In Search of Mary (25 page)

Like Wollstonecraft’s life, the work ends prematurely. It’s unfinished, and we’ll never know how she intended to leave it. I hug the book. We’ve been through so much together that surely it’s now time I called her Mary. But finally I realize I never will. It has to be the implacable, irreplaceable, unspellable Wollstonecraft. Woll. Stone. Craft. I’ve long imagined some
future encounter where I overcome my girl-crush, we get on first-name terms and become BFFs. But that’s just another treasure trail led astray. That closure will never happen, not even here in California. There are millions of Marys. There is, and will only ever be, one Wollstonecraft.

The next morning I take Will back to the diner. All I want to hear is that someone helped the woman, that she had a baby and they’re both safe, that a partner’s stroking her hair, that the girl will get to hold her sibling. Please, please. We hover anxiously by the counter in front of a row of intimidating multi-coloured doughnuts. Some are wet-look, some are studded. They are like British doughnuts gone to a specialist nightclub.

It’s a different waiter at the diner today. The name badge on her uniform says Soraya. She’s small and tired, with a scraped ponytail, gold hoop earrings and mauve lipstick. I ask her about the woman and yesterday’s waiter, but Soraya doesn’t know. She doesn’t even know whose shift it was yesterday: “Sorry ma’am”. Today is just another long day at work. The city streams on, and life is quietly hard, and no one can change what happened. Right here is the cruelty of non-fiction. I buy a frosted doughnut that will make me feel even sicker. We leave a huge tip that in no way makes up for yesterday’s failings.

And on we go.

Chapter Sixteen

I’ve Drunk of These Cups and I’m Walking away

Back to the dazzling murals and gracious sweep of the Women’s Building. Walking up Eighteenth Street I get a rush of affection when we see the building from afar, with its bonkers rainbow exterior. “Look, Will: we’re back again – remember this place?” He runs in the large door, where the Spanish-speaking receptionist and the purposeful buzz welcome us back in. Kids spill out of a
quinceañera
party with music in the main hall, people are queuing for tax-advice sessions and the computer-skills area is bustling. There’s even a place to change Will’s nappy that doesn’t involve public toilets. It’s a grounding place, if that’s not putting it too Californianly.

It’s also a place where I hope I can take my questions forward a generation: we’ve come to meet Bettina Aptheker’s notional granddaughters: the Goddess Grrrls. Tina and Heidi are my generation, just-forties women, running a course for girls. The leaflet has a big love heart and the words “Activate. Enlighten. Empower: A rite of passage training, for girls aged 10 to 13”. Tina is a dancer, Heidi is a child psychologist. Tina twists around, moves her hands and perches lightly on a bent-under leg as she speaks.

“I used to work with Planned Parenthood. The doctor I worked with in upstate New York was murdered by anti-abortion campaigners. I’d been there three years, and suddenly we were being trained how to deactivate bombs and deal with anthrax. We were a roomful of health educators, nurses and midwives, with this secret-service guy who’s teaching us about bombs. I totally lost it. I returned to dancing, but still wanted to work with health and empowerment for girls. And right here is where that comes together: with Goddess Grrrls!”

Will is pottering round the room, finding small spaces to hide the car keys in. “So is the course a modern-day version of consciousness-raising?” I ask. “A way to introduce girls to feminism?”

“Well, I completely identify as a feminist,” says Tina. “But it’s been made to look angry and unglamorous. The movement has also had its own changes and challenges. If we called this” – she waves a hand around her – “a Feminism course, then I think the girls and maybe even the parents would be suspicious. This has always been a problem.”

“Feminism by stealth – has the label become so toxic?”

