Mary Wollstonecraft

Roopinder Oberoi
• Wollstonecraft was born in London on April 27,
1759 into modest working-class circumstances.
The tyrannical personality of her father left the
young girl suspicious of marriage.
• The advantages her family showered on a far less
talented brother made her burn with awareness
of how deeply society valued men more than
women.
• Her rejection of marriage and the privileges of
men deepened when, in 1783, she helped her
sister Eliza to flee from a brutal marriage and
arrange a legal separation.
• Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) in
which she rejected the traditional method of
teaching girls, which treated them as the
intellectual of boys.
• In 1788, Johnson published both her biographical
novel Mary, a Fiction, which depicted the social
limitations oppressing women, and a children’s
book entitled Original Stories from Real Life.
• Moving to London, Wollstonecraft worked as a
translator and reviewer for Johnson between
1788 to 1792; her work appeared in his journal
the Analytical Review, which she helped to found.
• Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was a moral and
political philosopher whose analysis of the condition of
women in modern society retains much of its original
radicalism.
• One of the reasons her pronouncements on the subject
remain challenging is that her reflections on the status
of the female sex were part of an attempt to come to a
comprehensive understanding of human relations
within a civilization increasingly governed by
acquisitiveness and consumption.
• Her first publication was on the education of
daughters; she went on to write about politics, history
and various aspects of philosophy in a number of
different genres that included critical reviews
• A Vindication of the Rights of Women is a book-length
feminist essay by British writer Mary Wollstonecraft,
published in 1792.
• A Vindication of the Rights of Women called for female
equality, particularly in the area of education.
Wollstonecraft dismissed the cultivation of traditional
female virtues of submission and service and argued that
women could not be good mothers, good wives and good
household managers if they were not well-educated.
• In the Introduction, she stated her “profound conviction
that the neglected education of my fellow-creatures
[women] is the grand source of the misery I deplore.”
• She claimed that women were expected to spend too
much time on maintaining their delicate appearance and
gentle demeanor, sacrificing intelligence for beauty and
becoming flower-like playthings for men.
• The equal education of girls and boys, she
believed, would dissolve the destructive ideal of
woman as a docile and decorative companion to
man. In this vein, Wollstonecraft penned what
may well be her most famous sentiment;

• “To marry for a support is legal prostitution.”

Wollstonecraft pleaded for intellectual
companionship to be the ideal of marriage. She
argued for an end to social prejudice against
women which would, in turn, lead to women
being defined by their character and work rather
than by their marriages.
• A Vindication also provided broader social
commentary on the role that domestic life
played in politics, on the relationship between
the private and public spheres. In essence,
Wollstonecraft argued that morality and
stability in the public sphere required respect
for women in the private one.
• Wollstonecraft’s feminist legacy is best expressed in her texts. Her
early work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)
and Original Stories from Real Life (1788) made the case in effect
for socialization, arguing that middle-class values such as reason
and self-discipline could be instilled through education in children
and women: inferiority was learned not natural.
• The much cited A Vindication on the Rights of Man responded to
Conservative Irish philosopher Edmund Burke’s (1729-1827)
condemnation of the French Revolution. She criticized the
aristocracy and associated the equality of women with more
democratic middle-class values.
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman championed co-education
and universal schooling (though poorer children would not reap all
benefits). Invoking what would later be termed maternal feminism,
she suggested that educated women benefit society as better
citizens, wives, and mothers.
• Wollstonecraft’s occasional deference to conventional
gender binaries was understandable considering the iconic
male intellectuals with whom she entered into public
debate and whose hypocrisies relating to women she set
out for readers. She sardonically dismissed male
contemporaries such as Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712-1778) who argued that the end of women’s
education was to please men.
• Wollstonecraft also pushed genre boundaries. Her
novels, Mary: A Fiction (1788) and Maria: or, The Wrongs of
Woman (1798) both critiqued the institution of marriage
and the pressures on women to pursue romantic goals and
prioritized other relationships including strong female
friendships
• Influenced by European Enlightenment, Mary
Wollstonecraft’s seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman (1792) questioned the socialising process in the
subordination of women. Being one of the pioneers who
radically deviated from the concept of femininity as
natural/biological to the view of femininity as social,
Wollstonecraft observed that the social norms, values, law
and cultural practices demanded, imposed and
recommended particular forms of behaviour from women;
and not conforming to these norms resulted in their being
treated as witches or monsters.
• Thus women consented to feminine roles and to their own
subordination. She asserted that the “so called feminine
attributes” such as love for fashion and jewellery, are
indoctrinated by society, such that women come to
assimilate these values in order to fit into the category of
the “feminine”.
• Written in response to a French report that argued that
women should be given only domestic
education, Rights of Woman attacks sexual double
standards and posits that women should be given .an
education commensurate with their position in the
society. Attacking male thinkers like Rousseau who
argued against women’s education, Wollstonecraft
emphasized the social and communal benefits of
educating women. Educated women would be better
companions to their husbands and will be able to bring
up children in a better way.Being empowered by
reason and rationality would also help them from
being susceptible to excessive emotions and sensibility.
• The Historical and Moral View may have also
reflected Wollstonecraft’s state of mind over
personal matters. Even as insistence on reason
dominated her writing, Wollstonecraft’s
passion for a married man overwhelmed her
life. In England, she had fallen in love with the
painter Henry Fuseli.
• Now in France, amid political chaos and
physical danger, Mary fell tragically in love
with another married man, the American
Gilbert Imlay, by whom she bore a child
named Fanny. It was a doomed relationship.
Despondent, Wollstonecraft attempted
suicide twice.
• Wollstonecraft also rejoined the circle of London
radicals and re-established contact with Godwin
who had been deeply impressed by her
book Letters. Later in life, he wrote, “If ever there
was a book calculated to make a man in love with
its author, this appears to me to be the book.”
They became lovers and, then, married in 1797
even though both of them had publicly
repudiated that institution. At the time of their
marriage, Wollstonecraft was pregnant.
• Soon, thereafter, Wollstonecraft gave birth to a second
daughter, Mary, who would later marry the poet
Shelley and write Frankenstein among other novels.
Less than two weeks after Mary’s birth, Wollstonecraft
died of septicimia, a type of blood poisoning then
called “childbed fever.”
• In 1798, a heartbroken Godwin published both
the Posthumous Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, which
included the unfinished novel Maria, or the Wrongs of
Woman. A Fragment, and his own Memoirs of the
Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
• Wollstonecraft recognized that for many women of her
time, raising a family would be their primary
responsibility, but she insisted that a husband and wife
whose relationship was founded on reason and
equality would parent happier and more well-rounded
children than in families governed by strict discipline
and inequality between parents.

