by Sady Doyle
Today, Mary Wollstonecraft is so respectable that she’s actually not intrinsically interesting. She’s an eighteenth-century feminist, well-entrenched in the canon, whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a staple in any Women’s Studies student’s list of Books You Should Probably Get Around To, I Mean, Not Now, But Eventually. Her points have been so widely accepted that they neither shock nor enlighten: education for women? Sure! Women voting? Why the heck not? Letting ladies be doctors? Yes, yes, very good. Let’s move on to the hard stuff.
So you wouldn’t guess that for most of the time Wollstonecraft has been a part of the canon, she was known primarily for her scandalous sex life. Nor would you know that while she may have written the first book of Western feminist theory, she was also the trainwreck that functionally derailed the feminist movement for one hundred years.
In her lifetime—a brief one; she was born in 1759, and died in 1797—Wollstonecraft was respected. She was connected with the writers and theorists of the British far-left wing; when people thought of her, they thought of French revolutionaries and pro-democracy radicals like Thomas Paine. Granted, “armed revolution against the monarchy” was not exactly a mainstream position. But it did have quite a lot of traction, particularly in France and the newly established United States, and Wollstonecraft enjoyed a surprising amount of legitimacy as a result.
Vindication was well situated in a debate people were already having over the concept of “natural rights,” which kept it from seeming foolish, and made it one of those books that people felt obliged to know, if only so that they could argue about it. John and Abigail Adams read her work carefully. Aaron Burr (himself not the most well-liked guy in history) had a portrait of Wollstonecraft over his mantel, and educated his daughter according to Wollstonecraft’s theories. The conservative Anti-Jacobin Review, in one of its many takedowns, quipped, “Rights of Woman, which the superficial fancied to be profound, and the profound knew to be superficial”—but even they were forced to admit that people were listening.
And then she died. Quickly, unexpectedly, and early, at the age of thirty-eight. She had the great misfortune to have, at that time, an adoring husband, the philosopher William Godwin, who was determined that her genius should be remembered. He arranged for the publication of all her remaining work (including, fatally, her letters), and took the eight weeks immediately after her death to write a biography, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. To this day, it’s hard to say why Godwin did what he did: It could have been political conviction, or the hazy judgment of fresh grief, or simply the inability to understand that anyone might dislike the woman he’d loved. But for whatever reason, in his biography, William Godwin set out to expose every damaging secret Wollstonecraft ever had. Most crucially, he exposed the importance of two names: Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay.
Fuseli was the lesser offense. He was a self-consciously risqué painter, with whom Wollstonecraft had gotten involved just as he was getting married to one of his models. This culminated in a spectacularly awkward episode in which Wollstonecraft arrived at Fuseli’s doorstep, asked his horrified wife for permission to move in, and was thrown out on her face. In 1798, this story alone would have been enough to destroy a woman’s reputation. But, as it turns out, it was just an opener for the main event, featuring the American writer, father of Wollstonecraft’s first child, and All-Time Great Historical Douchebucket, Gilbert Imlay.
Wollstonecraft and Imlay lived together in France, where she had gone to cover the Revolution. This was at the height of the Reign of Terror, when saying the wrong word in the street could result in execution; England had declared war on France. So, to avoid Wollstonecraft’s being taken for a British spy, they claimed to be married. The idea, though, was to be better than married: Like many radicals of the day, they believed in a higher bond, something outside of the patriarchal arrangements, which could be held together by love rather than legal consequences. Or at least, they believed it for a time. Then, Wollstonecraft gave birth to their daughter, Fanny. At this point, she believed in a higher bond, and he believed he had to go out for the proverbial pack of cigarettes—you know, not far out, just out, preferably across a national border or an ocean or two. Be back soon! Love you, honey! Bye!
