Mary Wollstonecraft: Pioneer of Feminist Thought

In the late spring of 1792, a thirty-three-year-old English woman, then living in Paris with her lover Gilbert Imlay, an American adventurer, was working on a short book about the education and the social position of women. The book was published in London, in December 1792, by Joseph Johnson, the radical London publisher who had been her friend and patron for the better part of a decade. The book was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and within a year it had become the most widely read and the most widely attacked work of feminist political philosophy in the English language.

The book was, in its own time, a careful intervention in three ongoing controversies. The first was the French debate, conducted in the National Assembly, over the proper political status of women. The second was the British debate, conducted in the periodical press, over the proper moral and social position of women. The third was the European debate, conducted in the salons and the philosophical societies, over the proper role of reason in the conduct of the moral life. Wollstonecraft intervened in all three, and her intervention is, in this writer’s judgment, the most important single moment in the history of modern feminist thought.

The book is, in this writer’s judgment, the most underrated of the great works of Enlightenment political philosophy, and the most important. The reason is partly that the standard histories of the Enlightenment have, until the last thirty years, treated the feminist contribution as a kind of late, secondary, and not quite respectable addition to the male philosophical tradition. The reason is partly that the standard biographies of Wollstonecraft — the late Victorian hagiographies, the mid-twentieth-century feminist celebrations, and the late-twentieth-century academic treatments — have, until the last twenty years, tended to read the works through the lens of the personal life. The reason is partly that the philosophical position that Wollstonecraft occupied — the natural-rights feminism, in the recent terminology of Sylvana Tomaselli — has been, in the standard histories of philosophy, treated as a kind of derivative position, rather than as the most ambitious and most consistent of the modern feminist positions.

The Life

Wollstonecraft was born on April 27, 1759, in Spitalfields, then a working-class district of London. She was the second of seven children of Edward John Wollstonecraft, a dissipated man who made a modest living as a silk weaver and who wasted the family’s resources in futile speculative ventures. The early life of the family was marked by the father’s violence, by the mother’s depression, and by the constant fear of poverty. The childhood is worth pausing on, because it produced, in this writer’s judgment, the most distinctive feature of Wollstonecraft’s mature work: the combination of philosophical argument with personal experience, and the refusal to separate the abstract question of the proper moral and political position of women from the concrete experience of what it was actually like to be a woman in late-eighteenth-century London.

Wollstonecraft’s early education was provided by her father, who insisted that she should learn to think independently and to argue vigorously. This was unusual for a girl of her time, and it helped to develop the passionate, self-willed character that would mark her life. She left home at the age of nineteen, when her elder sister Eliza had an unhappy marriage and Wollstonecraft helped her to escape by setting up an independent household. The episode is, in this writer’s judgment, the most revealing single moment in the early life, because it captures the most distinctive feature of her character: the willingness to act, in the most personal and the most public ways, on the most abstract principles.

The early years in London were difficult. Wollstonecraft worked as a lady’s companion, as a governess, and as a schoolteacher, supplementing her income by writing for the publishers James Johnson and Joseph Johnson. The latter became her lifelong friend and the publisher of most of her works. The partnership with Johnson was, in this writer’s judgment, the most important single intellectual relationship of her life. Johnson was the publisher of Tom Paine, of William Godwin, of Joseph Priestley, of Thomas Holcroft, and of the other leading figures of the English radical tradition. The relationship was, in fact, the most important of the eighteenth-century English radical publishing partnerships, and the proper response to the standard accounts is not the postmodern dismissal but a careful re-reading of the partnership in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the history of the English radical tradition.

In 1792, Wollstonecraft visited France during the early years of the French Revolution. She fell in love with Gilbert Imlay, an American adventurer, and had a daughter, Fanny, in 1794. The relationship with Imlay was unhappy, and he eventually abandoned her. She attempted suicide, and then began a new relationship with William Godwin, the radical political philosopher. They married in 1797, and she had a second daughter, Mary, on August 30, 1797. She died on September 10, 1797, from complications of the birth, at the age of thirty-eight.

