In Western Europe during the late 18th century, single
women had little protection under the law and married
women lost their legal identity. Women couldn’t retain a
lawyer, sign a contract, inherit property, vote, or have rights
over their children.
As Oxford law professor William Blackstone noted in his
influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (1758):
The husband and wife are one person in law, that is, the very
being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during
the marriage or at least is incorporated and consolidated into
that of the husband: under whose wing, protection and cover,
she performs everything.
Then along came passionate, bold Mary Wollstonecraft
who caused a sensation by writing A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (1792). She declared that both women
and men were human beings endowed with inalienable
rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She called
for women to become educated. She insisted women should
be free to enter business, pursue professional careers
and vote if they wished. “I speak of the improvement
and emancipation of the whole sex,” she declared. “Let
woman share the rights, and she will
emulate(surpass/match) the virtues of man for she must
grow more perfect when emancipated(free from political
and legal restriction)”
Wollstonecraft inspired people because she spoke from the
heart. Although she was reasonably well-read, she drew
more from her own tumultuous experience. “There is
certainly an original defect in my mind,” she confessed, “for
the cruelest experience will not eradicate the foolish
tendency I have to cherish, and expect to meet with,
romantic tenderness.”
She dared do what no other woman had done, namely pursue
a career as a full-time professional writer on serious subjects
without an aristocratic sponsor. “I am then going to be the
first of a new genus,” she reflected. It was a harsh struggle
because women were traditionally cherished for their
domestic service, not their minds. Wollstonecraft
developed her skills on a few earnings. She dressed plainly.
She seldom ate meat. When she had wine, it was in a teacup,
because she couldn’t afford a wine glass.
Contemporaries noted Wollstonecraft’s provocative presence
—thin, medium height, brown hair, haunting brown eyes, and
a soft voice. “Mary was, without being a dazzling beauty, ...
of a charming grace,” recalled a German admirer. “Her face,
so full of expression, presented a style of beauty beyond that
of merely regular features. There was enchantment in her
glance, her voice, and her movements.”
Mary Wollstonecraft’s father Edward was a farmer and her
mother was a housemaker. She was the second oldest
daughter in her family. The family moved seven times in ten
years as their finances deteriorated. Edward drank heavily,
and Mary often had to protect her mother from his violent
outbursts. She had rocky relations with her siblings.
Mary’s formal schooling was limited, but one of her friends
in Hoxton, outside London, had a respectable library, and
Mary spent considerable time exploring it. Through these
friends, she met Fanny Blood, two years older and skilled at
sewing, drawing, watercolors, and the piano. She inspired
Mary to take the initiative in cultivating her mind.
Spurred by family financial problems, Mary resolved to
somehow make her own way. She pursued the usual
opportunities open to smart but poor young women. At
19, she got a job as live-in helper for a wealthy widow who
proved to be a difficult taskmaster.
Young Adulthood
Three years later, in 1781, Mary tried and failed to
establish a school at Islington, North London. Then Mary,
Fanny, and Mary’s sisters Eliza and Everina started a school
nearby at Newington Green. After initial success, that, too,
failed. She then worked as a governess for an Irish family
and saw firsthand the idleness of landed aristocrats. These
discouraging experiences were compounded by the death of
Fanny Blood from tuberculosis. After Mary’s mother died not
her oldest brother, but she took primary responsibility for
taking care of her violent father.
Meanwhile, through her Newington school experience, she
met many local protestors whose religious beliefs put them
outside the tax-supported Anglican Church. Among these
Dissenters was minister and moral philosopher Richard Price,
who was in touch with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,
Marquis de Condorcet, and other radical thinkers of the day.
Wollstonecraft also met scientist Joseph Priestley,
schoolteacher John Hewlett, and Sarah Burgh, widow of
radical author James Burgh. Although Wollstonecraft retained
her faith in the Anglican Church, she stood out as a maverick
and became good friends with these people.
Dissenters promoted reform of Britain’s cozy political system.
The House of Lords consisted of aristocrats who
inherited their positions. The House of Commons was
chosen by the very few males who were enfranchised
just 15,000, about one-half percent of adult males
determined the outcome of an election. The Test and
Corporation Acts disenfranchised religious Dissenters.
Moreover, no town had gained the right to representation
since 1678, which meant that dynamos of the Industrial
Revolution like Birmingham and Manchester were excluded.
The Influence of Joseph Johnson
Hewlett encouraged Wollstonecraft to write a pamphlet
on education and submit it to Joseph Johnson, the radical
publisher and bookseller with a shop at St. Paul’s Churchyard.