It would have been cruel to simply disappear, but what Imlay did was crueler: For months, Wollstonecraft wrote to him, begging him to return, only to be put off each time with promises that he’d rejoin her as soon as his “business prospects” allowed. She believed him for longer than sense would seem to permit. But then, there was very little that made sense about her situation. She was a woman with a newborn, living in a war zone, and the person she most trusted kept telling her that the truth she could almost certainly perceive—she was alone, she was unprotected, Fanny had no father—was a delusion brought on by her own overheated emotions. Unmoored and gaslit, her tone became steadily darker. She began to mention death more often. She wrote that she could not sleep. That she wondered if she were already dying. “I wish one moment that I had never heard of the cruelties that have been practised here, and the next envy the mothers who have been killed with their children,” she wrote. “You will think me mad: I would I were so, that I could forget my misery—so that my head or heart would be still.”
Finally, in April of 1795, Wollstonecraft arrived in London and discovered what had kept Imlay: While she’d been fearing death, raising their baby and begging for his return, he had been living comfortably in London with another woman. Strung-out, overwhelmed, and at the end of her tolerance, Wollstonecraft attempted suicide with a laudanum overdose.
Imlay, to give him credit, personally rescued her from the attempt. Imlay, to give him less credit, somehow convinced her to hide herself again, assuring her of her importance and then sending her away to Scandinavia. She went, wrote a book about it—one of her more well-received works, in fact—and returned to find Imlay still with his new partner. She tried to drown herself in the Thames. This time, she told Imlay not to save her: “Nothing but my extreme stupidity could have rendered me blind so long,” she wrote to him. “Yet, whilst you assured me that you had no attachment, I thought we might still have lived together … Your treatment has thrown my mind into a state of chaos; yet I am serene. I go to find comfort, and my only fear is, that my poor body will be insulted by an endeavour to recall my hated existence.”
But, once again, she survived. And, in time, she got down to the business of surviving; she cared for Fanny, she returned to work, she found a way to be alone. “I flinch not from the duties which tie me to life,” she was able to write to Imlay, in late 1795. And though the angry letters about the deterioration of their relationship and the fate of their child continued until about 1796, she was happy to report that when she saw him in the street, she could say hello without experiencing any strong feelings whatsoever.
By that time, of course, much of her focus was on her old friend, William Godwin. As she recovered, the friendship had quickly turned romantic, and sexual (another fact Godwin was all too eager to share with the world), and in 1797, when Wollstonecraft once again found herself pregnant, they bit the bullet, overcame the years in which both of them had publicly fulminated against marriage as an institution, and officially got married.
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft had only been married for six months when she died from complications of childbirth. His state of mind is probably reflected in the name of their daughter: Simply “Mary Wollstonecraft.” (Later to be known as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and even later, of course, as Mary Shelley.) He claimed that he had fallen in love with her through her writing. He had just committed to spend the rest of his life with her. And then, almost overnight, she was gone. In the midst of his grief, Godwin did something that he believed would keep Mary’s name alive.
Godwin published the old suicide note. He published Wollstonecraft’s tender recollections of sex. He published the bitter breakup letters in which Wollstonecraft told Imlay th
at he was a sex-crazed, loveless asshole who would turn into a sad old man. All of it, everything: It was out there. And it was attached to a woman who had argued, of all things, that emancipating women would make them more virtuous.
So, that was the tragedy. And here were the reviews:
William hath penn’d a waggon-load of stuff
And Mary’s life at last he needs must write,
Thinking her whoredoms were not known enough,
Till fairly printed off in black and white.
With wondrous glee and pride this simple wight
Her brothel feats of wantonness set down.
Being her spouse, he tells, with huge delight
How oft she cuckolded the silly clown
And lent, O lovely piece! Herself to half the town.
That was the Anti-Jacobin (they’re the folks responsible for the “scripture” line, along with timeless zingers such as “God help poor silly men from such usurping bitches.”) There was also this, from Richard Polwhele, concerned with the damage wrought by “unsex’d females” like “WOLLSTONECRAFT, whom no decorum checks”:
Come, from those livid limbs withdraw your gaze,
Those limbs which Virtue views in mute amaze;
Nor deem, that Genius lends a veil, to hide
The dire apostate, the fell suicide.
