by Bee Rowlatt
So it’s pretty obvious which one you’re going to fall for. And I fell hard. I heard about some upstart woman called Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote a kind of travel book made out of letters. Its portrayals of the Sublime, of wild and terrifying nature, drew rave reviews. It was a bestseller, and the young Romantics couldn’t get enough. The poet Robert Southey breathlessly asked a friend: “Have you met with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden and Norway? She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight.” Coleridge channelled her straight into his Kubla Khan. William Godwin wrote: “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.”
My first reading of Letters from Norway proved unforgettable. Like Godwin I promptly fell in love, but for different reasons. Right there in the introduction, where naturally I was seeking shortcuts, was the real motive behind this apparently jaunty trip of hers. In the worn edition I still use today, the evidence of my youthful astonishment remains. The following words are underlined in stupid green ink: “In fact, Wollstonecraft was on a treasure hunt in Scandinavia.” A treasure hunt. That single phrase hooked me. A treasure hunt. Has there been another treasure-hunting single-mum philosopher on the high seas?
But the Romantics don’t just caper around gasping at mountains and starry skies. They also go out and try to change the world. Which brings us to:
2. Wollstonecraft and the Vindication
The next time Wollstonecraft electrifies my life it’s via A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This is her best-known work, and feminism’s first manifesto. It was published in 1792 and soon quoted around the world, even by the American president. And it’s blisteringly angry. Reading it again among the doldrums of my early career felt like being in the same room as an intoxicating but terrifying woman. A taster description of fluttering girly types:
Fragile in every sense of the word, they are obliged to look up to man for every comfort. In the most trifling danger they cling to their support, with parasitical tenacity, piteously demanding succour; and their natural protector extends his arms, or lifts up his voice, to guard the lovely trembler – from what? Perhaps the frown of an old cow, or the jump of a mouse.
Stand back – you’ll get scorn in your eyes. Some of it’s funny, some of it is weird, the rest is very powerful. Admittedly she spends time on topics unlikely to vex today’s youngsters, such as “Does woman have a soul?” and “Does God want women to be inferior?” But elsewhere she could not be fresher. When she demands “JUSTICE for one half of the human race”, Wollstonecraft is talking about equal rights to education and financial independence.
In the middle of one of her scraps with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who argues it’s their lovely quiet pretty softness that gives the ladies power over men), she delivers the killer blow that’s still feminism’s bottom line to this day:
I do not wish [women] to have power over men, but over themselves.
Power… over themselves. Are we there yet? This question of power over ourselves still needs a proper stare in the face. The Vindication is a tonic for anyone who’s twenty-something and a bit vague: if there were a curriculum for such people, she’d be top of the list. The final distillation is: woman up. Get educated. Be useful. And, above all, independence is “the grand blessing of life”.
For me, the book was a kick in the backside at the right moment. In the thick of trying to achieve “power over myself”, after the year as a showgirl my next professional gig, inexplicably, is journalism. From a job where you get looked at, to a job where you get shouted at. It’s my mid-twenties, and I’m paying the rent by making live news programmes for the BBC World Service.
The wages are lower than showgirl wages, and the management equally incomprehensible. Our boss emerges, tells us how much he misses journalism, then goes back into his office to do more managing. We roll our eyes and get back to work. His sole piece of career advice is to elaborate on job applications precisely how I will make his life easier.
On the upside, the colleagues are exceptional. The World Service in the 1990s is the most exciting place. It still lives in Bush House – home to exiles, poets, eccentrics and rebels from all over the world. As a rookie in the Latin American Service, I’m taught to razor-cut audiotape by a bass-voiced Chilean and a Mexican Goth. The African Services have legendary parties. The Russians never answer the phone. The Arabs smoke more than any smokers have ever smoked, anywhere. The head of the Uzbek Service wears a famous hat and translates Shakespeare. There are marble staircases and stained threadbare carpets. No high-camp sequinned glamour, but also no undignified thong adjustments. Swings and roundabouts, I reflect sagely.
There are female bosses, and there are female correspondents. But very few. Reporting is still largely a posh bloke’s game, and the women who do make it aren’t necessarily of the sisterly kind. One producer, on hearing the flat-vowelled beauty of what remains of my Yorkshire accent, shouts “Give ’er a bag o’ greasy chips!” And there’s an unforgettable female presenter who goes out of her way to crush the ideas, hopes and even the most timid utterances of her junior female colleagues. This includes me, and I spend much of the two years I work on her programme wanting to throw up.
One day this presenter holds up the interview brief I’ve written between her finger and thumb, waves it at our editor and acidly pronounces:
“I’ve done what you might call some basic journalism on this story, and it turns out that Law in Action did it two weeks ago.”
I quietly call Law in Action and find out that this is not true. But it’s too late. The editor won’t stick up for an idea that the presenter has so thoroughly murdered. There’s nothing to do but take the humiliation and grind my teeth.
If you are feeling downtrodden, try a prescription-free dip into the pages of the Vindication. It’s a resolve-firming, terrifying boost. Like sticking your head out of a car window into a hailstorm of indignation. It may sting, but your complaints will pale next to what she had to put up with. Sometimes she can’t contain herself, and adds an asterisk so she can blow off more steam at the bottom of the page (what nonsense! etc.) You will feel better for it.