He was known as a visionary entrepreneur who backed a
number of unknowns including the poet-printmaker William
Blake. Johnson published works by Joseph Priestley and poets
William Cowper and William Wordsworth, too. He distributed
materials for Unitarians.
Hewlett’s suggestion turned out to be a lifeline because, as
Wollstonecraft biographer Claire Tomalin explained,
Mary was homeless again, without a job or a reference; she
had nothing to live on, and she was in debt to several people.
She had no marriage prospects. She was 28, with a face that
looked as though it had settled permanently into lines of
severity and depression around the fierce eyes. Her most
remarkable trait was still that she had refused to learn the
techniques whereby women in her situation usually
attempted to make life tolerable for themselves: flattery,
docility, resignation to the will of man, or God, or their social
superiors, or all three.
Johnson told Wollstonecraft that she had talent and could
succeed if she worked hard. He published her pamphlet in
1786 as Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; with
Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important
Duties of Life. Sales were negligible, but the work launched
Wollstonecraft’s literary career. She sent her author’s fee to
the impoverished Blood family and redoubled her efforts. “I
must exert my understanding to procure an independence
and render myself useful,” she wrote. “To make the task
easier, I ought to store my mind with knowledge—The seed
time is passing away.”
By 1788, Johnson offered her steady work. She translated
books from French and German into English. She served as
an assistant editor and writer for his new journal, The
Analytical Review. She contributed to it until her death,
perhaps as many as 200 articles on fiction, education,
sermons, travelogues, and children’s books.
Johnson was a good man. He helped Wollstonecraft find
lodgings. He advanced her money when needed. He dealt
with her creditors. He helped her cope with her father’s
chaotic situation. He calmed her bouts of depression. “You
are my only friend,” she confided, “the only person I am
intimate with—I never had a father or a brother—you have
been both to me. ...”
Wollstonecraft met more radicals who visited Johnson,
including William Blake, Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, and
Johnson’s publishing partner, Thomas Christie. On one
occasion, she met philosopher William Godwin and Thomas
Paine, the Englishman who helped inspire the American
Revolution by writing Common Sense. Wollstonecraft
dominated the conversation. “I heard her very frequently,”
Godwin recalled, “when I wished to hear Paine.”
The French Revolution
The outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789 triggered
explosive controversy. In November, Richard Price gave a
talk before the Society for Commemorating the Glorious
Revolution of 1688, defending the right of French
people to rebel and suggesting that English people
should be able to choose their rulers challenging the
hereditary monarchy. This alarmed Edmund Burke, a Member
of Parliament previously known for having defended the
American Revolution. John Burke wrote Reflections on the
Revolution in France (November 1790), a rhetorically brilliant
attack on natural rights and a defense of monarchy and
aristocracy.
Burke’s ideas, as well as his swipes at Price, made
Wollstonecraft angry. Drawing on the ideas of John Locke and
Price, she rushed into print with A Vindication of the
Rights of Men, among the earliest of some 30 replies to
Burke. Although this polemic was repetitious and
disorganized, and Wollstonecraft overdid her attacks on
Burke as vain, unprincipled, and insensitive. She had an
impact. She faulted Burke for being blind to poverty: “Misery,
to reach your heart, I perceived, must have its cap and
bells. ...”
She denounced injustices of the British constitution
which evolved during the “dark days of ignorance, when
the minds of men were shackled by the grossest
prejudices and most immoral superstition.”
She singled out the aristocratic practice of passing
family wealth to the eldest son: The only security of
property that nature authorizes and reason sanctions is, the
right a man has to enjoy the acquisitions which his talents
and industry have acquired and to bequeath them to whom
he chooses.
She lashed out at arbitrary government power: The real
definition of English liberty, but softly it is only the property
of the rich that is secure, the man who lives by the sweat of
his brow has no asylum from oppression. The strong man
may enter when the castle of the poor sacred and the base
informer stole him from the family that depended on his
industry for subsistence. I cannot avoid expressing my
surprise that when you recommended our form of
government as a model, you did not caution the French
against the arbitrary custom of pressing men for the sea
service.
Wollstonecraft’s work and everyone else’s for that matter,
was later dwarfed by Thomas Paine’s far more powerful reply
to Burke’s The Rights of Man but she established herself as
an author to reckon with.
A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman
She had generally supposed that when revolutionaries spoke
of “man,” they were using shorthand for all humanity. The
Bishop of Autun advocated government schools that
would end at eighth grade for girls but continue on for
boys. This made clear to Wollstonecraft that despite all the
talk about equal rights, the French Revolution wasn’t
intended to help women much. She began planning her
most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
She wrote for more than three months and was finished on
January 3, 1792. Johnson published it in three volumes.
