Originally published in the last ever issue of Solidarity:
A Journal of Libertarian Socialism (London, UK) No.30/31 [new series] Spring 1992,
under the title “Two sexes, yet one
truth”. It was subject to some ‘subbing’ from the then editor so may not have been
written (or published, due to re-subbing), exactly as it appears below. (L.W.)
Subheadings and
quotations in boxes added.
“Those who are bold enough to advance
before the age they live in, and to throw off, by the force of their own minds,
the prejudices which the maturing reason of the world will in time disavow,
must learn to brave censure. We ought not to be too anxious respecting the
opinion of others. – I am not fond of vindication. – Those who know me will suppose
that I acted from principle. – Nay, as we in general give others credit for
worth, in proportion as we possess it – I am easy with regard to the opinions
of the best part of mankind. I rest on my own.”
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) rejected
both marriage and the available ‘suitable’ jobs for women, to earn her living
by writing and win fame or notoriety in her public life as “English
miscellaneous writer”: pioneer of sexual liberation, champion of women’s
rights, wife to William Godwin, and mother of Mary Shelley. While Godwin has
always had a secure place in the history of (pre-)anarchist political thought, libertarians
have tended to neglect or be ambivalent towards Wollstonecraft.
In recent years, the women’s movement has accorded her a
deserved revival of attention and done much to counter the more negative,
grudging, patronising and romanticising tendencies of earlier commentators. But
in-depth analyses of what she actually said have remained fairly thin on the
ground, There are still aspects of her work and thought to which her numerous
friends and critics have done less than justice, including some of particular
interest to libertarians – rejection of authority and received opinions,
insistence on individual autonomy, and the recognition that the liberation of
women had to be an integral part of an enlightened outlook. These are illustrated
in A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the first feminist manifesto
and her best known book.
This was not her first venture into the contemporary political
fray. In 1970, her Vindication of the Rights of Men was one of the first published
ripostes to;[Edmund] Burke’s notorious attack on the principles of the French
Revolution, and she now proceeded to expound her conviction that “the rights of humanity have thus been
confined to the male sex from Adam”. She saw the logical and moral necessity of
rounding out the concept of full human emancipation, “to be free in a physical,
moral and social sense”.
She undertook this new championship thoroughly and conscientiously,
aware of its audacity and significance in “representing the whole sex, one half
of mankind”, and also with passion against injustice, anger at suffering, and
humour at the many absurdities she exposed. These qualities, and her unwavering
commitment, make her still worth reading and eminently quotable. Confronting the
question of what was wrong and why, and what could be done to put it right, she
proceeded to develop a detailed critique of existing society and its coercion
and/or persuasion of female children into the acceptance of traditional sex
roles and values – the art of ‘pleasing’.
“Asserting the rights which
women, in common with men, ought to contend for,” she wrote, “I have not
attempted to extenuate their faults; but to prove them to be the natural consequence
of their education and station in society.” Education was the key to
improvement, not only for the good of their souls but to break the chains of
economic dependence. She outlined a system to replace the confinement,
ignorance and affectation imposed on girls (and the differently pernicious
alternative imposed on boys), which would have gone a long way to undermine the
dominant ideology. At the same time, she recognised the importance of external
restrictions, and intended to deal with the matter of legal disabilities in a
second volume, which never appeared – although it has been observed that her
unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman (1797) effectively fills the place of such
a work by illustrating the fate of women in different classes in society.
She did not, however, regard women either with indulgence or
despair as inevitably helpless, passive victims of circumstances; they had to
take responsibility for their own behaviour, even granted that they were in
many ways up against it from their earliest days, beset by double-think and double-binds
at every turn. Wishing “to see women neither heroines nor brutes, but
reasonable creatures” who did not “have power over men, but over themselves”, she
addressed them directly and uncompromisingly. She pointed out the fallacies and
dangers of prevailing attitudes towards them, however hypocritically flattering
in appearance – as long as they fulfilled the desired stereotypical roles – but
covering hostility and contempt: “This separate interest – this insidious state
of warfare…”
Reason
and Autonomy
Her project involved demolishing many prestigious theories of
education and infant management as expounded by such luminaries as Rousseau,
whose more absurd fantasies about female character she was ready to dismiss
with a brisk “What nonsense!” despite her admiration for some of his other
ideas. Her style was normally forthright – “What she thought, she scorned to
qualify,” as Godwin observed – but always based on reasoned argument, reason
being in her view a chief good and guiding principle, its exercise a right and
duty for both sexes.
For modern readers, the placing of these concepts in the context
of an overall deistic philosophy may be off-putting, but the point is that
whatever the framework, men and women must be equally free to confront and come
to terms with their own reality, and factors impeding their doing so must not
be tolerated. Her religion was rationalist too; the admittedly paternalistic
God was expected to act in a reasonable and humane manner – practically a
mandated deity subject to recall. She had no time for the barbaric notions of
eternal punishment of the hell-fire brigade and rejected the fall-of-man
creation myth as an excuse for denigrating women.