“Well, even as it evolves there are new problems,” says Heidi. “Take the Third Wave, with things like burlesque and feminist porn. There’s a lot of play with exploitation and experimentation. Sometimes this is problematic. I studied with someone who said: ‘I’m going to sleep with hundreds of men: this is my feminist performance art.’ We were kind of worried about that. But I guess it all comes under the wider umbrella—”

(Will stoops down and lets out a noisy fart. We burst out laughing and lose our thread. Keep your opinions to yourself there, sonny.) This is a tricky one to untangle. For me, the showgirl roots run deep: I enjoy some camp sparkle and a high heel just as much as the next rebellious child of the bare-foot, straggly Seventies. But feminism with tassles? Perhaps the Third Wave has gone to some unexpected places. I resolve to ask Wollstonecraft’s advice at the first opportunity.

“So this umbrella – if it keeps on getting wider, that’s bound to cause internal problems, isn’t it?”

“No,” says Tina. “These debates should happen. I’m glad there are places to keep the discourse going. Young people need information, to approach the media critically. And they need to respect their bodies, which is the opposite of the images that inundate them daily. And that’s why we’re here.”

Heidi and Tina have to get their classroom ready before the trainee Goddess Grrrls arrive. But they ask if I’d like to come back and give a short talk about ‘Following Your Dreams’. I’m flattered. Training young Goddesses? “I’d love to!” I offer to tell them all about the short but extraordinary life of the great Mary Wollstonecraft, and how you too can hit the road and explore the world, even with a baby.
Especially
with a baby.

While they prepare the room, Will and I head to the nearby Bi-Rite Creamery. It smells of a bygone sugary heaven, has slightly too fashionable deli tiles and is full of thin people eating fat food. We get a large ice cream for Will. That ought to keep him occupied during my goddess lecture. And we scamper back over to the Women’s Building, where the girls are sitting ready in a circle. They’re a sweet collection of awkward
pre-teens, with an air of resignation about what their parents have gone and signed them up for now.

I do my best sizzling hyper-account of Wollstonecraft’s life: it needs no sexing up, and I give it both barrels. The time she rushes alone to Portugal to save her best friend – the time she serves France’s top diplomat wine in a cracked teacup – the time she forces a ship’s captain to rescue some shipwrecked sailors… It’s all going brilliantly; look at their faces!

Gradually it dawns on me that the smiles, nudges and gasps of “oh-my-God” and “aww” aren’t for me, or even for Wollstonecraft. Behind me, in his buggy, Will has been fashioning himself a large beard and moustache out of ice cream. A brown cascade has dripped all down his front and his legs, and he’s beaming. The chocolate varmint is working the crowd like a pro. Wollstonecraft never stood a chance.

Despite the sugar rush and the tide of admiration, Will soon settles down for a nap, and I get time to have a look at the tassle question. So what would Wollstonecraft say to Third Wave feminism? I recall Roberta trying to fabricate a Wollstonecraftian social media response on the subject of the SlutWalks. And how her offer was abruptly declined.

The fact is, Wollstonecraft was a strong believer in the now extremely unfashionable notion of modesty. I’m loath to allow her to appear fusty and out of touch, but you’re going to have to trust me here. We’ve come all this way, so please bear with her now. There’s a whole chapter full of modesty in the
Vindication
. It begins:

Flipping heck, this latter-day L’Oréal advert doesn’t half go on. She’s really not helping me out here. How, exactly, will smooth-’n’-soft modesty that “spreadest the ethereal cloud” help women get equal pay, for example? Luckily the intro soon calms down and gives way to some sense among the weirdness. Interestingly, she first discusses modesty in relation to men. No less a triumvirate than John Milton, George Washington and Jesus Christ passes the modesty test. This is because they are high achievers, without arrogance or fear.

In fairness, if some of Wollstonecraft’s turns of phrase sound so dated as to be barely intelligible, it’s worth checking out the voices of some of those around her at the time. Such as the one that appears in her discussion of women being denied access to the study of botany:

Were women really blocked from what appears to be an appropriately ladylike field of study? As so often happens with Wollstonecraft, I get drawn further afield by the questions she provokes. Might those poor ladies fall prey to a vagtastic orchid opening wide its provocative throat, and become irredeemably corrupted? Wollstonecraft herself was fully up to speed on developments in natural history, through her hundreds of articles and translations for the
Analytical Review
.