She despised the government class. “Taxes on the very
necessaries of life,” she wrote, “enable an endless tribe of
idle princes and princesses to pass with stupid pomp before a
gaping crowd, who almost worship the very parade which
costs them so dear.”
She specifically cited laws that make an absurd unit of
a man and his wife; and then, by the easy transition of
only considering him as responsible, she is reduced to a
mere secret how can a being be generous who has nothing of
its own? or virtuous who is not free?(women)
Wollstonecraft issued an early call for women’s suffrage:
“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.”
Wollstonecraft attacked those like collectivists,
Rousseau who wanted to keep women down. He had written
that the education of the women should always be relative to
the men. He wrote that they shall please, to be useful to us,
to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when
young, and take care of us when grown up, to advise, to
console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable; these are
the duties of women at all times, and what they should be
taught in their infancy. Rousseau treated women like
material.
Wollstonecraft believed education could be the
salvation of women:
The exercise of their understanding is necessary, there is no
other foundation for independence of character; I mean
explicitly to say that they must bow only to the authority of
reason instead of being modest slaves of opinion.
She insisted women should be taught serious subjects
like reading, writing, arithmetic, botany, natural history, and
moral philosophy. She recommended vigorous physical
exercise to help stimulate the mind.
To be sure, she had a naive faith that the same governments
which restricted women could inexplicably be trusted to run
schools uplifting women. The 20th-century government
schools have been catastrophes for women as well as men,
graduating large numbers at high cost without the most
fundamental skills.
Wollstonecraft called for eliminating obstacles to the
advancement of women. “Liberty is the mother of virtue
and if women be, by their very constitution treated as slaves,
and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of
freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be
reckoned beautiful flaws of nature.”
She envisioned a future when women could pursue
virtually any career opportunities:
Though I consider that women in the common walks of life
are called to fulfill the duties of wives and mothers, by
religion and reason, I cannot help lamenting that women of a
superior cast have not a road open by which they can pursue
more extensive plans of usefulness and independence.
With A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft
emerged in a class by herself. She went beyond her
contemporary Catherine Macaulay who had written
passionately about educating women. Wollstonecraft was
opposed by “Bluestockings” like Hannah More, Elizabeth
Montagu, and Hester Chapone who had fared well by making
the most of the subordinate position of women. A succession
of women novelists—Fanny Burney, Clara Reeve, Charlotte
Smith, and Elizabeth Inchbald, for instance—had portrayed
women who achieved heroic moral stature, but they didn’t
always celebrate women with brains.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman sold out within a year,
and Johnson issued a second edition. An American edition
and translations into French and German followed.
Wollstonecraft crossed the English Channel so she
could see the French Revolution for herself. She was
welcomed by ex-patriots such as the American patriot Joel
Barlow, English poet Helen Maria Williams, and Thomas
Paine. She sided with liberal Girondists who, including
Marquis de Condorcet, favored a constitutionally limited
government and equal rights for women. But she was
horrified at how fast the totalitarian(authoritarian) Jacobins
seized power and launched the Reign of Terror.
Wollstonecraft dreamed that someday men and women
would nurture each other as equals. “The man who can be
contented to live with a pretty, useful companion, without a
mind, has lost in voluptuous gratifications a taste for more
refined enjoyments,” she wrote, “he has never felt the calm
satisfaction that refreshes the parched heart like the silent
dew of heaven of being beloved by one who could
understand him.”
Alas, she had an agonizing time applying these ideas to her
own life. She became infatuated with the eccentric genius
Henry Fuseli, but he was married and brushed her off after
an extended flirtation. While still in France, she fell in love
with an American adventurer named Gilbert Imlay, who was
always looking for a scheme to strike it rich. They had a
daughter, Fanny, but he lost interest in both of them and
walked out. Wollstonecraft attempted suicide twice. After the
second incident, when she was being dragged out of the
Thames, she renewed her resolve:
It appears to me impossible that I shall cease to exist, or that
this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow,
should only be organized dust. Surely something resides in
this heart that is not perishable and life is more than a
dream.
While recovering from despair over Imlay, she took a three-
month break with Fanny in Scandinavia and produced one of
her most poignant works, Letters Written During a Short
Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The letters
were addressed to the unnamed American father of her child.
They provide a travelogue laced with commentary on politics,
philosophy, and her personal life.
