’. Her private letters and political writings are attuned to states of mind; all assume that right action comes from within–from an educated capacity to judge in a way that breaks the constricting mindsets of her sex. She herself demonstrates ‘natural strength’, eloquence not meekness, and, later, passion in place of the ‘unnatural coldness’ women were taught to cultivate. She questions Rousseau’s belief that women exist to please men and that works of genius are beyond their capacity. Her preferred model is Catharine Macaulay, whose Letters on Education (1790) resisted ‘the absurd notion, that the education of females should be of the opposite kind to that of males. How many nervous diseases have been contracted? How much feebleness of constitution has been acquired, by forming a false idea of female excellence…’ Girls were trained to suppress their natural energy, and play the babe: ‘to lisp with their tongues, to totter in their walk, and to counterfeit more weakness and sickness than they really have, in order to attract the notice of the male’. Coeducational day schools, open to all classes, would help to eliminate
what is false in our differentiation of boys and girls.

  Above all, the Rights of Woman proposes insight and sympathy as an alternative basis for political action. ‘Brutal force has hitherto governed the world,’ Wollstonecraft observes. ‘Man accustomed to bow down to power in his savage state, can seldom divest himself of this barbarous prejudice…’ Military heroics are no longer wanted: ‘It would puzzle a keen casuist to prove the reasonableness of the greater number of wars that have dubbed heroes…I sincerely wish to see the bayonet converted into the pruning-hook.’ Future hopes may lie with ‘moral agents’ who have not accustomed themselves to brutal force: ‘It is time to effect a revolution in female manners–time to restore them their lost dignity–and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.’

  The second Vindication sold in the region of three thousand copies. Not a large number compared with the two hundred thousand copies of Paine’s Rights of Man sold by 1793, yet Wollstonecraft’s name became known throughout the land. It was the first demand for women’s transformation to enter the mainstream of British and American politics. The Rights of Woman was debated by groups of women in public meetings in the British provinces. In Glasgow, Mrs Anne Grant wrote to a Miss Ourry: ‘I have seen Mary Wollstonecraft’s book which is [so] run after here, that there is no keeping it long enough to read leisurely.’

  Jane Austen’s early novella Catherine is dated August 1792, eight months after the Rights of Woman appeared. Wollstonecraft’s ridicule of women’s inflated gush and plaything education reappears in Austen’s ridicule of Camilla: ‘those years which ought to have been spent in the attainment of useful knowledge and mental improvement, had been all bestowed in learning drawing, Italian, and music…and she now united to these accomplishments, an understanding unimproved by reading’. This is Wollstonecraft’s uncharmed voice, and it sounds again in Catherine’s protest against marriage as a form of prostitution for the orphaned Miss Wynne, who is sent off by relations to marry a stranger in India. Silly Camilla sees a romantic adventure, but Austen, at seventeen, already knows better. The prospective husband could turn out a tyrant or a fool or both, and to marry though ‘infinitely against [Miss Wynne’s] inclinations had been necessitated to embrace the only possibility that was offered to her, of a Maintenance’. A generation earlier, this had been the fate of Jane’s orphaned and unhappy aunt, Philadelphia Austen.