And this, from Robert Browning, who took it upon himself to write a poem in the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft herself, and whose “Mary Wollstonecraft” is, essentially, a blithering idiot with a stalker’s crush (she has “more than a will—what seems a power / to pounce on my prey”) who pretends to be smart in the vain hope of getting a boy to notice her:
Much amiss in the head, Dear,
I toil at a language, tax my brain
Attempting to draw—the scratches here!
I play, play, practise and all in vain:
But for you—if my triumph brought you pride,
I would grapple with Greek Plays till I died[.]
It’s not quite “Stupid Spoiled Whore,” but it’s close. (The main difference, I would argue, is that it leaves out the “Spoiled” bit.) Wollstonecraft’s promiscuity and craziness ballooned outward from the facts, becoming monstrous. The Anti-Jacobin implied that we’d only heard about two instances of Wollstonecraft having premarital sex because Godwin was intentionally leaving out hundreds of others: “The biographer does not mention many of her amours. Indeed it is unnecessary; two or three instances of action often decide a character as well as a thousand.”
The dates on these things are particularly illuminating. The Memoirs and the letters were released in 1798, shortly after Wollstonecraft’s death. Polwhele wrote his immortal verse in 1798, too, and the Anti-Jacobin was still cackling about Wollstonecraft’s “whoredom” in 1801. But Browning’s thoughts on Wollstonecraft’s desperation and stupidity went out in 1883—eighty-five years after the scandal first hit. Godwin’s Memoir didn’t affect Wollstonecraft’s reputation, it was her reputation, more or less until the dawn of the twentieth century.
As Wollstonecraft went, so went her cause. When Vindication was first published, it seemed that women’s rights would be naturally folded into the discussion of human rights, part and parcel of the increasing democratization of culture. But after the Memoirs, they dropped out of view: Even her former employer, the Analytical Review, was forced to conclude that some people “will be apt to say, that the experience of Mrs. G is the best refutation of her theory.” Another magazine was more to the point: “Her works will be read with disgust by every female who has any pretensions to delicacy; with detestation by everyone attached to the interests of religion and morality, and with indignation by anyone who might feel regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion.”
And bury her they did. The progressives who used to read her, such as John Stuart Mill, increasingly either avoided the topic of feminism or carefully eliminated all mention of Wollstonecraft when framing it. Novelists writing for lady audiences filled their plots with misguided, sex-crazed feminists who threw themselves at men—or off cliffs. The prediction that her work would be read with particular revulsion by “females” was correct; it was women, in fact, who increasingly drove the shaming of Wollstonecraft, in an effort to avoid being associated with her disgrace. In 1885, socialist Karl Pearson proposed naming his activist group after her. It was the women in the group who threatened to resign. Even if you believed in the brotherhood and equality of all mankind, you didn’t want to march into battle calling yourselves the Crazy Slut Fan Club.
The only way for a woman to engage in feminism at all, it turned out, was to actively participate in the shaming: Harriet Martineau, one of the few to carry the torch, declared that “Mary Wollstonecraft was, with all her powers, a poor victim of passion, with no control over her own peace, and no calmness or content except when the needs of her individual nature were satisfied.” Not only were real feminists entirely unlike Mary Wollstonecraft, allowing women like her into the movement set it back: “[Their] advocacy of Woman’s cause becomes mere detriment, precisely in proportion to their personal reasons for unhappiness, unless they have fortitude enough […] to get their own troubles under their feet, and leave them out of the account in stating the state of their sex.”
A whore, a madwoman, an idiot, a joke, and most of all, responsible for setting women’s rights back. It didn’t matter that she’d started the conversation about their rights in the first place. Feminism was for women who behaved correctly and had their shit together. As for Mary: Mary was over. She was wrecked.
