The Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Sandrine Berges

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415674157
• eBook ISBN: 9781136205279
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the greatest philosophers and writers of the Eighteenth century. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Her most celebrated and widely-read work is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This Guidebook introduces:

• Wollstonecraft's life and the background to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• The ideas and text of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• Wollstonecraft's enduring influence in philosophy and our contemporary intellectual life

It is ideal for anyone coming to Wollstonecraft's classic text for the first time and anyone interested in the origins of feminist thought.

1
The First of a New Genus

The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft

On 10 September 1797, at the age of thirty-eight, Mary Wollstonecraft died in London of puerperal fever, ten days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary. She died painfully, as the result of an infection brought on, probably, by the use of unsterilized medical instruments. She left behind two daughters, newborn Mary, and Fanny, aged three, born from a relationship to a previous lover, Gilbert Imlay.¹ Wollstonecraft also left behind her husband of six months and lover for a year, the moral philosopher William Godwin, two Vindications – on the rights of men (1790) and women (1792) – a semi-autobiographical novel, Mary, three educational books, some translations, a large number of book reviews in the Analytical Review, a book on the French Revolution, written during a stay in France between 1792 and 1795, a published volume of letters from Sweden, Denmark and Norway, and some unpublished works including the unfinished novel Maria or the Wrongs of Woman.

To have achieved that much writing in such a short time, while also bringing up a child single-handedly and providing emotional and financial support for several members of her extended family, she would have to have been a singularly energetic, talented and hard-working woman. And by all accounts, she was. The portrait we have of Wollstonecraft’s life, from her widower’s memoirs and from herown letters, is one of a very driven individual, who fought back conventions and relative poverty to establish herself, first as a an educated woman whose opinion on current affairs and philosophical debates mattered, and second as a successful professional writer. But we should not imagine that she was always single-minded and concentrated on her work. Like many human beings, she spent a significant portion of her life obsessing over failed love affairs, twice even to the point of attempting suicide. Her letters tell us that she was not above wasting time on pettiness either. She seemed to spend a fair amount of time whining to her sisters about how hard her life was. She complained of how unpleasant the jobs she had taken on to support them were, or how hard it was to beg loans from rich friends. She complained of her health too, suffering from headaches and stomachaches that frequently prevented her from working.² She was, however, robust, as became evident from her ease through pregnancy and childbirth.³ One might venture that her health problems were stress-related, induced by constant worry about whether she would have enough money to support herself and her dependents, and discomfort at her almost unique situation as an independent, unmarried middle-class woman who took it upon herself to have a literary career and be the head of her family.

Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-seven, Wollstonecraft took on a series of jobs, at first to gain independence from her parents, then out of necessity to support herself, her sisters, brothers and extended family. At the age of nineteen, she left home to work as a lady’s companion in Bath, hoping to make enough money to rescue her family from her father’s increasing debts. She came home after a little over a year to nurse her sick mother, and was with her until her death a year later. She then founded a school in Islington (and then in Newington Green) thereby creating a home and an income for herself, her sisters and her close friend Frances Blood. As this was not sufficient to pay for the debts she and her sisters accumulated through the failing schools, Wollstonecraft went to work as a governess for an aristocratic family in Ireland, from which position she was dismissed a year later. When, at the age of twenty-eight, she came back from Ireland to London, her friend and editor of her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), suggested she might earn a living by writing. He offered her a job as a writer on the Analytical Review, of which he was the editor, and encouraged her to write more books. Wollstonecraft wrote to her sister: ‘Mr. Johnson … assures me that if I exert my talents in writing, I may support myself in a comfortable way. I am then going to be the first of a new genus – I tremble at the attempt.’⁴

Wollstonecraft was not, of course, the first woman ever to make money from writing. There were at the time a large number of educational treatises and children’s books written by women, and for which women were paid. Women were also paid for reviews, novels and translations. There was nothing terribly unusual about a woman making money from writing.⁵ But Wollstonecraft was not, like many of the others, a woman peddling manuscripts in the hope of making a little money: she had a job. Johnson guaranteed her a decent income if she would take on commissions from him. She was a staffwriter, and a journalist, in charge of regular reviews. In this, she was indeed probably the first.

Nothing in Wollstonecraft’s background predisposed her for a philosophical career. Many of her contemporaries who had achieved some sort of literary or scientific success either came from rich or intellectual backgrounds, or married into them. Wollstonecraft’s family was middle class and very undistinguished. Her father was an alcoholic and a gambler who had lost any chance the family had of being comfortable or even respectable. Her mother was the victim of domestic abuse, and perhaps because of that, had very little time to devote to the education of her daughters. She seems not to have wasted much love or affection on them either, preferring her oldest son. Wollstonecraft seems to have regarded her both as a victim to be defended, and an example of bad parenting to be avoided.