Demonstrating how women were moulded into being “insignificant
objects of desire – mere propagators of fools!” she was ready to take on just
about anyone, male or female, obscure or famous, for “the books of instruction,
written by men of genius, have had the same tendency as more frivolous
productions… Viewing them [women] as if they were in a state of perpetual
childhood, unable to stand alone”. Such a view could be deeply internalised,
and was all too often reinforced by women themselves imposing it on each other,
as Mary well realised, understanding but pleading for rejection of the
psychological mechanisms and motives involved.
She knew she was asking women to embark on what could be a
painful process, but saw it as inevitable as well as ultimately desirable. “Why
have we implanted in us an irresistible desire to think?” she exclaimed in [one
of] her early letters, declaring that women should “struggle with any obstacle
rather than go into a state of dependence”. She spoke from hard-won experience
as well as observation and conviction – “The world cannot be seen by an unmoved
spectator, we must mix in the throng.” Her personal antipathy to her
conventional role comes out more than once. “On many accounts I am averse to
any matrimonial tie,” she explained:
“It is a happy thing to
be a mere blank, and to be able to pursue one’s own whims, where they lead,
without having a husband and half a hundred children at hand to teaze and
controul a poor woman who wishes to be free.”
This did not indicate a dislike of children or disregard of
their interests; on the contrary, their welfare was central to her emphasis on
(conditional) duties and responsibilities of women as mothers: “Make women
rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives,
and mothers – that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and
fathers.”
For, even in its own terms, she pointed out, the existing system
of female education was riddled with contradictions, and militated against
“domestic virtue”. She insisted that men should also take responsibility for
the children they propagated and relationships they undertook outside marriage
– “When a man seduces a woman, it should, I think, be termed a left-handed marriage” – arguing cogently
against the unfairness of the prevailing double standards of sexual morality
(from which she herself was to suffer): “I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny
the existence of sexual [gendered] virtues... for men and women, truth... must
be the
same.”
In the public sphere likewise, she illustrated the evils of “blind
obedience” and its corrupting effects in creating chains of despotism and
debasing its victims. She can be said to have made some sort of connection
between sexual repression, authoritarian conditioning and the irrational in
politics. She takes an integrated view, trying to understand what is happening
throughout society and why. Her themes include fear of freedom, authority
relations, repression: “The being who patiently endures
injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to
discern right from wrong”; and the refusal to think.
“Men, in general, seem to employ their
reason
to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they know not how, rather
than to root them out. The mind must be strong that resolutely forms its own
principles; for a kind of intellectual cowardice prevails which makes many men
shrink from the task, or only do it by halves…”
There is quite a lot in this vein, its implications largely
unremarked by successive editors.
“There seems
to be an indolent propensity in man to make prescription always take the place
of reason, and
to place every duty on an arbitrary foundation.”
“The many
would fain let others both work and think for them.”
“... [T]he
fear of innovation, in this country, extends to everything...”
Class
and Revolution
Our more class-conscious comrades may wonder whether her theories
are mere bourgeois(e) complaints. It is true that Rights of Woman is addressed to the “middle” sort, but by contrast with
the hopelessly effete aristocracy rather than in order to exclude the lower
orders, who for practical reasons she evidently did not see as the agents of
the sort of change she advocated, although according respect and consideration
to working-class women as individuals – “with respect to virtue… I have seen
most in low life…” Later, her Historical
and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794) illustrated sympathy with
and understanding of the revolutionary cause in spite of her profound misgivings
about the turn events had taken. Realism did not make her pessimistic or
reactionary, but she saw more clearly what preconditions were required:
“People thinking for
themselves have more energy in their voice, than any government which it is
possible for human wisdom to invent, and every government not aware of this
sacred truth will, at some period, be suddenly overturned.”
And not only self-managed autonomy, but mutual aid: “Till men
learn mutually to assist without governing each other, little can be done by
political associations towards perfecting the condition of mankind.”
Although her ‘class politics’ were inevitably circumscribed by
her historical situation her perceptions were often strikingly sound:
“But one power should
not be thrown down to exalt another – for all power inebriates weak man; and
its abuse proves that the more equality there is established among men, the
more virtue and happiness will reign in society.”
Of course this must all be seen in historical context, but it
seems to have more to do with a libertarian tradition than either bourgeois
liberalism or the authoritarian left.
Liberty,
Equality, Comradeship
Mary would not necessarily make an automatic or
comfortable conscript into some sections of the modern feminist movement
either. One factor is her consistent denial of biological determinism/ sexual
dimorphism (“Mind has no sex”). Rather than wallowing in imposed and alien
‘feminine’ attributes, and abdicating from whole swathes of human activity, or
alternatively aping ‘masculine’ patterns, she saw the arrogating of certain
qualities and propensities to the dominant sex as wholly unacceptable and at
variance with reality.
