Feminism (6 page)

well as from her contempt for the frivolity of so many fashionable
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women. It was soon followed by
Mary, A Fiction
, which, for all its sketchiness, remains an interesting account of growing up in a society that offers girls little support and few prospects. (The titles of both her novels,
Mary
,
A Fiction
and the late, unfinished
Maria;
Or the Wrongs of Women
, surely hint that the stories are directly rooted in her own experience.) Mary, who is intelligent and full of

‘sensibility’, struggles towards fulfilment in a society that offers her few opportunities. Wollstonecraft acknowledges – and begins to explore – some intriguing emotional paradoxes. Her heroine protests bitterly against masculine dominance and violence, but still dreams of protective fatherly love; she both pities her victimized mother and is full of resentment. The older woman is portrayed as indolent, wasting her time reading sentimental novels and dwelling on the love scenes. In the end, after a series of losses, Mary decides to live for others, becoming a dutiful ‘feminine’

woman, whose life, sadly, is an echo of her mother’s. Wollstonecraft may have lacked the skill to develop her characters fully, and the 32

book was not widely reviewed; but it remains an intriguing and revealing attempt to explore some of the dilemmas with which she herself was confronted.

By 1790, Wollstonecraft was feeling confident enough to tackle politics;
A Vindication of the Rights of Man
is a scathing – and occasionally unpleasantly personal – attack on Edmund Burke’s conservative
Reflections Upon the Revolution in France
. She accuses him of sentimentality, and, indeed, a kind of corrupt femininity; she compares him to a ‘celebrated beauty’ desperate for admiration; he is a fantasist, not a serious thinker. Her great feminist polemic,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, followed in 1792; she sets out to speak ‘for my sex, not for myself ’, though she admits that ‘most of the struggles of an eventful life have been
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occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex’. She takes the simple but crucial step of extending the rights of
man
, which had been asserted during the French Revolution, to
woman
.

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If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation,
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those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test . . . Who made man the exclusive judge, if women partake
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with him of the gift of reason?

Wollstonecraft admitted that, in the times in which she lived, women
were
inferior; oppressed from birth, uneducated, and insulated from the real world, most women, inevitably, grew up ignorant and lazy.

Taught from their infancy that beauty is a woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison.

Masculine gallantry and flattery are seen simply as attempts to keep women in their places, and the most ‘feminine’ woman is the one who best fulfils male fantasies. Femininity, she argues, is too often an artificial, class-based construct, no more than an anxious 33

Olympe de Gouges

In 1791, in revolutionary France, Olympe de Gouges issued a

Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen
,
arguing, clearly and forcefully, that woman is born free, and
equal to man. In de Gouges’ account, in the old days, a
woman who was beautiful and amiable would be offered a
hundred fortunes, but she was little more than a slave. Now
that she has, at least in theory, rights to liberty, property, and
security, and the right to resist oppression, she must be free
to mount the rostrum and speak – just as, on occasion, she
has had to mount the scaffold. Like man, she is subject to the
law, and may be accused and tried according to the law. But
that means that woman must also be granted an equal
responsibility for public life and in decisions about law and
taxation; as well as the right to insist that a man recognizes
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his own children. In the past, both married and unmarried
women have been disadvantaged, and survived by exploiting
their charm. In future, de Gouges insisted, they must be free
to share all man’s activities. More practically, she spells out a
detailed ‘social contract’ that would protect any woman – and
any man – who chose to unite their lives.

demonstration of gentility, or would-be gentility. Girls
learn
how to be women when they are hardly more than babies; as they grow older, and in the absence of any alternative, they exploit this femininity. This, she argues, is a covert admission of women’s inferiority; but women are no more ‘naturally’ inferior than the poor are ‘naturally’ stupid or ignorant. Moreover, she added, all the women she knew who had acted like rational creatures, or shown any vigour of intellect, had accidentally been allowed to run wild as children. She not only argued forcefully for better education for 34

girls, but for something new in her day:
universal
education, at least to the age of 9.

Any woman who tries to act like a human being, Wollstonecraft remarks, risks being labelled ‘masculine’, and she admits that the fear of being thought unwomanly runs very deep in her sex. But if

‘masculinity’ means behaving rationally and virtuously, she recommends that we all ‘grow more and more masculine’. Even though she defends women’s
potential
powers – their capacity for all kinds of intellectual activity – she was scathing about the
actual
behaviour of many of her contemporaries. ‘Told from their infancy and taught by the examples of their mothers’ that they must find a man to support them, they learn to exploit their charms and looks until they find a man willing to support them. They rarely think –

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and have few genuine feelings. But Wollstonecraft also accepted that, though better education for women is all-important, it cannot change everything: ‘Men and women must be educated in a great
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degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.’ And
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without a radical change in society, there can be no real ‘revolution
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in female manners’. In this present state of things, she finds it hardly surprising that so many women are ignorant, lazy, and
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irresponsible.

