A vindication of the rights of woman: conformity and rebellion in Wollstonecraft's era

¶ … Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Mary Wollstonecraft's book a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was written as a response to the proposed state-supported system of public education that would only educate girls to be housewives, a proposal made by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, the French minister of education after the French revolution (Mellor 367). The passion with which Wollstonecraft wrote a Vindication of the Rights of Woman was derived from her personal experience of inequality as a young woman in a patriarchal society and also by the injustice she experienced in her own family growing up, an injustice experienced primarily because of her gender given that she was raised in a home where her older brother, Ned (who by law would inherit all the family wealth), was favored by their mother, leaving Mary and the rest of her siblings to compete for any affection from their mother. As a result of the English law that forbade women to own their own property (instead females were considered the property of their father's and later of their spouses), Mary was forced to take on employment that involved teaching, being a governess, and working as a "playing companion" to demanding old women, as they were the only suitable jobs for a woman of no means. These types of jobs were traditionally held by women and are an example of the conformity by which Mary Wollstonecraft was expected to live her life. It could be said that the passion with which she wrote her book was fostered by her experiences with conformity.

As an adult, Mary Wollstonecraft lived a life that very often stood outside the realm of conformity, and one could say she lived a revolutionary life, or at the very least flirted with rebellion, blurring the line between her public life and her private reality. She, like many others of her time, found that a life of conformity would only lead to a life of oppression, but even in her rebellion, she was never quite free: "It is a melancholy truth; yet such is the blessed effect of civilization. The most respectable women are the most oppressed" (Johnson 287).

It is not likely that Mary set out to change the world, but she did leave an indelible mark through her writing, most especially a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The ideas of and contrasts between conformity and rebellion are central to the discussion in a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, so an exploration of the various sections of this work shows how they reflect both principles while showing how they coexist within the work and within Mary Wollstonecraft's life. Mary Wollstonecraft is outspoken in her argument for the rights of women and for national education, and as part of this awareness, she shows throughout her argument that she is mindful of her position as a woman in a patriarchal society; she is also cunning (skillful) in her approach when asserting her opinions. Her views are rebellious and go against the laws and social practices of her community. However, she conforms to some basic norms in the assertion of her beliefs in order to assure that her thoughts will have some chance of being heard: "Let it not be concluded that I wish to invert the order of things; I have already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue" (Johnson 135). She here concedes that men are stronger, then moves to her message that women should "endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness" (Johnson 111).

Mary Wollstonecraft also talks a great deal about marriage and virtue in Vindication, which seems a contradiction to her private life. She writes in Vindication, "To satisfy this genus of men, women are made systematically voluptuous, and though they may not all carry their libertinism to the same height, yet this heartless intercourse with the sex, which they allow themselves, depraves both sexes" (Johnson 274). It is widely known that Mary Wollstonecraft carried on affairs and consequently had a baby out of wedlock with Gilbert Imlay. Publicly, she condemns the giving into lust, while privately, she cannot deny her own feelings. She lived in the Romantic Era and had a considerable influence on both early feminist thinking and on political thought in her time and after. She was embroiled in a number of political arguments in her day and would be cited by others in later decades. She certainly had a major influence on her daughter, Mary W. Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, and would be cited by Virginia Woolf more than a century later for her importance to feminist thinking and the ongoing battle for women's rights.

The role of women in society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries presented women in a secondary position in society at a time when they were becoming more aware of that fact. The eighteenth century was a period in which a new kind of political radicalism emerged with the American Revolution and the French Revolution. In America, which served as a model for the French Revolution to a degree, certain principles developed in the seventeenth century were put in place. It had been assumed in the seventeenth century that societies could be made by human beings and that human beings could exert control over the natural world in their own interests, and many thinkers decided that progress was natural and inherent in human society once the restrictive elements of aristocratic rule and culture were swept away:

Politically this took the form of demanding participation in government. The new reformers, however, like the puritans, tended to set limits to the scope of participation. Many of them still felt that there must be certain criteria for democratic rule, and retained qualifications of property, class and sex. (Rowbotham 19)

As men in France began to ally themselves with radical movements, women as well tried to include themselves within the scope of radical argument:

Male radicals, influenced by the idea of men controlling nature and society by science and reason, did not necessarily see that this had implications for women. They tended to assume that a man would reason for his woman and children, just as the puritans had assumed that democracy would only involve heads of households who owned property. (Rowbotham 20)

It was in the context of the French Revolution that Mary Wollstonecraft produced her work Vindication of the Rights of Woman and extended ideas about the need for all human beings to decide their fate to women. She called for women to be able to decide their own fate based on what was in their interests rather than depending on men. She saw some relationship between the oppression of women and existing property relations. She saw that in society, men had more scope for freedom than women (Rowbotham 20-21).

Both the French Revolution and Mary Wollstonecraft were influenced y the political and philosophical writings of Locke, Rousseu, and Hume. Rousseau does not see the state of nature as a state of grace and instead sees men as seeking their own advantage over others through coercion and force. However, there is a social unit in the state of nature that serves as the model for society, and that social unit is the family. He writes in Book I, Chapter II: "The most ancient of all societies, and the only natural one, is that of the family" (Rousseau 4). Even the family unit, though, is based on underlying motives and forces, since "children remain bound to their father only so long as tehy need him for their own self-preservation" (Rousseau 4). For Rousseau, self-preservation is the first and the most important function of the human being, a function he calls the first law of human nature.