Rejecting inhibiting assumptions, she asserted that the basic
premise should be of equal potential, deserving and requiring equal opportunity
to develop. Rather than branding females as by definition weak, illogical,
childish, incompetent, and thereby preventing them from being anything else,
both their minds and their bodies should be encouraged and preserved in health
and knowledge. If they then turned out not to be able to attain the same heights
as their male companions, so be it; but the experiment had never been tried, so
the case was unproved – it was mere prejudice, Likewise they should not
be confined to the domestic zone, but take their places in professional and
public life: “I may excite laughter, by dropping an hint… that women ought to
have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed…”
Her methods would, she argued, have the effect of making better
wives and others, but this was not the primary aim: “The great end of [women’s]
exertions should be to unfold their own faculties and acquire the dignity of
conscious virtue.”
There are many digressions and repetitions in Rights of Woman as well as some engaging
sidelights, such as concern for animal welfare and a recurrent antimilitarism.
She was aware of [the book’s] faults: “… dissatisfied with myself for not
having done justice to the subject – had I had more time I could have written a
better book.” But she didn’t do so badly, religion, middle-class origins and
bees-in-the-bonnet notwithstanding. It
is altogether a remarkable production, and many of her observations are highly
relevant today.
Rather unfortunately, the book ends with an appeal to
(enlightened) men to see the sense of what is being argued, and act on it, and
is prefaced by an address to Talleyrand, the French politician who she thought
had the power and capacity to introduce principles of sound education in revolutionary
France. The idea, however, was to remove the multitudinous massive obstacles in
the way of women’s autonomous action, rather than to substitute for it. She was
not exactly pessimistic about what women could achieve, even though she took a
dim view of what in the present state of society most of them had become. There
were examples, including her own, to demonstrate an alternative, but she knew
there was a long way to go.
Private
Life and Public Persona
Mary’s eventual decision to marry seems to have been a rational
though reluctant adaptation to circumstances and recognition of the realities
of a social life from which she did not wish to be totally excluded – “The
odium of society impedes usefulness”. (Ironically, [the decision]
did lead to a measure of ostracism, by spelling out the fact that she had not
been married to Gilbert Imlay, the father of Fanny, her first child.) It is
certainly unfair to blame her for Godwin’s apparent abandonment of long-held principles;
they were both in the same boat, and acknowledged as much, even if society would
not have penalised Godwin in the same way for defying its conventions.
[Marriage:
“law and the worst of all laws... an affair of property and the worst of all
properties” – William Godwin]
Some censorious commentators have maintained that it was the
‘scandalous’ dimension that ‘set back’ the cause of women’s emancipation, but
the times had grown increasingly reactionary and theirs was not the only good
cause to suffer. In any case, the principle (that she should have modified her
behaviour for the sake of public relations), as well as the [supposed] fact, is
dubious. Conversely, modern feminists may see the ‘romantic’ view of the
relationship as somewhat detracting from Mary’s character and principles. This
would be to ignore the context, and the innovative attempt to forge an equal
partnership based on mutual respect, even if it did not work perfectly in
practice every day: for example, Mary had occasion to point out that Godwin continued
to assume priority for his sacrosanct ‘work’, while hers was supposed to be
shelved in order to deal with domestic matters as required.
The events of her life have alwavs been difficult
for observers to view in detachment from her writings, and many of the
unreasoned critiques published in her lifetime and shortly after her death were
frankly ad feminam attacks. Another
effect of this was that her writings have seldom if ever been given due consideration.
Even many comparatively favourable write-ups have an apologetic tone, while
recent feminist commentators often tend to overlook her more generally
political (libertarian) significance. In any case, she acted in accordance with
her ideals in difficult circumstances with courage and honesty, and provided an
example and inspiration, rater than an awful warning, to others in the next and
subsequent generations.
“And who can
tell, how many generations may be necessary to give vigour to the virtue and
talents of the freed posterity of abject slaves?”
hedgehog
reprints @ smothpubs
At the time of writing the above, the main modern source for Mary’s life
was: Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death
of Mary Wollstonecraft. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976.
There have been a number of useful publications about Mary
Wollstonecraft in the past twenty years, including:
Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A
Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. (Little, Brown 2005) Virago 2006. Closely
attentive to MW’s writings and sympathetic with her character.
Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, a
Revolutionary Life. Weidenfeld & Nicolson,2000.
Janet Todd, ed. The Collected
Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Allen Lane 2003.
Claudia L. Johnson, ed. The
Cambridge Companion to Mary
Wollstonecraft. CUP 2002.
Black Flag
no. 227, Summer 2008, includes
writing by Emma Goldman
on Mary Wollstonecraft.
A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
and other writings by MW herself can
be found in various editions in
libraries and/or currently in print.