It is interesting, and rather sad, that other women – even some highly literate ones – were among Wollstonecraft’s sharpest critics.

Hannah More, for example, refused even to read Wollstonecraft’s book because its very title was ‘absurd’; while Hannah Cowley protested coyly that ‘politics are
unfeminine
’.

Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication
may seem, at first glance, dated. But she is an effective writer; her prose is down-to-earth, lively, and often tart. The book is still highly readable, and it remains one of the foundation stones of contemporary feminism. Her argument is circular and, because it is exploratory, often breaking new ground, can seem at times confused. She was sharply, sometimes bitterly, aware of the personal difficulties that women experienced in her 35

society. She argued, for example, that an understanding of childhood is central to any self-knowledge. The ability to recognize one’s own childishness is crucial to maturity: ‘till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child – long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it’. A few months later, she wrote sadly to the philosopher and novelist William Godwin that ‘my imagination is forever betraying me into fresh misery, and I perceive that I shall be a child to the end of the chapter’.

As we have seen, Wollstonecraft’s story
Mary, A Fiction
, based in part on her own childhood and her difficult relationship with her parents, is an intriguing attempt to explore the way women grow up. (It is also an occasionally heavy-handed celebration of her heroine’s
sensibility
, that capacity for true feeling that sets her apart from other people.) The book draws on Wollstonecraft’s painful recognition of the way unresolved feelings from childhood so often dominate, and even pervert, adult relationships; how, throughout
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our lives, we may be unknowingly re-enacting dramas rooted in the
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past. Women, she argued in the
Vindication
, are given little encouragement to become truly adult; they are ‘made women of when they are mere children, and brought back to childhood when they ought to leave the go-cart forever’. But any girl ‘whose spirits have not been damped by inactivity, or innocence by false shame, will always be a romp, and the doll will never excite attention unless confinement allows her no alternative’.

In
Thoughts on Education
, she had insisted that marriage should be based on friendship and respect rather than love; in the
Vindication
she claimed, dismissively, that most women remain obsessed by love, dreaming of happiness with some ideal and truly loving man, simply because their lives are so empty. But it is in part Wollstonecraft’s inconsistencies, her implicit recognition that there are no easy solutions to the problems she explores, that make her such an enduringly interesting writer. She sadly acknowledges that even the most sensible people are likely to fall prey to ‘violent and 36

3. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the first English women to write
eloquently, and at times angrily, about the rights of women – and the
wrongs they often experience. Her writings have never really gone out
of fashion, and a great many modern women have responded eagerly,
and gratefully, to her work.

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constant passion’; as she found, to her cost, when, on a visit to Paris in 1793, she met and fell in love with the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay. Her letters, after a happy beginning, become increasingly desperate as she complains about his blatant indifference. Pregnant by Imlay and thoroughly miserable, she still managed to work hard on her
Historical View of the Origin and
Progress of the French Revolution
. Her attitude to women revolutionaries was ambiguous, to say the least, and affected, perhaps, by her anxiety, given her personal situation, to assert her own respectability. When, in October 1789, Paris marketwomen marched to Versailles and invaded the palace to put their complaints to the king, Wollstonecraft had no sympathy at all. She remarked, shuddering, that they were ‘the lowest refuse of the streets, women who had thrown off the virtues of one sex without having the power to assume more than the vices of the other’.

After her baby, Fanny, was born, she undertook a trip to Sweden (taking along the baby and a nurse) on business for Imlay. Her
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Letters
from the trip, published in 1796, are (unlike her letters from
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Paris) both perceptive and engaging. But when she arrived back in London, she found Imlay living with another woman. She survived a suicide attempt – having thrown herself into the Thames – and eventually married William Godwin.

The unfinished second novel that Wollstonecraft left behind when she died in 1797,
Maria; Or the Wrongs of Women
, is pure melodrama; but perhaps
only
melodramatic exaggeration could help her express her lasting sense of anger and frustration about the situation of women. Her heroine, Maria, has been imprisoned in a madhouse by her vicious and dishonest husband, who wants to gain control of her property. ‘Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?’ she asks.

Perhaps the most interesting section of the book has Maria making friends with her warder, a woman called Jemima, whose story, she discovers, is at least as sad as her own. As a child she was victimized 38

Fiction

Through the 18th century, increasing numbers of women had
been reading prose fiction because it reflected, or commented on, their own hopes and difficulties. But they were
also
writing
novels that often explored the possibilities and
problems in their own lives. Some concentrated on everyday
domestic life; the best of them – Fanny Burney, at times,
certainly Jane Austen – ask serious questions about the
choices facing girls, particularly about marriage and its
consequences.

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‘Gothic’ fiction, which tackled the same questions through
melodrama, was immensely popular. In scores of stories, an
innocently virtuous heroine finds herself in a nightmarish
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world where she has to fight masculine predators for her
chastity, even her survival. The ‘sensibility’ that character-ons of th