The circumstances of the death are worth pausing on. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever, a disease that was, in the eighteenth century, the most common cause of death of women in childbirth, and that was, in fact, the cause of death of her own mother. The disease was, in fact, preventable, and the proper response to the death is the recognition that the most personal of the tragedies of Wollstonecraft’s life was, in fact, a public health disaster that the Enlightenment tradition of the time was not, in fact, equipped to address.

The Major Works

Wollstonecraft was the author of a remarkable body of work, including novels, educational treatises, children’s books, historical works, and political pamphlets. The following are the most important.

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) was Wollstonecraft’s first published work, a brief treatise on the proper education of women. The book developed many of the themes that would later be expanded in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, including the importance of rational education, the dangers of vanity and idleness, and the necessity of treating women as rational beings in their own right.

A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) was a response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The book was one of the first published replies to Burke, and it made the case for the principles of the French Revolution against Burke’s conservative defense of the Old Regime. The book is notable for the forceful and eloquent style in which Wollstonecraft develops her arguments, and for the combination of political argument with social commentary that is characteristic of her work. The book is, in this writer’s judgment, the most underrated of the early English replies to Burke, and the most important precursor of the later and more famous reply of Thomas Paine.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is Wollstonecraft’s masterwork, and one of the foundational texts of modern feminism. The book extends the principles of the French Revolution to women, and it argues that the existing relations between the sexes are incompatible with the principles of reason, liberty, and human rights.

Wollstonecraft’s central argument is that women are not naturally inferior to men. The appearance of inferiority is the result, she argues, of the inadequate education that women receive, of the false ideas about feminine delicacy and beauty that society has constructed, and of the legal and economic dependence that prevents women from developing their full rational and moral capacities. The book develops a comprehensive programme of reform. Women, Wollstonecraft argues, should be educated in the same way as men, with the same emphasis on reason, virtue, and the development of the rational faculties. They should not be confined to the domestic sphere but should be allowed to participate in the professions and in public life. The institution of marriage, as it then existed, should be reformed so as to be a relation of equality between husband and wife. The institution of property should be reformed so as to allow women to have economic independence.

Wollstonecraft’s arguments were not for an abstract equality that ignored the differences between men and women. She recognized that women are physically different from men, and she did not argue that women should perform the same tasks or have the same roles. What she argued was that women should be treated as rational beings in their own right, that they should be given the opportunity to develop their rational and moral capacities, and that the social, legal, and economic structures that prevented them from doing so were unjust.

The novels and other works are, in this writer’s judgment, the most underrated of her writings. Mary: A Fiction (1788) and Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798) were among the first English novels to focus on the inner lives of women and to address the social and psychological dimensions of women’s oppression. The Wrongs of Woman is particularly notable for its proto-feminist argument that the institution of marriage, as it then existed, was incompatible with the full development of women’s rational and moral capacities. The novel is, in this writer’s judgment, the most underrated of the English feminist novels of the eighteenth century, and the proper response to the standard accounts is not the postmodern dismissal but a careful re-reading of the novel in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the history of the English novel.

The Philosophical Position

Wollstonecraft’s philosophical position was an application of the Enlightenment commitment to reason, virtue, and human rights to the situation of women. She drew on Locke and the British empiricist tradition, on the French philosophes, and on her own experience of the inequalities that women faced in her own time.

The critique of femininity was one of her most important contributions. She argued that the contemporary conception of femininity — with its emphasis on delicacy, beauty, sensibility, and dependence — was a social construction that prevented women from developing their rational and moral faculties. The woman who was concerned above all with her appearance, with pleasing men, and with the cultivation of her sensibility, was a creature of social convention, not a natural being.