Wollstonecraft herself has to stick with jobs she hates, and is no stranger to people pulling rank on her. As a governess to the richest family in Ireland, the Kingsboroughs, she attends one of their social gatherings. A guest engages with her, this lively, dark-eyed young woman with a dazzling mind and a knowing sense of humour. The aristocrat only finds out later, face turning ashen, that she was accidentally conversing with the staff. Wollstonecraft’s parting shot to these people is an unflattering cameo in her next book, as she goes on to become a celebrated author. Ha!
This is how Wollstonecraft is still so compelling: she defies categories, she constantly bounces back and reinvents herself. She keeps finding out new treasure to hunt. She’s always pushing the boundaries of gender and class. What she’s doing is what we now call human rights and social mobility. What drives Wollstonecraft onwards? In spite of all the raging, it is love. Love: her “ardent affection for the human race” and her passion for its improvement.
Wollstonecraft remains quite poor throughout her life, but still manages to set up a school, travel alone, publish reviews and books, and live in Paris during the Revolution. She keeps on going. On top of supporting her family, and regular career breaks caring for whoever was about to die or have a baby (or both, in the case of her first love and best friend Fanny). She just keeps on going. This entirely rocks my twenty-something world.
3. Wollstonecraft and Motherhood
The third and decisive phase of my Wollstonecraft love-in centres on what Virginia Woolf calls her “experiments in living”. Her unusual domestic arrangements include attempting a ménage à trois, her love for other women, having a baby out of wedlock, and even having the effrontery to call unannounced at the house of a man she rather liked, without a chaperone. These days our twenties are a series of mis
adventures in coexistence. Isn’t that what being young is for? Back then, such things get her into lots of trouble.
Of all Wollstonecraft’s life experiments, the one into motherhood is most moving. This is the one that sets me spiralling off on my mission. Some time in my thirties I read Virginia Woolf’s essay about Wollstonecraft, and the fascination floods back. “Mary’s life had been an experiment from the start, an attempt to make human conventions conform more closely to human needs.” Approaching the age at which Wollstonecraft died, I reckon I finally know what this means, this “experiments in living”: it’s discovering how best to share your life with other people.
Including small people. Motherhood happens to me at twenty-nine; four kids later I’m still catching up. It happens, as for many women, just as I am getting “power over myself”. Everything changes. My pre-dancer self, who enjoyed certainty and knew all injustices could be solved – where has she gone? Yes, it’s your basic mum-life crisis. The 1970s having-it-all heritage suddenly doesn’t fit. I begin to doubt feminism, and suffer from laundry-related rages. I feel unrepresented, guilty for letting the side down, and annoyed about feeling guilty.
I’m drawn back to Letters from Norway and the journey that Wollstonecraft makes, both on and behind its pages. I daydream about her Scandinavian treasure hunt, with her baby. The letters from the rocky and remote shores detailing people, food, nature and politics. Her moments of madness and high passion, interspersed with dry social statistics. All this with a baby in tow. The woman pulled off multitasking before the notion was invented. I return again to those heart-felt, funny and demanding letters, but this time I’m not on a Sublime thrill-seeker’s mission. This time I only want to know one thing: how the hell did she do it?
Having a baby doesn’t stop Wollstonecraft writing or cramp her style in the least. Of course she does it the modern way, packing in an extra decade of travel and work-related madness before getting knocked up. She’s thirty-four, living in violent revolutionary France and dating the baby’s father, a dodgy two-timing American. Career versus motherhood? Whatever. She simply scoops the baby up and takes it along on her Scandinavian adventure. She breast-feeds, which wasn’t fashionable at the time, and between writing books and trying to change the world she thinks a lot about children.
Despite her own appalling childhood (domestic violence and hours spent sitting in silent fear), Wollstonecraft becomes a tender and enthusiastic parent. She doesn’t limit the care to her own, either. She wants to change the way everyone brings up children, to create future “rational beings”. The first book that she writes is, after all, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.
Here am I, stuck in a self-regarding web of conflicting impulses, pitting motherhood against selfhood. And Wollstone-craft has it nailed long before mothers like me began carping about their diminishing horizons. I begin to think about her, and find her invading my rare private moments. Aghast, I read about her death. It’s the most bitter blow. A few years after her first baby, she gets pregnant again and dies, cruelly, unnecessarily, in childbirth. She’s only thirty-eight. Mary Wollstonecraft campaigns, writes and dies for motherhood. She achieves remarkable motherhood – and then it kills her. She’s the mother of all mothers.
The baby who goes to Scandinavia with her in Letters from Norway is not much older than my youngest child, Will. Suddenly, ping! The revelation lands. This is what to do. This is how to move beyond the thinking, and the talking avidly in pubs about Wollstonecraft, to actually doing something. Here’s the way to illustrate her. She took her baby on that notorious Scandinavian voyage? OK, then I’ll do it too. I will recreate that trip. Just like her, with my own baby and everything.