And according to the redoubtable research team at Kew Gardens, botany was indeed “considered to be a feminine pursuit … popular among British ladies from before 1753, including Queen Charlotte”. The first woman formally to name a plant species was Elizabeth Blackwell, who published in 1757 to earn the money to get her husband out of debtors’ prison. But then, guess what? Countless women discovered new species only to have them written up and published by male authors.

A certain youngster named Beatrix Potter submitted her research on fungus species to the then Director of Kew, William Turner Thiselton-Dyer. It was rejected, and she was barred from presenting her work. Even though she was ultimately proven right, her theories were credited to a male German scientist. Small wonder that over 97% of the plant species discovered between 1753 and 2013 are named after men. And ultimately botany’s loss was children’s literature’s gain. That’ll be
Ms
Tiggy-Winkle, thank you.

Anyway where were we? Back to Wolly and Modesty. She’s going full throttle now as she moves on to examine what it means in everyday social interactions.

Not a fan of ye olde wolf whistle, then. The solution to this kind of behaviour, she says, is to develop “the modest respect of humanity and fellow feeling”
.
While some of the chapter’s more outlandish extracts do read like an ancient etiquette guide, its distillation is practical: modesty is a mutual form of respect. This may not be a resoundingly cool or dazzling thing to say. But it’s useful. Definitely useful.

When she wrote the
Vindication
, Wollstonecraft had never actually had sex, and she can at times come across as a bit prim and disapproving. Here, though, she freely acknowledges sexual desire:

By which she means the obligation to be less rampant is on everyone. It’s not just down to those wanton young fillies inviting sexual assault by wearing skirts – no.
Everyone
. By
the end of the chapter, I’m fairly persuaded by this argument that “modesty must be equally cultivated by both sexes”. Even so, by her own admission, “men will probably still insist that woman ought to have more modesty than man”.

Still perplexing, though, is the nature of the word itself. It has a doomed edge, a taint of oldness and starch. And pretty much no chance of rehabilitation. Until fairly recently, modesty might have invoked the idea of someone blushing, or perhaps living in a small house. Fair dos. But not any more. Modesty seems to have long departed Wollstonecraft’s prized realm of Reason, and taken up exclusive lodgings with religion.

They must be out there, but I haven’t yet seen any fully veiled or bewigged women on the streets of San Francisco. But back in London there it is: the regular sight of women draped and covered up. Wollstonecraft deemed modesty equally important for men and women. In which case, full blackout veils are totally fine. As long as the gentlemen use them too, covering up when they’re not under the watchful care of a lady chaperone. Just in case, you know.

“OK Will, I think this is it…” We’re standing on the street, looking up at a fairly ordinary Mission District house. This is our final San Franciscan encounter. We’re here for one last rumble with the Seventies, my native decade and the source of my Second Wave worries. And it’s right here, with Deborah. Deborah is a witch, a member of the Reclaiming Coven. The group originated in the Seventies with the merging of paganism and political activism.

From outside, Deborah’s house looks like all the others, with its wooden boards and bay windows. I tentatively ring the doorbell, and it takes a while for the door to open. Deborah has an open face, a wide smile and cheekbones, blue eyes and bright-white hair. She’s very attractive indeed. She doesn’t look at all like a witch, I think, only just hiding my disappointment.

Deborah invites us inside and up some long steep stairs to her home. It’s like a pomegranate: ordinary on the outside and bursting inside with jewel colours and sparkly towers of encrusted intricate stuff. Every space has rainbow light flickering in the afternoon sun. Glittering beads hang from chandeliers. Love hearts, tiles, flowers, collages, silk cushions, icons, petals, glitter, joyful kitsch. There’s an Elvis altar. And a magnet on her fridge saying “Does my fat ass make my ass look fat?”