This law is carried out in a world in which each individual has complete independence and sovereignty over himself. This sovereignty in the state of nature is inalienable, but it can be altered so that it becomes sovereignty for the collective mass in society rather than the individual and weaker sovereignty in presocial life. The social contract is the agreement whereby individuals come together to form a society and place their collective, corporate sovereignty in one man or group of men who then become the sovereign as the servant or the political instrument of the people. Wollstonecraft adopted much of this schema, including the idea of the family as a central unit.

The place of women in the eighteenth century was thus secondary to males and was dependent on the male, whether it was the father, a brother, or a husband. This sense of dependence continued into the nineteenth century and was indeed seen as the rightful place of women in society. These attitudes were reflected in opera as in other arts. Ross (1988) notes the development of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century and indicates that it was essentially a masculine phenomenon:

Romantic poetizing is not just what women cannot do because they are not expected to; it is also what some men do in order to reconfirm their capacity to influence the world in ways socio-historically determined as masculine. The categories of gender, both in their lives and in their work, help the Romantics establish rites of passage toward poetic identity and toward masculine empowerment. Even when the women themselves are writers, they become anchors for the male poets' own pursuit for masculine self-possession. (Ross, 1988, 29)

Mary Wollstonecraft was as famous as a writer in her day as her daughter. Both mother and daughter were important proponents of the rights of women both in their writings and in the way they lived and served as role models for other women of their time. Much of their work as writers and political thinkers developed from and represented the spirit of the Romantic era in which they lived. Wollstonecraft said she sought justice for women. Specifically, such justice would be found when women were educated as were men and when women could use their education for more than gracing the home. Wollstonecraft saw women and men as equal, and yet she was fully aware that fiction reflected the prejudices of society and showed that society did not see men and women as equal:

For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same; yet the fanciful female character, so prettily drawn by poets and novelists, demanding the sacrifice of truth and sincerity, virtue becomes a relative idea, having no other foundation than utility, and of that utility men pretend arbitrarily to judge, shaping it to their own convenience. (Wollstonecraft 51)

The Romantic age was bringing about a change in the way women were depicted in literature, and Mary Wollstonecraft was both reacting to and part of this change. Women had been treated harshly in literature prior to this period, but various factors at the time were bringing about a change.

Wollstonecraft's essential themes in Vindication of the Rights of Woman are directed toward removing the stigma from women and recognizing that women and men are not as different as they have been made out to be. The roles women are given in society are artificial and ignore the real values embodied in women:

have already inveighed against the custom of confining girls to their needle, and shutting them out from all political and civil employments; for by thus narrowing their minds they are rendered unfit to fulfill the peculiar duties which nature has assigned them. (Wollstonecraft 169)

Wollstonecraft pleads for the broader education of women in order to allow them to develop their faculties and abilities. Marriage is seen throughout this book as an institution which prevents women from developing in any other way than domestic, and this begins prior to marriage with the way women are trained and the reasons for that training: "if they [women] be moral beings, let them have a chance to become intelligent; and let love to man be only a part of that glowing lame of universal love, which, after encircling humanity, mounts in grateful incense to God" (Wollstonecraft 67-68). Wollstonecraft is only using society's own terminology and views in developing her argument here, for women are spoken of as moral beings, as the conscience of society, and yet they are treated as other than moral beings by being refused a full education. Wollstonecraft does not denigrate domestic activities and spends some time noting how difficult they are and what faculties they require to be done right. One of the most important tasks left to women is the raising of children, and yet society does not see that women need a developed intelligence to accomplish this task properly: "The management of the temper, the first, and most important branch of education, requires the sober steady eye of reason..." (Wollstonecraft 68).

Wollstonecraft calls for a new educational system, one which she details at length. One of its notable elements is that boys and girls would study together rather than in a gender-segregated setting. One of the consequences of a full education for both men and women as seen by Wollstonecraft would be for relationships to be based more on equality and a real connection between people. This would also be a boon to both sexes, pushing them to a fuller and more temperate life:

The want of natural affection, in many women, who are drawn from their duty by the admiration of men, and the ignorance of others, render the infancy of man a much more perilous state than that of brutes; yet men are unwilling to place women in situations proper to enable them to acquire sufficient understanding to know how even to nurse their babies. (Wollstonecraft 177)

Wollstonecraft's book on women's rights does not make reference to those who had gone before and who had called for greater rights for women, and most of these earlier writers may have been unknown to Wollstonecraft. The book is thus not an outgrowth of previous social or philosophical thought except to the degree that it arose within the wide movement for social change taking place in Europe and the United States:

Broadening that movement to include a concern for women was Mary's unique contribution, and she made it, not so much because of what she had read or the thinkers she had listened to and argued with, but from her own personal experience and her reflections on those experiences (Flexner 149).

Her concern was not with the economic exploitation of women, though she would later recognize it, but she was concerned with middle-class women and the ladies of the "gentry" because she believed that these classes set the tone for society as a whole:

She is intent on removing the stigma attaching to woman -- any and all woman -- as creatures of instinct and feeling, devoid of intellectual powers or the capacity for intellectual growth (Flexner 149).