Unlike some other ‘neglected’ daughters, Wollstonecraft did not have the run of big libraries in which she could educate herself while no-one was watching.⁶ She relied on friends to lend her books, to advise her in her readings, and to engage her in intellectual discussions about them. During her Yorkshire adolescence, it was her best friend Jane Arden’s father, a philosopher by profession, who provided her with a library and guidance in her readings, and in her early twenties, the Revd and Mrs Clare in Hoxton, London, and the friend she met through them, Frances Blood, were responsible for much of her reading as well for her developing writing skills.

Her own intellectual thirst guided her to seek out these people’s friendships. Other than that, she had access to very little learning. She knew no Greek or Latin, and taught herself French and German later on, so that she could become a governess and so that she could take on translation work, but found it very difficult.⁷ In her mid-twenties, Wollstonecraft was befriended by Mrs Burgh, widow of the director of a dissenting academy, and influential author James Burgh.⁸ Mrs Burgh would become her patron for several years, setting her up in Newington Green, at the time a village a couple of miles out of London, helping her find a house and pupils for her school there and rescuing her when she needed money. Mrs Burgh introduced her to the Newington Green community of Rational Dissenters, and in particular to Richard Price, a Welsh dissenting preacher who, thanks to his writings on economics, was on friendly terms with the government, but who was also adviser to the founding fathers of the United States of America. Price was also active in the anti-slavery movement, a staunch republican, and a defender of the French Revolution. He played an important part in shaping Wollstonecraft’s career, first by lending her books, discussing them with her and introducing her to the publisher Johnson. But his influence went further: it was a sermon given by Price on the French Revolution that prompted Edmund Burke to write his Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which he defended the rights of the aristocracy and denounced what he saw as the excesses of the Revolution, predicting that it would end in a bloodbath. Burke’s pamphlet was also, in many ways, a personal attack on Price and on his republican beliefs. Two people immediately rose in defence of their friend Price. One was Thomas Paine, with his Rights of Man. But Wollstonecraft beat him to publication with her own A Vindication of the Rights of Men, which she wrote in six weeks.

Rational Dissenters were, for the most part, republicans who favoured equality and sometimes had strong views on slavery, women and education. Wollstonecraft’s time in Newington Green helped her become a radical thinker. It also developed her education. Dissenters were not allowed to enter English universities (Oxford or Cambridge, at the time), and so Newington Green, home to many prosperous city merchants and bankers, had become some sort of a university village, rife with books and intellectual discussions. Wollstonecraft borrowed books from her new friends, and heard from them about those she could not read.⁹

When Wollstonecraft started to work for Johnson, she would have gained access to even more books – those she was asked to review, and those she could borrow. And she was a voracious reader. Somehow she would have done her best to catch up so that she could take part in debates over dinner at Johnson’s place, with men such as the painter Fuseli, who had received a classical education, or Paine and Godwin, who, although they had not benefited from a university education either, would have found it easier as men to educate themselves. Of course, many books remained inaccessible to her as they were in Greek or Latin. Plato’s works, for example, had not yet been translated, nor had the majority of Aristotle’s. She would have picked up what she could in conversation, but remained very much an outsider in her lack of classical culture.

Throughout her short life, Wollstonecraft took on responsibilities that were traditionally male. She supported a number of people financially, including her sisters, at times two of her brothers, her friend Frances Blood’s entire family, and a few others besides. In 1784 she arranged for one of her sisters, Elizabeth, who was possibly going through a kind of postnatal depression, to leave her husband, whom she had come to hate and fear. Together the sisters ran away, and lived in hiding for some time until they could figure out what to do. It was to provide for her sisters, that Wollstonecraft decided to set up a school for girls. But it was also to further her own dream of living and working together with her friend Frances Blood, who joined Wollstonecraft and her sisters as a teacher. The dream was short-lived, as Frances married and moved to Portugal, and shortly afterwards died in childbirth. Wollstonecraft travelled to Portugal to help, but was powerless, and grieved for a long time afterwards. After that, the second school failed and Wollstonecraft took up a job as a governess in Ireland in order to pay her debts. Before leaving for Ireland, Wollstonecraft had given Johnson the manuscript for her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, based on her own experience as a woman and as a teacher of girls. Her ideas were influenced by those of the Dissenters – Revd Burgh, her patron’s late husband, had written a treatise on education in which he took up and responded to some of Locke’s ideas on that topic. Wollstonecraft’s book was a continuation of that debate.¹⁰ When Wollstonecraft came back from Ireland, Johnson offered her a job.

