MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
When women, standing at length beyond the last of the gates and walls
that have barred their road to freedom, measure their debt to history,
there will be little to claim their gratitude before the close of the
eighteenth century. The Protestant Reformation on the whole depressed
their status, and even among its more speculative sects the Quakers
stood alone in preaching the equality of the sexes. The English Whigs
ignored the existence of women. It was left for the French thinkers who
laid the foundations of the Revolution to formulate a view of society
and human nature which, as it were, insisted on its own application to
women. The idea of women's emancipation was alive among their
principles. One can name its parents, and one marvels not at all that it
seized this mind and the other, but that any mind among the professors
of the "new philosophy" contrived to escape it. The central thought,
which inspired the gospel of perfectibility has a meaning for men which
an enlightened mind can grasp, but it tells the plain obvious fact about
women.
When Holcroft compares the influence of laws and institutions upon men
to the action of beggars who mutilate their children, when Godwin talks
of the subtle poisons of dogma and custom, which cause mankind to grow
up a race of dwarfs when they should be giants, they seem to be using
metaphors which describe nothing so well as the effect of an artificial
education and a tradition of subjection upon women. One by one the
thinkers of this generation were unconsciously laying down the premises
which the women's movement needed. At the end of all their arguments for
liberty and perfectibility, we seem to hear to-day a chorus of women's
voices which points the application to themselves. There was little hope
for women while the opinion prevailed that minds come into the world
with their qualities innate and their limitations fixed by nature. If
that were the case, then the undeniable fact that women were
intellectually and morally dependent and inferior must be accepted as
their inevitable destiny. Helvetius, all unconscious of what he did, was
the hope-bringer, when he insisted that mind is the creation of
education and experience. When he urged that the very inequality of
men's talents is itself factitious and the result of more or less good
fortune in the occasions which provoke a mind to activity, who could
fail to enquire whether the accepted inferiority of women were so
natural and so necessary as the whole world assumed?
This school of thought revelled in social psychology. It studied in turn
the soldier, the priest and the courtier, and shewed how each of these
has a secondary character, a professional mind, a class morality
impressed and imposed upon him by his education and employment. Looking
down from the vantage ground of their philosophic salon upon their
contemporaries in French society who owed their fortunes and reputations
to the favour of an absolute court, Helvetius and his friends framed
their general theory of the demoralisation which despotism brings about
in the human character. They studied the natural history of the human
parasite who flourished under the Bourbons. They need not have travelled
to Versailles to find him. The domestic subjection of wives to husbands,
the education of girls in a specialised morality, the fetters of custom
and fashion, the experience of economic dependence, the denial of every
noble stimulus to thought and action--these causes, more potent and more
universal than any which work at Court, were making a sex condemned to
an artificial inferiority, an induced parasitism. Thinkers who had
discarded the notion that human minds come into the world with an innate
character and with their limitations already predestined, were ripe to
draw the conclusion. The Revolution believed that men by taking thought
might add many cubits to their mental stature. To think in these terms
was to prepare oneself to see that the "lovely follies" the "amiable
weaknesses" of the "fair sex" were in their turn nothing innate, but the
fostered characteristics of a class bred in subjection, the trading
habits of a profession which had bent all its faculties to the art of
pleasing. Reformers who sought to raise the peasant, the negro, and even
the courtier to his full stature as a man, were inevitably led to
consider the case of their own wives and daughters. They were not the
men to be arrested by the distinction which has been recently invented.
Democracy, we are told, is concerned with the removal not of natural,
but of artificial inequalities. Their bias was to regard all
inequalities as artificial. Looking forward to the goal of human
perfection, they were prompt to realise that every advance would be
insecure, and the final hope a delusion, if on their road they should
leave half mankind behind them.