•
The leap from Paris Hilton to Mary Wollstonecraft may seem like a long one. But in practice, it’s hardly even a bunny hop. The pattern of forcible exposure and public shaming that governs female sexuality is very old, and has changed very, very little. We simply find new personalities and new technologies with which to recreate the same drama.
In the summer of 2014, Eron Gjoni published “thezoepost,” a 9,000-word blog post. It was perhaps the world’s most exhaustive and lamentable effort on the part of an ex-boyfriend to prove that his girlfriend—well-reviewed feminist game developer Zoe Quinn—was a bad person. It was also, if you watched closely, an eerie play-by-play reenactment of the furor surrounding Wollstonecraft and the Memoirs.
“This post exists to warn you to be cautious of Zoe,” Gjoni began. “It is here to paint a portrait of her actual personality.”
That “actual personality,” in Gjoni’s view, was entirely comprised of the fact that, during their five-month relationship and/or the three months they’d been broken up, Quinn had slept with other people. Gjoni knew the language of left-wing and feminist outrage well enough to mimic it effectively (“I very much align with SJ [social justice],” he assured Vice) by claiming that his post was “helping a very large number of abuse survivors” and taking care to “apologize to those […] who have been triggered.”
Yet despite the highflown rhetoric, Gjoni’s definition of “abuse” was highly unorthodox—specifically: It failed to include his own behavior. Gjoni posted chatlogs in which he interrogated and browbeat Quinn into messy, borderline-suicidal breakdowns by calling her a liar and telling her that she was exactly like her violent mother and ex-husband. He counted as one of her sins the fact that she’d refused to let him search her private message archives for the word “love.” At one point, he even started calling hotels for “evidence” that she’d been there with other men.
About those hotel calls: Those, actually, were not in Gjoni’s original post. He wrote about them on 4Chan, one of the most powerful and virulent sources of online harassment for women, where Gjoni went to rally support for himself. He also posted the entire contents of “thezoepost” to Something Awful and Penny Arcade; Quinn alleged, when she filed her restraining order, that Gjoni knew them to be primary sources of previous harassment.
Still: He published it. He published the Facebook message in which she wrote “I shoul
d kill myself.” He published the fact that one of her partners had been married. He published her pleading with him not to tell that man’s wife to “go public” with the affair. In 2014, as in 1798, it was enough to burn a woman down to the ground.
Where Godwin’s disclosures were motivated by foolish love, Gjoni’s came from knowing and calculated hate. (He would casually admit on Twitter that he calculated the odds of Quinn being harassed at 80 percent when he published.) But both had the advantage of cultural momentum: The communities Gjoni courted were already powerfully angry at “SJWs” (“Social Justice Warriors,” or, generally, leftist women) and feminists who criticized their beloved videogames. They leapt at the chance to take their anger out on one of these women, under the premise that she’d been immoral. These men quickly proceeded from crowing about Gjoni’s post, to concluding that Quinn’s career was entirely due to sexual favors, to (of course) leaking nude photos she’d taken and/or posting her address online, to, finally, theorizing the existence of a vast feminist conspiracy to destroy video games as we know them.
Gjoni’s gesture was vile, but it was also silly: It was overwrought interpersonal drama from a small subculture (independent video game developers) that the mainstream rarely thought about, let alone tracked. But, as with Wollstonecraft’s disgrace, the chance to publish something embarrassing about a feminist woman, and therefore to discredit feminism itself, was an opportunity that got right-wing types salivating. One of the primary exponents of GamerGate, as the phenomenon came to be known, was Milo Yiannopolous, a “journalist” ensconced in the far-right hive mind of Breitbart.com, who published dispatches from the movement with titles like “Feminist Bullies Are Tearing the Gaming Industry Apart,” eagerly repeating apocryphal charges that Quinn “cheated on her boyfriend for calculated professional advancement” with men who “know that they will be rewarded with sexual favours for promoting substandard work by some female developers.”