After witnessing the French Terror, she tempered her hopes
for social change:
An ardent affection for the human race makes enthusiastic
characters eager to produce alterations in laws and
governments prematurely. To render them useful and
permanent, they must be the growth of each particular soil,
and the gradual fruit of the ripening understanding of the
nation, matured by time, not forced by an unnatural
fermentation.
Throughout the book, Wollstonecraft struggled to cope with
her grief about Imlay, and she conveyed an immediacy and
tenderness that touches the heart. “If ever there was a book
calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears
to me to be the book,” remarked William Godwin.
Relationship with William Godwin
Wollstonecraft decided to pursue her acquaintance with
Godwin, calling on him April 14, 1796. He had a large head,
deep-set eyes, and a thin voice. “He seems to have had
some charm which his enemies could not detect or his
friends define, but which had a real influence on those who
attained his close friendship,” reported Godwin biographer
George Woodcock.
Wollstonecraft and William Goldwin had started a
school, but their ideas were too radical, and the effort failed.
His literary career had begun with a dull political biography, a
book of sermons and some potboiler novels. Then London
publisher George Robinson offered to pay Godwin enough of
an advance that he could work out his philosophy. The result
was Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), describing his
vision of a harmonious society without laws or war. The book
established him as England’s foremost radical thinker.
Godwin courageously spoke out against the British
government’s campaign to suppress the Corresponding
Societies which were debating clubs interested in
revolutionary ideas. Godwin wrote public letters supporting
defendants. He charged that the government’s campaign
was illegal since none of the defendants had committed
revolutionary acts of violence. These writings won
widespread sympathy for the defendants, and further
prosecution was abandoned.
At the time Wollstonecraft called, Godwin was a 42-year-old
bachelor courting Amelia Alderson, a doctor’s daughter. But
he was intrigued with Wollstonecraft, despite his initial
impression that she talked too much. He invited her to a
dinner party the following week. Included were James
Mackintosh and Dr. Samuel Parr, both of whom had written
rebuttals to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.
After Alderson rejected Godwin, he became more responsive
to Wollstonecraft, and her passion overwhelmed him. “It was
friendship melting into love,” he recalled. But Wollstonecraft
was haunted by fear of another betrayal. Godwin reassured
her that he longed for a relationship between equals. Her
passion surged again. “It is a sublime tranquility,” she wrote
him, “I have felt it in your arms.” By December, she was
pregnant. Both Wollstonecraft and Godwin had criticized
marriage as a vehicle for exploitation, but they tied the knot
on March 29, 1797. She rejoiced that she had found true love
at last.
She went into labor during the early morning of Wednesday,
August 30, 1797. She was attended by one Mrs. Blenkinsop,
an experienced midwife. After 11 o’clock that night, a
daughter was born—Mary, who grew up to be Mary Shelley,
author of Frankenstein. For a while, it appeared things were
fine, but three hours later, Mrs. Blenkinsop notified Godwin
that the placenta still hadn’t come out of the womb. The
longer the placenta remained, the greater the risk of
infection. Godwin called a Dr. Poignand who succeeded in
removing much of the placenta. Wollstonecraft reported that
the procedure was the most excruciatingly painful experience
of her life.
That Sunday, she began suffering chills, an ominous sign of
infection. Doctors offered wine to help ease the pain, and
tried other measures to stimulate her body to eject the
remains of the placenta. Wollstonecraft continued to decline.
She died Sunday morning, September 10, 1797. Godwin was
so overcome that he didn’t attend the funeral, held at St.
Pancras church where they had been married just five
months before. She was buried in the churchyard.
Posthumous Influence
Soon afterwards, ever-loyal publisher Joseph Johnson issued
Godwin’s edition of the Posthumous Works of the Author of a
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, together with Godwin’s
candid memoir about her. Although Godwin believed telling
all would boost her reputation, it unleashed a firestorm of
controversy, and her unsettled personal life became an easy
excuse to belittle her ideas.
But as author Virginia Woolf remarked about Wollstonecraft
decades later, “we hear her voice and trace her influence
even now among the living.” American crusaders for equal
rights like Margaret Fuller, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton were all inspired by A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman.
In recent years, the women’s movement has become linked
with preferential treatment and hatred of men. Today,
happily, more people are rediscovering Mary Wollstonecraft
who established the individualist roots of equal rights. She
took responsibility for her life. She educated herself. She
showed how a woman can succeed with her wits. She urged
everyone to achieve his or her human potential. She spoke
out for vital economic liberties. She demanded justice. She
championed relationships based on mutual respect and love.