It requires a vigorous exercise of the historical imagination to realise
the conditions which society imposed upon women in the eighteenth
century. If Godwin and Paine had reflected closely on the position of
women, they might have been led to modify their exaggerated antithesis
between society and government. Government, indeed, imposed a barbarous
code of laws upon women. It was a trifle that they were excluded from
political power. The law treated a wife as the chattel of her husband,
denied her the disposal of her own property, even when it was the
produce of her own labour, sanctioned his use of violence to her person,
and refused (as indeed it still in part does) to recognise her rights as
a parent. But the state of the law reflected only too faithfully the
opinions of society, and these opinions in their turn formed the minds
of women. Civilised people amuse themselves to-day by detecting how much
of the old prejudices still lurk in a shamefaced half-consciousness in
the minds of modern men. There was no need in the eighteenth century for
any fine analysis to detect the naive belief that women exist only as
auxiliary beings to contribute to the comfort and to flatter the
self-esteem of men. The belief was avowed and accepted as the
unquestioned basis of human society. Good men proclaimed it, and the
cleverest women dared not question it.
For the crudest statement of it we need not go to men who defended
despotism and convention in other departments of life. The most
repulsive of all definitions of the principle of sex-subjection is to be
found in Rousseau:--"The education of women should always be relative to
that of men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem
them, to educate us when young, to 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." When the men of the eighteenth century said this, they
meant it, and they accepted not only its plain meaning, but its remotest
logical consequences. It was a denial of the humanity and personality of
women. A slave is a human being, whom the law deprives of his right to
sell his labour. A woman had to learn that her subjection affected not
only her relations to men, but her attitude to nature and to God. The
subtle poison ran in her veins when she prayed and when she studied.
Subject in her body, she was enslaved in mind and soul as well. Milton
saw the husband as a priest intervening between a woman and her God:--
He for God only, she for God in him.
Even on her knees a woman did not escape the consciousness of sex, and a
manual of morality written by a learned divine (Dr. Fordyce) assured her
that a "fine woman" never "strikes so deeply" as when a man sees her
bent in prayer. She was encouraged to pray that she might be seen of
men--men who scrutinised her with the eyes of desire. It is a woman,
herself something of a "blue-stocking," who has left us the most
pathetic statement of the intellectual fetters which her sex accepted.
Women, says Mrs. Barbauld, "must often be content to know that a thing
is so, without understanding the proof." They "cannot investigate; they
may remember." She warns the girls whom she is addressing that if they
will steal knowledge, they must learn, like the Spartan youths, to hide
their furtive gains. "The thefts of knowledge in our sex are only
connived at while carefully concealed, and if displayed punished with
disgrace."
Religion was sullied; knowledge was closed; but above all the sentiment
of the day perverted morals. Here, too, everything was relative to men,
and men demanded a sensitive weakness, a shrinking timidity. Courage,
honour, truth, sincerity, independence--these were items in a male
ideal. They were to a woman as unnecessary, nay, as harmful in the
marriage market as a sturdy frame and well-knit muscles. Dean Swift, a
sharp satirist, but a good friend of women, comments on the prevailing
view. "There is one infirmity," he writes in his illuminating _Letter to
a very young lady on her marriage_, "which is generally allowed you, I
mean that of cowardice," and he goes on to express what was in his day
the wholly unorthodox view that "the same virtues equally become both
sexes." There he was singular. The business of a woman was to cultivate
those virtues most conducive to her prosperity in the one avocation open
to her. That avocation was marriage, and the virtues were those which
her prospective employer, the average over-sexed male, anxious at all
points to feel his superiority, would desire in a subject wife.
Submission was the first of them, and submission became the foundation
of female virtue. Lord Kames, a forgotten but once popular Scottish
philosopher, put the point quite fairly (the quotation, together with
that from Mrs. Barbauld, is to be found in Mr. Lyon Blease's valuable
book on _The Emancipation of Englishwomen_): "Women, destined by nature
to be obedient, ought to be disciplined early to bear wrongs without
murmuring.... This is essential to the female sex, for ever subjected to
the authority of a single person."