• To that end, she proposed a system of national

education in which boys and girls would be educated
together, and education would be open to all classes.
Though written during the period of Romanticism, a
movement known for celebrating sensibility/feeling
over sense/rational thinking, Wollstonecraft warned
against false sensibility, a tendency of women to
become too overtaken by emotional sensitivity.
• Women were ill-prepared for their duties as social
beings and imprisoned in a web of false expectations
that would inevitably make them miserable. She
wanted women to be transformed into rational and
independent beings whose sense of worth came, not
from their appearance, but from their inner perception
of self-command and knowledge.
• Women had to be educated; their minds and bodies
had to be trained. This would make them good
companions, wives, mothers and citizens. Above all it
would make them fully human, that is, beings ruled by
reason and characterised by self-command.
• Besides criticisms of existing pedagogical
practices and theories, most notably
Rousseau's Emile (1762), the Vindication contains
many social and political proposals which range
from a detailed outline of necessary changes in
school curriculum to the suggestion that women
be granted not only civil and political rights, but
have elected representatives of their own.

• It argues that women should be taught skills so

as to be able to support themselves and their
children in widowhood, and never have to marry
or remarry out of financial necessity.
• It seeks to reclaim midwifery for women, against
the encroachment of men into this profession,
and contends that women could be physicians
just as well as nurses. It urges women to extend
their interests to encompass politics and the
concerns of the whole of humanity.

• It also contains advice on how to make marriages

last. In Wollstonecraft's view, marriages ought to
have friendship rather than physical attraction as
their basis. Husbands and wives ought not,
moreover, to be overly intimate and should
maintain a degree of reserve towards each other.
• That she embraced the social and economic
consequences of her vision of happy marriages, based
on friendship and producing the next moral generation
was spelled out further in her subsequent work, An
Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of
the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in
Europe (1794).

• In that work, she endeavoured, amongst other things,

to assess the merits and demerits of the progress of
humanity and establish the causes of French
despotism. The picture she drew
of ancien régime France was of a country ruled by
superstition, and morally and politically degenerate
• In this political climate, Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman called for a
“revolution in female manners.” The proximate
cause of the book was as a rebuttal to Jean-
Jacques Rousseau’s immensely influential book
Emile, which relegated the education of girls to a
role that supported men.

• But Vindication was more than this. In it,

Wollstonecraft exploded a political double
standard and applied the concept of inalienable
rights to women as well as men. The new
Vindication became Wollstonecraft’s manifesto.
• One of the most insightful eulogies to Wollstonecraft was
written over a hundred years later by another iconoclastic
female author, Virginia Woolf. Of Wollstonecraft, Woolf
wrote,
“She whose sense of her own existence was so intense,
who had cried out even in her misery, ‘I cannot bear to
think of being no more — of losing myself — nay it appears
to me impossible that I should cease to exist,’ died at the
age of 38. But she has her revenge. Many millions have
died and been forgotten in the 130 years that have passed
since she was buried; and yet as we read her letters and
listen to her arguments and consider her experiments,
above all that most fruitful experiment, her relations with
Godwin, and realize the high-handed and hot-blooded
manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, one
form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and
active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and
trace her influence even now among the living.”