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.(Tomalin 105)

The Romantic age was bringing about a change in the way women were depicted in literature, and Mary Wollstonecraft was both reacting to and part of this change. Women had been treated harshly in literature prior to this period, but various factors at the time were bringing about a change. One was the abundance of female novelists like Fanny Burney, Charlotte Smith, Clara Reeve, and Elizabeth Inchbald, all of whom presented heroines of moral if not always intellectual stature. Another factor was the increase in humanitarian and enlightened sentiment concerning the poor, the weak, and the despised, categories that all included women. Another factor was the existence of the Bluestockings, a group of women who gained some position in a male world by combining piety, seriousness, and learning. They were not radical in what they wanted for women, but their stature helped form a more tolerant climate of opinion regarding women (Ferguson and Todd 60-61).

Just twenty years old, she writes here as a woman to other women, using the pronoun "we," her emotional involvement palpable even as the formalities of her chosen diction work to displace any overt show of feeling... (Alexander 36)

Her language has a deliberate biblical undertone that is all part of her attempt to restore to women the human right of self-respect. Women resort to artifice in order to place the world, though such assumed feelings are awkward when compared to real feelings. She pleads for women to be seen as they really are. She says that the body hides the mind, yet just as proper clothing should in all suitable modesty draw attention to the self, so the bodily self so long distorted by the claims of vanity should purify itself by incarnating mind. Hence body, though cover for the mind, becomes alive with the inwardness it holds. (Alexander 37)

The roles for women were clearly differentiated in terms of the private and the public sphere, with class distinctions involved in both spheres and with women of a certain class expected to adhere more closely to this division, with women having a certain place in the domestic sphere, and a much more diminished place in the public sphere.

Chapter Two: Private vs. Public

Much of Mary Wollstonecraft's struggle with conformity and rebellion derived from the expectations and realizations of the public vs. The private sphere. This is an issue that faces us today as well, though the way we differentiate between the two spheres and the expectations we have for each are very different from Wollstonecraft's time. Her public persona was defined by her public voice, which often times conflicted with her private reality. What constituted the public and the private sphere? In his book the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Jurgen Habermas defines the public sphere as being "conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public" (Habermas 27).

According to Habermas, the "private" sphere was "a distinguishable entity in contrast to the public as each family's individual economy had become the center of its existence" (Habermas 19). In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft illustrates the way the private sphere becomes even smaller for women because they are denied "all political privileges, and not allowed... A civil existence," so that a woman's attention is "naturally drawn from the interest of the whole community to that of the minute parts... The mighty business of female life is to please, and [are] restrained from entering into more important concerns by political and civil oppression" (Wollstonecraft 195). In other words, women cannot, theoretically, affect the same kind of influence on the "public" sphere as men, meaning that women do not speak with the same authority as men as their "sphere" remains private, and even within the private sphere, their influence and authority are limited.

In the public sphere, Habermas explains that the public comes together to "debate over general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor" (Habermas 27).

In a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft addresses one of the many the issues of public vs. private when she says: "The grand source of female folly and vice has ever appeared to me to arise from narrowness of mind; and the very constitution of civil governments has put almost insurmountable obstacles in the way to prevent the cultivation of the female understanding" (Wollstonecraft 54). Here she makes reference to the way in which society has in place "obstacles" (barriers) for women to gain an equal footing on the intellectual and the practical concerns of the time, shutting them out of the public sphere. In Vindications, Mary Wollstonecraft expresses very strongly her belief that women are "naturally weakened or degraded by a concurrence of circumstance" (Wollstonecraft 72). It was those "circumstances" that perpetuated the "firmly rooted" prejudices against women in any sphere and moved Mary Wollstonecraft to bring into the forefront the struggle of every woman:

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners, time to restore to them their lost dignity, and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world" (Wollstonecraft 158). This can be seen as a suggestion of the intersection of the public and the private sphere as well as the ongoing struggle between conformity and rebellion.

According to Habermas, coffee houses became popular places to meet; it was in the coffee houses that "intellectuals met with the aristocracy" (Habermas 33) and literature had to "legitimate itself." Habermas said the conversations between the "intellectuals" first centered around literature and then moved into economic and political debates, reflecting the "landed and moneyed interests" of the aristocratic society and the bourgeoisie intellectuals. The coffee houses, according to Habermas, made "access to the relevant circles less formal and easier; it embraced the wider strata of the middle class, including craftsmen and shopkeepers" (Habermas 33). Furthermore, Habermas stated that only men were admitted to the "coffee-house society" and that women, "abandoned every evening, waged a vigorous but vain struggle against the new institution" (Habermas 33). This point is argued against by Ann Mellor in Mothers of a Nation when she says that Habermas's account of the "public sphere" is historically incorrect (Mellor 2). She says that women "participated fully in the public sphere as Habermas defined it" (Mellor 2).