The rest of morality was summed up in the precepts of the art of
pleasing. Chastity had, of course, its incidental place; it enhances the
pride of possession. The art of pleasing was in practice a kind of
furtive conquest by stratagems and wiles, by tears and blushes, in which
the woman, by an assumed passivity, learned to excite the passions of
the male. Rousseau owed much of his popularity to his artistic statement
of this position:--"If woman be formed to please and to be subjected to
man, it is her place, doubtless, to render herself agreeable to him....
The violence of his desires depends on her charms; it is by means of
these that she should urge him to the exertion of those powers which
nature hath given him. The most successful method of exciting them is to
render such exertion necessary by resistance; as in that case self-love
is added to desire, and the one triumphs in the victory which the other
is obliged to acquire. Hence arise the various modes of attack and
defence between the sexes; the boldness of one sex and the timidity of
the other; and in a word, that bashfulness and modesty, with which
nature hath armed the weak in order to subdue the strong."
The "soft," the "fair," the "gentle sex" learned its lesson with only
too much docility. It grew up stunted to meet the prevailing demand. It
acquired weakness, feigned ignorance, and emulated folly as sedulously
as men will labour to make at least a show of strength, good sense, and
knowledge. It adapted itself only too successfully to the economic
conditions in which it found itself. Men accepted its flatteries and
returned them with contempt. "Women," wrote that dictator of morals and
manners, Lord Chesterfield, "are only children of a larger growth.... A
man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and
flatters them, as he does a sprightly, forward child." The men of that
century valued women only as playthings. They forgot that he is the
child who wants the toy.
The first protests against this morality of degradation came, as one
would expect, from men. Demoralising as it was for men, it did at least
leave them the free use of their minds. Enquiry, reflection, scepticism,
unsuitable if not immodest in a woman, were the rights of a manly
intellect. Defoe and Swift uttered an unheeded protest in England, but
neither of them carried the subject far. There are some good critical
remarks in Helvetius about women's education; but the first man in that
century who seemed to realise the importance and scope of what several
dimly felt, was Baron Holbach, whose materialism was so peculiarly
shocking to our forefathers. A chapter "On Women" in his _Systeme
Social_ (1774) opens thus: "In all the countries of the world the lot of
women is to submit to tyranny. The savage makes a slave of his mate, and
carries his contempt for her to the point of cruelty. For the jealous
and voluptuous Asiatic, women are but the sensual instruments of his
secret pleasures.... Does the European, in spite of the apparent
deference which he affects towards women, really treat them with more
respect? While we refuse them a sensible education, while we feed their
minds with tedium and trifles, while we allow them to busy themselves
only with playthings and fashions and adornments, while we seek to
inspire them only with the taste for frivolous accomplishments, do we
not show our real contempt, while we mask it with a show of deference
and respect?"
Holbach was a rash and rather superficial metaphysician, but the
warm-hearted and honest pages which follow this opening inspire a deep
respect for the man. He talks of the absurdities of women's education;
draws a bitter picture of a woman's fate in a loveless marriage of
convenience; remarks that esteem is necessary for a happy marriage, but
asks sadly how one is to esteem a mind which has emerged from a
schooling in folly; assails the practice of gallantry, and the
fashionable conjugal infidelities of his day; writes with real
indignation of the dangers to which working-class girls are exposed;
proposes to punish seduction as a crime no less cruel than murder, and
concludes by confessing that he would like to adopt Plato's opinion that
women should share with men in the tasks of government, but dreads the
effects which would flow from the admission of the corrupt ladies of his
day to power.
Twenty years later this promising beginning bore fruit in the mature and
reasoned pleading of Condorcet for the reform of women's education.