The alternative to this false conception of femininity, Wollstonecraft argued, was the development of women as rational beings, capable of independence, of self-direction, and of participation in the public life of their communities. This alternative would be more conducive to women’s happiness, and it would also be more conducive to the welfare of society, since it would make possible the full development of the talents of half the human race.

The defence of reason was a central part of her feminism. She believed that the proper development of human nature required the cultivation of reason, and that this cultivation was as necessary for women as for men. The denial of rational education to women was, in her view, a violation of their natural rights, and it was also a violation of the principles of the Enlightenment.

This defence of reason was not a defence of cold, abstract, masculine rationality. Wollstonecraft did not deny the importance of feeling, of sympathy, of moral sensibility. But she argued that the proper role of feeling was to support and to supplement reason, not to replace it. The woman who was all feeling and no reason was as defective as the man who was all reason and no feeling.

The programme of reform was comprehensive. It included educational reform, legal reform, economic reform, and the reform of marriage and the family. The proper education of women, she argued, should be the foundation of all the other reforms, since only women who were educated to be rational and independent would be in a position to take advantage of the new opportunities that reform would provide.

A Judgement

Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight, having experienced an extraordinarily full and extraordinarily troubled life. Her works were largely ignored in the early nineteenth century, and her reputation suffered from the attacks of conservative critics who pointed to her personal life (her illegitimate child, her suicide attempt, her marriages) as evidence of the dangers of her ideas. The attacks were, in this writer’s judgment, the most sustained and most unfair campaign of character assassination in the history of English letters, and the proper response to the attacks is not the postmodern dismissal but a careful re-reading of the works in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the history of the English feminist tradition.

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, Wollstonecraft’s reputation was gradually rehabilitated. The early women’s rights leaders — including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the Pankhursts — cited her as a foremother, and the modern feminist movement of the twentieth century recognized her as one of its founding figures.

The most important scholarly debate is the one between the two leading interpreters. The first is the political theorist Sylvana Tomaselli, who argued in her Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vested Interest (2009) that the political philosophy of Wollstonecraft is, in fact, a careful essay in the modern tradition of the Scottish moral philosophy, and that the proper reading of the works is as an essay in the tradition of the moral-sentimentalist defense of the rights of women. The second is the literary critic Claudia Johnson, who has argued in her Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (2002) that the proper reading of the works requires a careful attention to the literary form, and that the works are, in fact, a careful essay in the tradition of the English feminist novel. The Tomaselli–Johnson debate is, in this writer’s judgment, the most important interpretive debate in the contemporary reception of Wollstonecraft, and the proper response to the debate is not the postmodern dismissal but a careful re-reading of the works in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the history of the English feminist tradition.

Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, became Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein (1818). The connection between the two women — one of the great feminist thinkers and one of the great science fiction writers — is a fitting symbol of the many ways in which Wollstonecraft’s legacy has been carried forward. The connection is, in this writer’s judgment, the most striking biographical fact in the history of English letters, and the proper response to it is not the postmodern dismissal but a careful re-reading of the works of both women in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the history of the English radical tradition.

The most lasting of Wollstonecraft’s contributions is, in this writer’s judgment, the natural-rights feminism. The position has been the basis of the modern feminist tradition, of the modern tradition of the defense of the rights of women, and of the modern tradition of the defense of the secular state. The position has also been the object of a great deal of criticism, most famously in the work of the contemporary defenders of the natural-rights tradition, who have argued that the feminist appropriation of the natural-rights tradition is, in fact, a careful piece of liberal propaganda that has, in the long run, more costs than benefits. The critique is well taken in some respects, but it should not obscure the fact that the natural-rights feminism has, in fact, been the basis of a great deal of careful work in the defense of the rights of women, and that the proper response to the critique is not the abandonment of the tradition but a careful re-statement of the doctrine in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the philosophy of the rights of women.

The Life

The Major Works

The Philosophical Position

A Judgement

Further Reading