Chapter Two
Half a Million Small Things
After a short silence that took a long time coming, I casually tell my husband Justin about the plan. Just this small plan – that I’ve been, you know, planning. The plan is that I want to go off with baby Will and retrace the eighteenth-century Scandinavian adventures of Mary Wollstonecraft. And her baby. He laughs:
“It’s brilliant.”
I frown. “But won’t you miss me – I mean, how will everyone cope without me? It’ll be at least ten days, maybe even longer: what about all the laundry and packed lunches and homework and other stuff, you know – there’s some school trips coming up, and also Eva’s dance exam, and of course the girls will miss me so much. So you’ll probably need me here, won’t you. Won’t you?”
“No. We’ll be fine. Go for it.”
Damn. Now we’ve got to do it. Before I attempt to raise the notion with the kids, it brings itself up. A morning, like any other – shouting, spilling breakfast, shoes and book bags in a heap. The eight-year-old asks:
“Where’s daddy?”
“He’s away working.”
“Again?”
“Yes.”
“He’s always away!”
“Well, that’s not true. But his journalism does involve rather a lot of fabulous and exotic travel, now you mention it.”
“Yeah, and your job is always in the same place, isn’t it – ha-ha, mummy gets to go on the Northern Line. Why don’t mums travel as much as dads?”
“They do, of course – they do! Just I – eat your breakfast.”
Deep breath once all three girls are safely in school and I’m pushing the baby back home. And I start to wonder: who are the travelling mums? Even the richest ones I know don’t do it: just take off travelling. They do loads of other stuff, but not that. Don’t they want to? Is it all down to money? Is it that we can’t? Or we just don’t?
I head to the bookshelf. There she is. The very sight of the spine of the book reassures me. The book is now in my hands. Letters from Norway. It flops open at favourite points and mementoes fall out, faded scraps of previous readings. A postcard. A receipt. For a moment the world readjusts around me as I skim the pages, back and forth. I find a sense of balance. And a vague feeling of indebtedness. This book is our portal. I look at Will:
“They did it – and we can do it.” I wave the book at him. “This is our treasure hunt.” Will snores gently.
I don’t have an excuse not to go. And the more I think about it, the better it gets. We’ll follow Wollstonecraft, retracing her steps, spying into her personal life and celebrating her public achievements, as possibly the best woman who ever lived. I have an urge to tell the world about her adventures, and these passionate experiments in living. I am hoping to soak up some of her thoughts, to realize her, to get close to her. I’m basically a groupie.
But there’s a problem. How will I get any actual words written with a baby in tow? Will is nearly ten months old and a vigorous crawler. What if he falls into a pond while I’m contemplating the Sublime? Or eats a discarded cigarette as I’m marking a sacred footstep where Wollstonecraft trod? This is the reality of motherhood. If I never get this thing done, it will be because Will had a bad night, or wouldn’t eat and then got food all over both of us, or because he was struggling with a red face and a full nappy, and only I could make his life good (the best power of them all).
This is the thing. Countless days of women’s lives vanish into the haze of a new baby, exhausted toddler or anxious child. Sometimes there’s simply nothing left, no time left over, no separate sense of self. If I wasn’t so knackered, this would really get my dander up. It’s how mothers live: in the gaps between other people’s lives. Our essence is absorbed into theirs. But despite my grumbling, one thing is clear: an absorbed life is very much worth living. Indeed, this makes it better than it was. Somehow we’re not diminished: life is brighter, louder and altogether better.
But what about that tiredness, the amazing and famous tiredness of parenthood, so boring for everyone else and yet so fundamentally defining when it’s happening to you? Has anyone ever been this tired? Is it possible to die of tiredness? Lack of sleep and constant vigilance over a baby starting to crawl can combine to vanquish pretty much anything an adult human might attempt.
He’s so small, but the magnetic force of him radiates hugely in my life. I think about the dimples in his arms and sense the win-win: if I never get this thing done, I will still have him.
The trip is now happening. I’ve told everyone and spent many stolen hours setting it up, so it must. Luckily my day job at the World Service is freelance these days, and therefore flexible. Families, however, don’t share this quality, and I have to keep finding new hiding places to get stuff done. We’re due to set off in two weeks. My lists of instructions, advice, emergency numbers and school contacts are getting borderline freaky. Both Justin and Nori, our part-time nanny, repeatedly assure me that everyone will somehow cope.
While I cavort with baby Will, who is masquerading as Wollstonecraft’s baby Frances, we leave behind Will’s three sisters, Eva, Zola and Elsa, and their increasingly complicated social lives. The travel plans are squeezed around them: we’ll be leaving after Elsa’s assembly, and getting back just before Eva’s birthday. I point this out loudly and often, to make myself seem less selfish. No one is remotely bothered.
We hit an early logistics problem. In the interests of authenticity we must approach Norway from the sea, as Wollstone-craft did. But there are no longer any ferries to Norway from the UK. So Will and I must fly into neighbouring Sweden, then catch a ferry that’s 165 kilometres away. Between the plane landing and the ferry setting sail we have roughly six hours. But there’s no direct connection, and the combination of buses and trains adds up to over five hours.