There was no subject on which this noble constructive mind insisted with
such continual emphasis. His feminism (to use an ugly modern word), was
an integral part of his thinking. He remembered women when he wrote of
public affairs as naturally as most men forget them. He deserves in the
gratitude of women a place at least as distinguished as John Stuart
Mill's. The best and fullest statement of his position is to be found in
the report and draft Bill on national education (Sur l'Instruction
Publique), which he prepared for the Revolutionary Convention in 1792
(see also p. 109). He maintains boldly that the system of national
education should be the same for women as for men. He specially insists
that they should be admitted to the study of the natural sciences (these
were days when it was held that a woman would lose her modesty if she
studied botany), and thinks that they would render useful services to
science, even if they did not attain the first rank. They ought to be
educated for many reasons. They must be able to teach their children. If
they remain ignorant, the curse of inequality will be introduced into
the family, and mothers will be regarded by their sons with contempt.
Nor will men retain their intellectual interests, unless they can share
them with women. Lastly, women have the same natural right to knowledge
and enlightenment as men. The education should be given in common, and
this will powerfully further the interests of morality. The separation
of the sexes in youth really proceeds from the fear of unequal
marriages, in other words, from avarice and pride. It would be dangerous
for a democratic community to allow the spirit of social inequality to
survive among women, with the consequence that it could never be
extirpated among men. Condorcet was not a brilliant writer, but the
humanity and generosity of his thought finds a powerful and reasoned
expression in his sober and somewhat laboured sentences.
So far a good and enlightened man might go. The substance of all that
need be said against the harem with the door ajar, in which the
eighteenth century had confined the mind if not the body, of women, is
to be found in Holbach and Condorcet. But they wrote from outside. They
were the wise spectators who saw the consequences of the degradation of
women, but did not intimately know its cause. Mary Wollstonecraft's
_Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ (1792) is perhaps the most original
book of its century, not because its daring ideas were altogether new,
but because in its pages for the first time a woman was attempting to
use her own mind. Her ideas, as we have seen, were not absolutely new.
They were latent in all the thinking of the revolutionary period. They
had been foreshadowed by Holbach (whom she may have read), by Paine
(whom she had occasionally met), and by Condorcet (whose chief
contribution to the question, written in the same year as her
_Vindication_, she obviously had not read). What was absolutely new in
the world's history was that for the first time a woman dared to sit
down to write a book which was not an echo of men's thinking, nor an
attempt to do rather well what some man had done a little better, but a
first exploration of the problems of society and morals from a
standpoint which recognised humanity without ignoring sex. She showed
her genius not so much in writing the book, which is, indeed, a faulty
though an intensely vital performance, as in thinking out its position
for herself.
She had her predecessors, but she owed to them little, if anything.
There was not enough in them to have formed her mind, if she had come to
their pages unemancipated. She freed herself from mental slavery, and
the utmost which she can have derived from the two or three men who
professed the same generous opinions, was the satisfaction of
encouragement or confirmation. She owed to others only the powerful
stimulus which the Revolution gave to all bold and progressive thought.
The vitality of her ideas sprang from her own experience. She had
received rather less than was customary of the slipshod superficial
education permitted to girls of the middle classes in her day. With this
nearly useless equipment, she had found herself compelled to struggle
with the world not merely to gain a living, but to rescue a luckless
family from a load of embarrassments and misfortunes. Her father was a
drunkard, idle, improvident, moody and brutal, and as a girl she had
often protected her mother from his violence. A sister had married a
profligate husband, and Mary rescued her from a miserable home, in which
she had been driven to temporary insanity. The sisters had attempted to
live by conducting a suburban school for girls; a brief experience as a
governess in a fashionable family had been even more formative.
When at length she took to writing and translating educational books,
with the encouragement of a kindly publisher, she was practising under
the stimulus of necessity the doctrine of economic independence, which
became one of the foundations of her teaching. It is the pressure of
economic necessity which in this generation and the last has forced
women into a campaign for freedom and opportunity. What the growth of
the industrial system has done for women in the mass, a hard experience
did for Mary Wollstonecraft. In her own person or through her sisters
she had felt in an aggravated form most of the wrongs to which women
were peculiarly exposed. She had seen the reverse of the shield of
chivalry, and known the domestic tyrannies of a sheltered home.