However, Mellor does allow that women's participation in the public sphere was contested: "Numerous conduct books and other forms of public discourse" from sermons to literary texts to public debates "urged women to remain silent, to stay at home, to devote themselves exclusively to the activities of raising children and pleasing their husbands" (Mellor 6). This sentiment confirms women's struggle between the public and private sphere, between conformity and rebellion. Mellor goes on to say that "these discursive productions existed in open dialogue with women's published arguments which vigorously contested, qualified, or even on occasion endorsed them" (Mellor 6). The issue of whether women were allowed in coffee houses contributes (supports, illustrates) to the idea of a struggle between conformity and rebellion. In either case, Mary Wollstonecraft had to feel the challenge of being an intellectual woman living in a time when women were not accepted into the public sphere as men were and had little influence in the private sphere. As a woman, Mary Wollstonecraft pushed the acceptable boundaries of social expectations -- that is, and she quotes Rousseau from Emile, that a woman "should never feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man" (Wollstonecraft 134). According to Wollstonecraft, this was the familiar sentiment of the time and was only compounded by the lack of formal education made available to women, leaving women no avenue for escape.

Wollstonecraft's citation of Rousseau is interesting given the differences she would show in her view of the education of woman as contrasted with his. Rousseau shows a particular view of women in his novel Emile,

To be a woman means to be coquettish, but her coquetry changes its form and object according to her views. Let us regulate her views according to those of nature, and woman will have the education that suits her. (Rousseau 364)

Rousseau thus shows his sense of the relationship between nature and convention and an aspect of his approach to education. The education of the male is the primary subject of Emile, but Rousseau also addresses the issue of the education of women. He makes a distinction between men and women first on the basis of sex and then on the basis of behavior deriving from sexual differences, and both are attributed to the rule of nature. Rousseau's views of the natural role of woman is based on assumptions and beliefs about male and female behavior, and the basic distinction is between males who are aggressive and powerful and women who are submissive and pleasing to men. This is not only a male point-of-view but a view derived from the social order of the time. Given this view of women, Rousseau's belief that women should have an education that suits her role rather than one that suits the male role follows logically, though such a system has the aura of a self-fulfilling prophecy by training women for the role society believes is theirs by nature.

Rousseau had written on education before. This book is about an imaginary pupil, Emile, who is educated solely by his tutor in what might be called a scientifically conditioned environment. Rousseau said it would be absurd to try to duplicate this setting, for it is only a device used in the book to facilitate the demonstration of the author's principles. The book also embodies the essence of Rousseau's view of human nature and the relationship of the human being to the world in which he or she lives, and this will also be important in how Rousseau's political thought develops. In the beginning of Emile, Rousseau states that everything is good as it comes from the hands of Nature, but he also seems to contradict himself later in the book. He says several times that those with a primitive innocence can be guided a long way and that this is the original character of all human beings, but he also says that there are some with violent natures whose ferocity develops at an early age. The latter should have their education speeded up lest we have to chain them up for our own protection. Education for Rousseau means inculcation in civilization and a moral training including the ability to control the passions. The purpose of education for most is to preserve the goodness that comes from Nature. When he refers to Nature and to a natural education in this context, Rousseau means an education that interferes as little as possible with the natural development of the individual in both physical and psychological terms. Shaping the course of an individual's life begins by bringing out natural abilities and sentiments in adolescence through education, and a vital element of this learning is to come to understand that one belongs to a natural order including the rest of humanity:

At sixteen the adolescent knows what it is to suffer, for he has himself suffered. But he hardly knows that other beings suffer too... But when the first development of his senses lights the fire of imagination, he begins to feel himself in his fellows, to be mobbed by their complaints and to suffer from their pains. It is then that the sad picture of suffering humanity ought to bring to his heart the first tenderness it has ever experienced. (Rousseau 222)

Rousseau follows the prevailing social and religious view of his time and sees the woman as an adjunct to the male: "Emile is a man. We have promised him a companion. She is to be given to him. That companion is Sophie" (Rousseau 357). Rousseau proceeds to describe Sophie, giving her all that she needs to be a woman, meaning "everything which suits the constitution of her species and her sex in order to fill her place in the physical and moral order" (Rousseau 357). Yet, Rousseau also suggests a degree of equality between men and women that was original: "In everything not connected with sex, woman is man" (Rousseau 357). In terms of sex, man and woman are "in every respect related and in every respect different" (Rousseau 357). These very differences are the reason for coquetry. Rousseau says that the man and the woman contribute equally to the common aim but do so in different ways, and these ways are not merely factual but moral in nature: "One ought to be active and strong, the other passive and weak. One must necessarily will and be able; it suffices that the other put up little resistance" (Rousseau 358). Given this view, Rousseau concludes that the woman has been made especially to please the man, and he says that this is the law of nature:

If woman is made to please and to be subjugated, she ought to make herself agreeable to man instead of arousing him. Her own violence is in her charms. It is by these that she ought to constrain him to find his strength and make use of it. (Rousseau 358)

Rousseau sees the differences between men and women as put there by nature, and he sees the behavior that results as also put there by nature. Of course, the types of behavior he recognizes for each sex derive from the social order of his time as well as from his and his society idea of the differences between men and women, the proper roles and behaviors for men and women. And accepted and acceptable explanations for differences in behavior between men and women. Rousseau sees nature as always a logical instrument, and because the consequences of sex are different for men and women, it is only logical that there be inequalities based on those different consequences:

With so great an inequality in what each risks in the union, how can one fail to see that if reserve did not impose on one sex the moderation which nature imposes on the other, the result would soon be the ruin of both, and mankind would perish by the means established for preserving it? (Rousseau 358-359)

Rousseau here goes directly against the view that human beings in a natural environment would behave more like animals and that such things as reserve are behaviors imposed by society. Rousseau does not see civilization as controlling nature -- he sees nature as having already devised logical differences between men and women that impose necessary controls from within rather than from without.

