Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759-September
10, 1797), a revolutionary advocate of equal rights for women, was an
inspiration for both the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century women's movements.
Wollstonecraft was not merely a woman's rights advocate. She asserted the
innate rights of all people, whom she thought victims of a society that
assigned people their roles, comforts, and satisfactions according to the false
distinctions of class, age, and gender.
Mary endured a difficult childhood, denied the advantages and affection
lavished on her older brother. She often had to protect her mother from the
drunken rage of her father, the son of a master weaver from London who tried
unsucessfully to set himself up as a gentleman farmer. Many other
eighteenth-century girls had to endure similar injustices and hardships. It was
Mary's genius that allowed her to rise above these severe handicaps and
transform her experience into a dream of a reordered society. As a young woman
Wollstonecraft supported herself as a lady's companion, seamstress, governess,
and schoolteacher. She was largely self-educated.
From 1782 until 1785 Wollstonecraft was a
congregant at the Unitarian chapel at Newington Green, during which time she
was influenced by its minister, Richard Price. Through her friendship with Dr.
Price she entered a circle of intellectuals and radicals, including Joseph
Priestley, Thomas Paine, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, William Blake, and William
Godwin. Between 1788 and 1792 she was a translator and reviewer for publisher
Joseph Johnson. Her work frequently appeared in his periodical, Analytical
Review. Johnson, a distributor of Unitarian literature, often hosted
meetings and dinners that included Paine, Priestley, and Price.
In response to criticism of Price in Edmund
Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Wollstonecraft
immediately wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men. This work was
overshadowed by another response to Burke, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man,
which followed several months later. In Rights of Men Wollstonecraft
presented her vision of a society, based upon equality of opportunity, in which
talent—not the wrongful privileges of gentility—would be the requisite for
success. Paine and Wollstonecraft were accused in the press of seeking to
"poison and inflame the minds of the lower class of his Majesty's subjects
to violate their subordination." When Paine was later burnt in effigy for
his support of Revolutionary France, there was public talk of subjecting
Wollstonecraft to the same treatment.
Wollstonecraft decided to devote her next
treatise to women's rights, a topic that had never before been dealt with at
any length. The resulting A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
was, in part, her response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, in Emile
(1762), had recommended that girls be given a different education from boys, one
that would train them to be submissive and manipulative. In Rights of Woman
Wollstonecraft argued that the rights of man which she had previously espoused
applied equally and unconditionally to women as a just God could not have
created one human being superior to another. She sought to overturn centuries
of Judeo-Christian teaching that women, having no separate moral identity,
depended upon their husbands for a spiritual relationship with God.
Wollstonecraft boldly declared that all people-men, women, and children-have a
right to an independent mind. She envisioned a society in which women could be
educated and work alongside men as co-equals in every pursuit. She advocated
equal citizenship for both sexes, giving everyone "a direct share in deliberations
of government." Wollstonecraft opposed war and all forms of oppression.
"Let there be no coercion established in society," she said,
"and, the common law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into their
proper places." An advocate of universal self-reliance and responsibility,
she did not wish that women should exercise "power over men," only
"over themselves."
The historian Henry Noel Brailsford, in Shelley,
Godwin, and Their Circle (1913), considered the Rights of Woman
"perhaps the most original book of its century." "What was
absolutely new in the world's history," he thought, "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."
Rights of Woman reached a wide audience in its day. It went into two editions in Britain,
and was shortly available in America, where it was read by Judith Sargent
Murray as well as John and Abigail Adams. It was often reviewed. Some reviewers thought
the book "unfeminine," judgment with which Wollstonecraft did not,
perhaps, disagree. Others thought that her views on education were sensible.
One reader declared that the book "first induced me to think."
Wollstonecraft embraced a religion that combined
faith with reason, morality with knowledge, and which placed no limits on human
inquiry. "I submit to the moral laws which my reason deduces," she
said. "It is not to an arbitrary will, but to unerring reason." She
rejected the notion that the faculty of reason is exclusively a male attribute.
"Who made man the exclusive judge?" she asked. In particular, she
challenged the dogma and authoritarianism of the Church of England, decrying
"slavery to forms which make religion worse than a farce." Like many
religious liberals she took issue with the doctrine of original sin "on
which priests have erected their tremendous structures of imposition, that we
are all naturally inclined to evil." Rather she wished to "leave room
for the expansion of the human heart." Her fundamental religious beliefs
were not borrowed from her Deist friends or anyone else. She sensed the
presence of the God in nature and recorded a mystical experience in which her
"soul rested on itself, and seemed to fill the universe." Like
religious liberals in all ages, Wollstonecraft believed that "True grace
arises from some kind of independence of mind."
To alleviate the ills of an unjust society,
Wollstonecraft called for educational reform, including co-education, that
would benefit men and women alike. "Day schools, for particular ages,
should be established by government, in which boys and girls might be educated
together." She thought that children and youth were subject to "a slavish
bondage to parents" which "cramps every faculty of the mind."
Likening excessive respect for property to "a poisoned fountain,"
Wollstonecraft recommended that large estates be divided into small farms. She
decried slavery to "monarchs and ministers" and "the preposterous
distinctions of rank which render civilization a curse."
At the end of 1792 Wollstonecraft moved to
France to observe and write a book about the French Revolution. During part of
her residence in France she became the common-law wife of the American writer
and adventurer Gilbert Imlay, who some years later abandoned her, causing her
to go through a period of despair. Afterward Wollstonecraft resumed her work on
the Analytical Review. During the next two years Mary was courted by,
and finally married, her friend William Godwin. She died giving birth to their
daughter, Mary (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley).
Wollstonecraft endured calumny for what she
wrote and, for daring to write at all, but was never vengeful or abusive. In
the closing weeks of her short life, she said, "Those who know me know I
acted from principle." Nearly a century later Susan B. Anthony and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton dedicated their History of Women's Suffrage
(1881) to her.
Wollstonecraft's letters have been gathered and
edited by Ralph M. Wardle and published as Collected Letters of Mary
Wollstonecraft (1979). Along with the works mentioned above Wollstonecraft
wrote Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, with Reflections on Female
Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life (1787), Mary, a Fiction
(1788), Original Stories from Real Life (1788), An Historical and
Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), Letters
Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) and The
Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798). The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft
(1989), edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, have been issued in seven
volumes. Janet Todd also edited A Wollstonecraft Anthology (1977). The
writing of Wollstonecraft is included in the more general anthologies Feminism:
The Essential Historical Writings (1972) edited by Miriam Schneir and The
Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir (1973) edited by Alice S. Rossi.
Immediately after her death Wollstonecraft's
husband William Godwin wrote Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (1798). Modern biographies include Mary Wollstonecraft:
A Critical Biography (1966) by Ralph M. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: Her
Life and Times (1971) by Edna Nixon, Mary Wollstonecraft (1972) by
Eleanor Flexner, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974) by
Claire Tomalin, A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1975)
by Emily Sunstein, and, most recently, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Revolutionary
Life (2000) by Janet Todd. Wollstonecraft's influence on British Unitarians
is related in Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England:
1760-1860 (1998). The influence of Richard Price on Wollstonecraft is
addressed in Saba Bahar, "Richard Price and the Moral Foundation of Mary
Wollstonecraft's Feminism," in Enlightenment and Dissent (1999).
Article by Louis Worth Jones
All material copyright Unitarian
Universalist Historical Society (UUHS) 1999-2008
URL http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/marywollstonecraft.html
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