The miracle was that Mary Wollstonecraft's mind was never distorted by
bitterness, nor her faith in mankind destroyed by cynicism. Her
personality lives for us still in her own books and in the records of
her friends. Opie's vivid painting hangs in the National Portrait
Gallery to confirm what Godwin tells us of her beauty in his pathetic
_Memoir_ and to remind us of Southey's admiration for her eyes. Godwin
writes of "that smile of bewitching tenderness ... which won, both heart
and soul, the affection of almost every one that beheld it." She was, he
tells us, "in the best and most engaging sense, feminine in her
manners"; and indeed her letters and her books present her to us as a
woman who had courage and independence precisely because she was so
normal, so healthy in mind and body, so richly endowed with a generous
vitality. If she won the hearts of all who knew her, it was because her
own affections were warm and true. She was a good sister, a good
daughter, a passionate lover, an affectionate friend, a devoted and
tender mother.
She was too real a human being to be misled by the impartialities of
universal benevolence. "Few," she wrote, "have had much affection for
mankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters,
and even the domestic brutes whom they first played with." That eloquent
trait, her love of animals and her hatred of cruelty, helps to define
her character. She was, says Godwin, "a worshipper of domestic life,"
and, for all her proud independence, in love with love. In Godwin's prim
phraseology, she "set a great value on a mutual affection between
persons of an opposite sex, and regarded it as the principal solace of
human life." Indeed, in the _Letters to Imlay_, which appeared after her
death, it is not so much the strength and independence of her final
attitude which impresses us, as her readiness to forgive, her
reluctance to resent his neglect, her affection which could survive so
many proofs of the man's unworthiness. The strongest passion in her
generous nature was maternal tenderness. It won her the enduring love of
the children whom she taught as a governess. It caused her mind to be
busied with the problem of education as its chief preoccupation. It
informs her whole view of the rights and duties of women in her
_Vindication_. It inspired the charming fragment entitled _Lessons for
Little Fanny_, which is one of the most graceful expressions in English
prose of the physical tenderness of a mother's love. If she despised the
artificial sensibility which in her day was admired and cultivated by
women, it was because her own emotions were natural and strong. Her
intellect, which no regular discipline had formed, impressed the
laborious and studious Godwin by its quickness and its flashes of sudden
insight--its "intuitive perception of intellectual beauty."
The _Vindication_ is certainly among the most remarkable books that have
come down to us from that opulent age. It has in abundance most of the
faults that a book can have. It was hastily written in six weeks. It is
ill-arranged, full of repetitions, full of digressions, and almost
without a regular plan. Its style is unformed, sometimes rhetorical,
sometimes familiar. But with all these faults, it teems with apt
phrases, telling passages, vigorous sentences which sum up in a few
convincing lines the substance of its message. It lacks the neatness,
the athletic movement of Paine's English. It has nothing of the
learning, the formidable argumentative compulsion of Godwin's writing.
But it is sold to-day in cheap editions, while Godwin survives only on
the dustier shelves of old libraries. Its passion and sincerity have
kept it alive. It is the cry of an experience too real, too authentic,
to allow of any meandering down the by-ways of fanciful speculation. It
said with its solitary voice the thing which the main army of thinking
women is saying to-day. There is scarcely a passage of its central
doctrine which the modern leaders of the women's movement would
repudiate or qualify; and there is little if anything which they would
wish to add to it. Writers like Olive Schreiner, Miss Cicely Hamilton,
and Mrs. Gilman have, indeed, a background of historical knowledge, an
evolutionary view of society, a sense of the working of economic causes
which Mary Wollstonecraft did not possess and could not in her age have
acquired, even if she had been what she was not, a woman of learning.
But she has anticipated all their main positions, and formulated the
ideal which the modern movement is struggling to complete. Her book is
dated in every chapter. It is as much a page torn from the journals of
the French Revolution as Paine's _Rights of Man_ or Condorcet's
_Sketch_. And yet it seems, as they do not, a modern book.
The chief merit of the _Vindication_ is its clear perception that
everything in the future of women depends on the revision of the
attitude of men towards women and of women towards themselves. The rare
men who saw this, from Holbach and Condorcet to Mill, were philosophers.