Rousseau addresses the same issues in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. In this work, Rousseau distances himself emphatically from the optimistic, enlightened, and progressive attitudes of the eighteenth century. Rousseau here characterizes modern society as not only incorporating, but fostering and demanding, deep and hateful inequalities between people, leading them further and further into corruption and misery. Society in this sense counters the logic of nature. He makes it clear that inequality was created by human beings who were able to convince others that they were superior, that they owned what had previously been free, that they were more powerful and should thus be obeyed, and so on. He writes,

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. (Rousseau, Discourse 44)

The only inequality that Rousseau recognizes in nature derives from physical differences, and sex would come under this heading:

Moreover, it follows that moral inequality, authorized by positive right alone, is contrary to natural right whenever it is not combined in the same proportion with physical inequality: a distinction that is sufficient to determine what one should think in this regard about the sort of inequality that reigns among all civilized people, for it is obviously contrary to the law of nature... (Rousseau, Discourse 71)

Coquetry in woman is thus a natural element by which the woman pleases the man while at the same time restraining him until she is ready to submit. Coquetry in Rousseau's view is natural, but that is because he has made certain assumptions that may not be realistic. He sees coquetry as part of nature for the reasons given above, because he sees nature as logical and as restraining where restraint would be logical. It seems more likely that human beings in the wild, so to speak, lack the kind of restraint described by Rousseau and that this restraint has been imposed as much by social conventions as by real sexual differences. Rousseau describes coquetry as a product of nature and not nurture:

For their part, women do not cease to proclaim that we raise them to be vain and coquettish, that we constantly entertain them with puerilities in order to remain more easily their masters. They blame on us the feelings for which we reproach them. What folly! (Rousseau 363)

Given Rousseau's view, his approach to education appears logical as a way of assuring that future generations maintain their relationship with nature and natural law, though in fact his view would create the situation he has just denied -- that men would be training women to be vain and coquettish:

Once it is demonstrated tat man and woman are not and ought not to be constituted in the same way in either character or temperament, it follows that they ought not to have the same education. In following nature's directions, man and woman ought to act in concert, but they ought not to do the same things... After having tried to form the natural man, let us also see how the woman who suits this man ought to be formed so that our work will not be left imperfect. (Rousseau 363)

Rousseau's view of women and his attitude toward the education of women differs markedly from that of Mary Wollstonecraft. She would clearly not see coquetry as a natural and necessary element in the female nature and also would disagree with the idea that men are naturally more able than women. She still derived many ideas from Rousseau and clearly realized his belief in the power of education.

Perhaps the root source of the struggle between conformity and rebellion lies in the tension between the public and private sphere, with the underlying cause of that tension being the lack of education or training women received: "Women are told from infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives" (Wollstonecraft 19).

The notion that a woman's sole purpose was to please a man was considered to be nonsense by Mary Wollstonecraft. She wanted to see women become more independent, to make themselves "more respectable." Wollstonecraft believed that to make women more useful members of society, their "understandings" should be "cultivated on a large scale" so that women could "acquire a rational affection for their country, founded on knowledge, because it is obvious that we are little interested about what we do not understand; private duties are never properly fulfilled unless the understanding enlarges the heart; and that public virtue is only an aggregate of private" (Wollstonecraft 191-192). In order for women to participate fully in even the private sphere, they must have an understanding of how their behavior contributes to the overall well-being of society. Mary Wollstonecraft firmly believed that it was as important for women as it was for men to understand the impact that all citizens have on both the public and private spheres.

In a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft held the family ideally to be the "heart of political reform" (Tomaselli 241?). She believed the family to be "the unit of the social and moral reproduction of society. This unit consisted of a husband and a wife, a father and a mother, a citizen married to a citizen, a Christian married to a Christian, a companion married to another" (Tomaselli 241). For Wollstonecraft, family is the intersection of the private sphere and the public sphere in their obligation not only to each other, but also to society. Once again, the tension between conformity and rebellion is palpable as Mary Wollstonecraft acknowledges the rules by which women must live while offering what she feels is a reasonable alternative to the conditions of the time.

In this work Wollstonecraft also suggests that in a relationship between a husband and wife, "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; 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" (Wollstonecraft 90). Wollstonecraft rightfully points out that men suffer along with women in perpetuating the notion that society benefits from the ignorance of any member of it citizenry. She is right when she asks if the government is being most effective when it dismisses half of its members: would it not be a more effective governing if women could "render their private virtue a public benefit." Further, she says that "A truly benevolent legislator always endeavors to make it the interest of each individual to be virtuous; and thus private virtue becoming the cement of public happiness, an orderly whole is consolidated by the tendency of all the parts towards a common centre" (Wollstonecraft 144). Recognition of women as an integral part of the public sphere through their role in the private sphere as well as its influence on the public sphere reflects an ideal that Wollstonecraft aspired to and ultimately contributed to Mary Wollstonecraft's stand was considered radical, and as a result she had to portray her heroine in a special way:

The exaltation of feeling prized by Romantics posed severe problems for women. However liberating, female desire was singularly hard to express. Women had to survive in a culture in which the search for personal fulfillment had no ready place. Small wonder then that Mary Wollstonecraft placed her heroine Maria in a prison for the insane, the better to cast into relief the terrible tension in a woman's mind resulting directly from her powerlessness. (Alexander 10)

Alexander sees a clear distinction between mother and daughter in terms of their analysis of the lot of women in the world, and he notes that though Mary Shelley was aware of her mother's radical approach, she herself took a different route:

Haunted by ways in which genius had to accommodate itself to the demands of a culturally prescribed femininity, she presented a series of female figures, lovely and compliant, their powerlessness serving to clarify the limitless ambition of their men. (Alexander 11)

Wollstonecraft's language has a deliberate biblical undertone that is all part of her attempt to restore to women the human right of self-respect. Women resort to artifice in order to place the world, though such assumed feelings are awkward when compared to real feelings. She pleads for women to be seen as they really are.

Her view is directly opposite that of Rousseau, though she begins with the same question, noting first that "either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial" (Wollstonecraft 7). The unequal place given women in this social order has been imposed by the social order and is furthered and maintained by the educational system, which leaves women with their minds in other than a healthy state:

One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers.... (Wollstonecraft 7).

In making reference to education in this manner, Wollstonecraft elevates the element of reason as what differentiates human beings from animals, but being human means a mixture of reason, virtue, and knowledge in different degrees which distinguish the individual and also direct the laws binding society. Wollstonecraft argues directly with Rousseau and questions his assumptions rather than his logic: "Reared on a false hypothesis, his arguments in favor of a state of nature are plausible, but unsound" (Wollstonecraft 14). Wollstonecraft uses society's own terminology and views in developing her argument, for women are spoken of as moral beings, as the conscience of society, and yet they are treated as other than moral beings by being refused a full education. Wollstonecraft does not denigrate domestic activities and spends some time noting how difficult they are and what faculties they require to be done right. One of the most important tasks left to women is the raising of children, and yet society does not see that women need a developed intelligence to accomplish this task properly. Wollstonecraft calls for a new educational system, one which she details at length. One of its notable elements is that boys and girls would study together rather than in a gender-segregated setting. One of the consequences of a full education for both men and women as seen by Wollstonecraft would be for relationships to be based more on equality and a real connection between people.

Chapter Three: Closer Look at a Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The reception of Wollstonecraft's book showed in itself how viciously the male establishment would treat any questioning of its authority or of the philosophy by which it ruled, as Karen Green notes when she writes,

For nearly one hundred years this heartfelt text, which reaches out to all humanity for the establishment of justice, sympathy and virtue, was treated as monstrous, the work of a "hyena in petticoats" and an incitement to sin. It struggled for recognition and was dismissed with jeers. It was only during the second century of its life, that, having struck a chord with a few like minds during the first hundred years, the Vindication and its basic principles came to be accepted, at least in the west. Feminism is no longer automatically mocked, though it is still often marginalized. (Green ix-x)

Susan Ferguson also notes the changed atmosphere in which this work is read today and points out how various scholars have shifted to a different assessment of the work:

These revised accounts generally attribute Wollstonecraft's radical spirit to her recognition and condemnation of the pervading economic and social inequities of her day. In linking the project of women's emancipation to a broader socio-economic critique, they suggest, Wollstone- craft politicizes two institutions central to liberal theory: class and family. In the process, she not only distinguishes herself from others within the classical liberal tradition but also challenges the very separation of public and private spheres around which that tradition is constructed. For some, this feature of Wollstonecraft's thought is evidence of the radical potential that liberalism holds for feminism; for others it opens the door to subverting the liberal paradigm altogether. (Ferguson 428)

Clearly, though, Wollstonecraft was raising ideas in a new way and had an impact on subsequent philosophical and political thought, whether one agrees with that thought or not.

R.M. Janes sees the reception of the work differently, noting how most people believe that it was received originally with "shock, horror, and derision when it appeared early in 1792" and that "the forces of reaction massed agasint this bold attempt to assert the equality of woman and spattered the Amazon with their pens" (Janes 293). However, Janes says that most of the notices for the work were favorable, with the reviews splitting along party lines so that radical periodicals that shared Wollstonecraft's vision were sympathetic, in part because they were distressed by Edmund Burke's lack of consistency. Wollstonecraft's critique of Burke agreed with their own. These groups were favorable to ideas about the rights of man and were not fearful of extending this to women. The one journal that attacked the work was the Critical Review: "Although periodicals less politically or more conserva- tively committed did not in the main choose to review the work, the Critical Review attacked it in two passionate installments" (Janes 294). Even those greeting the work favorably tended to ignore those aspects that might be seen as the most radical: "Most reviewers took it to be a sensible treatise on female education and ignored those recommendations in the work that might unsettle the relations between the sexes" (Janes 294). The worst thing done to the work in this initial period was to ignore it. The aspect most journals did emphasize was that the work was a treatise on female education, and the Analytical wrote, "If the bulk of the great truths which this publication contains were reduced to practice, the nation would be better, wiser, and happier than it is upon the wretched, trifling, useless and absurd system of education which is now prevalent" (Janes 294). Reviewers from both sides of the political spectrum tended to ignore the political implications of the work. Even those accepting the work tended to focus narrowly:

In approving the work, the reviewers endorsed the view that the character of women at the present time needed to become more independent, more rational, more equal to men in mind and spirit; and they indicated how widespread the assumptions of earlier educational reformers had become. As is so often the case with British reformers, the benevolent, improving impulse sought to ameliorate the condition of the sex, not to alter relative positions between the sexes. (Janes 295)

One reviewer that agreed with the need for improved education for women and so accepted that basic argument still showed reservations about other elements that cold be gleaned from the work:

The point of difference was not the cultivation of women's minds, but the relative roles of the sexes and the psychological characteristics that are and ought to be peculiar to each. The author stood firm on the intellectual inferiority of women: no women exist or have existed who are the intellectual equals of men, and demonstrate the same strength of reasoning or reach of intuitive perception. (Janes 296)

Janes also finds that many reviewers showed a fascination with polygamy that Janes finds endemic in a certain class in Britain in the eighteenth century. Both good and bad reviews showed evidence of a variety of prejudices masquerading as uncontestible truths:

Elsewhere the tendency to consider women as an undifferentiated herd and masculine achievement as singular turns up in the numbers used to refute Wollstonecraft's contention that women should have representatives in parliament: if they did, "the state would lose 10,000 useful domestic wives, in pursuit of one very indifferent philosopher or statesman." Although he faulted Wollstonecraft for discussing modesty and carnal appetites too freely, the reviewer was not afraid that the work would promote sexual license. Quite the contrary: "The precepts are calculated to form such women as we hope never to see; such as we are certain would waste their days in joyless celibacy, their sweets upon the desert air." (Janes 297)

The good reception of the work by some was still selective.

What happened was that the work became a victim of the collapse of Wollstonecraft's reputation after she died in 1797 in childbirth, when she gave birth to the daughter who would have her name and marry Percy Bysshe Shelley and write Frankenstein. Her reputation was damaged first by the course of the revolution in France and the "consequent repudiation of the vocabulary of revolution in England" (Janes 297). Another issue was the publication of her posthumous works by her husband, William Godwin, and of his own Memoirs. The latter revealed that Wollstonecraft had borne a child out of wedlock and had been deserted by her lover. She had then pursued him and attempted suicide twice before finding consolation with Godwin:

This series of actions found no approval at the time from any political persuasion. The periodicals that had been favorably disposed towards the Rights of Woman united in wishing the Memoirs unwritten, unpublished, and unread... The most sympathetic readings of the Memoirs attempted to palliate her acts by attributing them to virtuous though mistaken motives. Having shared Wollstonecraft's political principles, this set of reviewers did not insist upon a necessary connection between her politics and her sexual divagations. (Janes 298)

Those already opposed to Wollstonecraft simply had more ammunition and saw all of this as "delicious evidence of the consequences of Jacobin principles in action" (Janes 298).

One approach by critics was to note that her ideas were not really different from others offered by writers like Thomas Paine, though why this would make her writings in particular valueless is unclear. As Janes sums up,

To a considerable extent, it was the Memoirs rather than the Rights of Woman that shaped and colored Wollstonecraft's subsequent reputation. At the extremes of approval and disapproval were those like Godwin and the Anti-Jacobin who considered her acts an illustration of Jacobin morality in action. Between the ideologues were those like Matilda Betham who represented Wollstonecraft as an amiable eccentric who had refused to marry Imlay as a matter of principle, those who approved her principles and were embarrassed by her actions, and those who found both her life and principles reprehensible. The range of attitudes has remained much the same from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the last quarter of the twentieth. The most obvious shift has been the replacement of moral disapproval by psychological disapproval: the lady was not evil, but certainly very odd, and not to be imitated. (Janes 299)

The background to Wollstonecraft's book includes her own experiences in life and how they shaped her thinking. It is well documented that Mary Wollstonecraft's own mother paid little attention to her and her younger siblings, lavishing most of her love and affection on to Mary's older brother, Ned. This would "embitter and fuel Mary's life" (Todd 4). In Vindications, she wrote, "A great proportion of the misery that wanders, in hideous forms, around the world, is allowed to rise from the negligence of parents" (Wollstonecraft 154). The treatment by her mother coupled with the relationship she witnessed between her parents helped to form her opinions of the roles of man and woman in society. Janet Todd points out that "the pains of marriage were engraved on Mary's mind in this demeaning tie of father-tyrant and mother slave, and the authority this mother naturally had over her was tainted by the vision of improper submission" (Todd 5). Mary spends a great deal of time in Vindications addressing the issue of man's authority over woman and woman's role with in the male/female relationship. Her experience at home placed marriage and tyranny together as well as love and power. Mary acknowledged in Vindications that "Men, for whom we are told women were made, have too much occupied the thoughts of women; and this association has so entangled love with all their motives of action... when a sense of duty, or fear, or shame, obliges them to restrain this pampered desire of pleasing beyond certain lengths, too far for delicacy... they become abject wooers, and fond slaves" (Wollstonecraft 119-120). In fact, it was Mary's relationship or lack of relationship with the important men in her young life -- her father and older brother -- that fostered her desire for "independence" while at the same time cultivating feelings of insecurity and neediness, all sensibilities related to her struggle between conformity and rebellion. Mary would later form a lasting personal as well as professional relationship with publisher Joseph Johnson, who she would describe as both the "father and brother" she never had (Taylor 42).