In 1792 the artist Fuseli, another of Johnson’s friends, disappointed Wollstonecraft by not being in love with her. The two had been close friends, but Fuseli was married and had no interest in their friendship developing in the way she was hoping. Unhappy, she decided to move to Paris, by herself, to observe and document the Revolution.¹¹ She had intended to go before, with the Fuselis, but that trip had been aborted for reasons of security. She decided to go anyway. Wollstonecraft stayed in France for three years, writing and meeting with members of the Revolution. It was in Paris that she met the American businessman Gilbert Imlay. They became lovers and had a child. Although Imlay registered Wollstonecraft as his wife with the American Embassy, and she took his name when a state of war was declared between Britain and France and things became difficult for the English in Paris, they were never married.

The affair did not last after Paris. When Wollstonecraft returned to London in 1795, it became apparent that Imlay was tired of her, and she attempted suicide. To raise her spirits (and possibly to ensure she was out of the way), Imlay sent her on a mission. A sea captain had absconded with a cargo of silver belonging to him. The ship had disappeared somewhere in Scandinavia. Imlay needed someone to go and look for it, and to talk with his lawyers in Denmark. He sent Wollstonecraft, armed with a power of attorney, her baby daughter, and a French maid. She found out some information, defended Imlay’s interests with gusto, and at the same time produced a volume of letters describing the natural wonders of Scandinavia, its political arrangements, and the lives of the people she met there. The letters were published on her return and received excellent critical reviews.

Shortly after her return from her Scandinavian expedition, in February 1796, Wollstonecraft met with Godwin. The two had met previously, at Johnson’s table, but had not got on very well. This time they did, and in August they became lovers. In December, Wollstonecraft was pregnant, and in March 1797, she married Godwin. She had no desire to risk her reputation and lose her friends by having another child so very obviously out of wedlock.¹² It was bad enough that she would have to acknowledge that she had never been married to Imlay, but that might pass off, shethought, provided she married Godwin. Both wished to preserve their independence, and even after marriage, maintained separate quarters. A few months later, baby Mary was born at home. Because the placenta was not ejected during the birth, it had to be pulled out. During the (painful) process, an infection was introduced. After ten days of suffering, she died.

In some ways, Wollstonecraft’s outlook on life had been fairly conventional: despite her living in close quarters with Dissenters, and marrying an atheist, Wollstonecraft remained staunchly religious all her life, and preferred the Anglican church. She did, it seems, flirt with the French revolutionary approach to religion, which was to replace God with the Supreme Being, remaining vague as to what the Supreme Being was supposed to be. Certainly, she did not believe in a god who was male, or had created men in ‘his’ image, and women from a rib bone. Her god was un-gendered, and above all rational. She did not hesitate to condemn passages in the Bible that pretended otherwise. But she did not seeanyof this as incompatible with a gentle Anglicanism. She and Godwin joked about their differences of opinion at her deathbed, which did not prevent him, in his memoirs, from presenting her as an atheist. This contributed greatly to Wollstonecraft’s fall from public favour after her death. From being a popular, well respected author, she became a figure of ridicule and shame. This happened almost overnight after the publication of Godwin’s memoirs of his wife.

Godwin wrote the memoirs immediately after his wife’s death, perhaps as a sort of therapy, and to pay tribute to her. He decided, as was in keeping with his beliefs, to be perfectly honest about everything. He described her love affairs, her strong affection for her friend Fanny Blood, her unrequited passion for Fuseli, and her illegitimate affair with Imlay, as well as the fact that her first child, Fanny, was born out of wedlock. Some people knew this already, of course: it would not have been possible for Wollstonecraft to marry Godwin had she already been married to Imlay. But after the publication of the memoirs this became public knowledge, as did her two suicide attempts,¹³ and the fact that she was Godwin’s lover for several months before she became his wife.

The respected writer of educational books for girls, whose quirky political outlooks had, for the most part, been overlooked by the wider public, was no longer a respectable woman, and her books were not to be read:¹⁴

Fierce passion’s slave, she ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Series editor's preface
• Author preface
• 1 The first of a new genus
• 2 The rights of woman and national education
• 3 Brutes or rational beings?
• 4 Relative virtues and meretricious slaves
• 5 Abject slaves and capricious tyrants
• 6 Angels and beasts
• 7 Taste and unclouded reason
• 8 Rational fellowship or slavish obedience? Love, marriage and family
• 9 Concluding reflections
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index