Mary Wollstonecraft had no pretensions to philosophy. A brilliant
courage gave her in its stead her range and breadth of vision. It would
have been so much easier to write a treatise on education, a plea for
the reform of marriage, or even an argument for the admission of women
to political rights. To the last of these themes she alludes only in a
single sentence: "I may excite laughter, by dropping a hint, which I
mean to pursue, some future time, for 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." She had the insight to perceive that the first task of the
pioneer was to raise the whole broad issue of the subjection of her sex.
She begins by linking her argument with a splendid imprudence to the
revolutionary movement. It had proclaimed the supremacy of reason, and
based freedom on natural right. Why was it that the new Constitution
ignored women? With a fresh simplicity, she appeals to the French
Convention in the name of its own abstract principles, as modern women
appeal (with more experience of the limitations of male logic) to
English Liberalism. But she knew very well what was the enormous
despotism of interest and prejudice that she was attacking. The
sensualist and the tyrant were for her interchangeable terms, and with
great skill she enlists on her side the new passion for liberty. "All
tyrants want to crush reason, from the weak king to the weak father."
She demands the enlightenment of women, as the reformers demanded that
of the masses: "Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there
will be an end to blind obedience; but as blind obedience is ever
sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they
endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want
slaves, and the latter a plaything."
With a shrewd if instinctive insight into social psychology, she traces
to the unenlightened self-interest of the dominant sex the code of
morals which has been imposed upon women. Rousseau supplies her with the
perfect and finished statement of all that she opposed. He and his like
had given a sex to virtue. She takes her stand on a broad human
morality. "Freedom must strengthen the reason of woman until she
comprehend her duty." Against the perverted sex-morality which treated
woman in religion, in ethics, in manners as a being relative only to
men, she directs the whole of her argument. It is "vain to expect virtue
from women, till they are in some degree independent of men."
"Females have been insulated, as it were, and while they have been
stripped of the virtue that should clothe humanity, they have been
decked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-lived
tyranny.... Their sole ambition is to be fair, to raise emotion instead
of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in
absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character. Liberty is the
mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves,
and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they
must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in
nature.... Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they
are human duties.... If marriage be the cement of society, mankind
should all be educated after the same model, or the intercourse of the
sexes will never deserve the name of fellowship, nor will women ever
fulfil the peculiar duties of their sex, till they become enlightened
citizens, till they become free by being enabled to earn their own
subsistence, independent of men; in the same manner, I mean, to prevent
misconstruction, as one man is independent of another. Nay, marriage
will never be held sacred till women, by being brought up with men, are
prepared to be their companions rather than their mistresses."
It is a brave but singularly balanced view of human life and society.
There is in it no trace of the dogmatic individualism that distorts the
speculations of Godwin and clogs the more practical thinking of Paine.
It is, indeed, a protest against the exaggeration of sex, which
instilled in women "the desire of being always women." It flouts that
external morality of reputation, which would have a woman always "seem
to be this and that," because her whole status in the world depended on
the opinion which men held of her. It demands in words which anticipate
Ibsen's _Doll's House_, that a woman shall be herself and lead her own
life. But "her own life" was for Mary Wollstonecraft a social life. The
ideal is the perfect companionship of men and women, and the preparation
of men and women, by an equal practice of modesty and chastity, and an
equal advance in education, to be the parents of their children. She is
ready indeed to rest her whole case for the education of women upon the
duties of maternity. "Whatever tends to incapacitate the maternal
character takes woman out of her sphere." The education which she
demanded was the co-education of men and women in common schools. She
attacked the dual standard of sexual morality with a brave plainness of
speech. She demanded the opening of suitable trades and professions to
women. She exposed the whole system which compels women to "live by
their charm." But a less destructive reformer never set out to
overthrow conventions. For her the duty always underlies the right, and
the development of the self-reliant individual is a preparation for the
life of fellowship.