The fact that Mary and her family were uprooted several times during her childhood only contributed to the unstable and unhappy environment she experienced at home. At a time when the quality of women's education was substandard compared to that of men's, Mary's education could be best described as hit or miss. However, her experience was not unique. She makes reference to the quality of education women received in Vindications, saying that it "cramped" women's understanding and that women received "only a disorderly kind of education" (Wollstonecraft 22).

The political element in her analysis was downplayed by those critics who agreed with her but also saw that her more radical ideas could lead to a backlash. One clear political strain involved her critique of Edmund Burke, as noted. The dissension between the two related to differing views of the French Revolution. Edmund Burke criticizes the French Revolution from an English perspective, while Mary Wollstonecraft urges the revolution to include women.

Edmund Burke was born in the eighteenth century. He was also a statesman and a political thinker. Edmund Burke was closely involved in the constitutional controversy over George III's reign. The King was seeking to assert a more active role for the crown, which had lost influence in earlier times, and to do so without infringing on the limitations of the royal prerogative set by the revolution settlement. Burke argued that George's actions were against the spirit of the constitution, though not its letter. He offered a new justification of party, defined as a body of men united on public principle and able to act as a constitutional link between king and Parliament. Burke continued to work for the curtailment of the powers of the crown. He was present as a movement began for parliamentary reform as well, including wider political participation in society, and he supported the latter to a degree, provided that there was evidence of rationality, restraint of aggressive partiality, and dedication to the common good.

Burke later fought against the Revolution in France and demanded war against the new state. He believed that the French Revolution had brought about a devaluation in tradition. He saw strength in the English constitution, which offered continuity and unorganized growth as well as a respect for traditional wisdom. Burke's writings on France cannot be considered a complete statement of his views on politics, and in fact he never gave a systematic exposition of his fundamental beliefs, only raising them in relation to specific issues. He has been seen as inconsistent in his views through his career, though he denied this. He suggested an interpretation of nature and the natural order and thus implied a deep respect for the historical process. This also shows that social change is not only possible but inevitable. However, for Burke the scope and the role of thought operating as a reforming instrument on society as a whole is limited and should act in response to specific tensions or specific possibilities rather than in large speculative schemes that might interfere with the stable, habitual life of society.

Burke saw history as governed by an "eternal law" which he said could be discerned in both hsitory and Christian revelation. When the statesman acts in accordance with the eternal law, tranquility results, just as chaos results when he does not (Hart 22-23). Burke thought the influence of the crown was too strong and the independence of the Commons too uncertain. He resisted parliamentary reform while also seeking to curtail royal prerogatives such as the authorization for the king to appoint and dismiss ministers. To bring about these changes, Burke fostered the idea of party, the organization of parliamentary politicians that would enable their joining together control parliament and thus to contest certain issues (Cone 9).

Burke's view of the role of the state was in part infused with a pessimistic view of human nature and of the need to curtail that nature:

Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought to subjection. (Burke 52) powerful state was required to accomplish this. Burke saw the revolution in France as a challenge to this assumption, as a case where the people's passions bubbled over and destroyed the power that was supposed to keep them in check. He says that because of the revolution, the normal concepts of truth and right have been changed:

All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. (Burke 67)

Burke found a solution in the social contract, and he extolled the virtues of a constitution as an agreement not to be broken, an agreement between the people and their governing body. However, he saw manners as more important than laws, which is why the British constitution, an unwritten constitution, was preferable.

Burke was also in the Parliament when dissension started in the American colonies over the Stamp Act, dissension which soon swelled into disobedience, conflict, and secession. Burke's views begin with a very legalistic analysis but often depart from a strict interpretation of the law for a sense of the spirit underlying that law. He argued, for instance, that while the British had a legal right to impose taxes and had indeed taken a legalistic position in the matter, that position should have been exercised with respect for the temper of those subject to it. Burke believed that the revolt of a whole people could not be treated as a criminal matter but instead was a demonstration of serious misgovernment. For Burke, government should ideally be a cooperative, mutually restraining relation of rulers to subjects, with an attachment to tradition and the ways of the past to the degree possible but also with a recognition of the fact of change and the need for a comprehensive and discriminating response to it.

Wollstonecraft followed Thomas Paine in challenging the way Burke wrote about the French Revolution. Paine wrote in the preface to the English edition of the Rights of Man that "from the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind... But no sooner did he see the old prejudices wearing away, than he immediately began sowing the seeds of a new inveteracy, as if he were afraid that England and France would cease to be enemies" (Paine 269). For Paine, Burke and his allies were simply hypocrites who supported reform only when it benefited themselves. Wollstonecraft's split with Burke derives from a similar sense of betrayal, for she was associated with the moderate Whigs Burke had once also been associated with, and some continued to suport him and some did not. Wollstonecraft's link to the moderate Whigs came through her association with the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, the intellectual sponsorship of Richard Price, and her romantic and social relations with George Fuseli and later William Godwin. She therefore embodies in specific detail the ambivalence about Burke which was so characteristic of that group. James Conniff writes, "I believe the split between Burke and Wollstonecraft prefigures the future of reformist thought, for they debated precisely those issues which were to become of paramount importance in the next two centuries" (Conniff 301).