Mary Wollstonecraft
London 1792 and the case for women’s rights
Description
In January 1792, a thirty-two-year-old English writer named Mary Wollstonecraft published a book in London called A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The book had been written in six weeks. It was over three hundred pages long, addressed primarily to a French statesman named Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord whose recent report on national education had explicitly excluded women, and it argued, against the prevailing political and educational thought of its time, that women were rational beings whose minds had been deformed by a system of education and social expectation that treated them as decorative objects rather than as full human subjects. The argument was made with unusual directness for the period. The book was an immediate succès de scandale. It would also become one of the founding texts of what would eventually be called feminism.
Wollstonecraft had been writing seriously for a decade by the time the Vindication appeared. She had published a previous book, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, that had positioned her on the radical-republican left of British politics during the early French Revolution. She had been a regular contributor to the Analytical Review under the editorship of Joseph Johnson, who was the central figure of the London radical intellectual circle that included William Godwin, William Blake, Thomas Paine, and a generation of dissenting Protestants and political reformers. The Vindication of the Rights of Woman emerged from this network and addressed it as much as it addressed the broader European reading public.
The book’s argument has had an unusual fate. It would become, over the next two centuries, the foundational text of liberal feminism the position that women, like men, are rational beings and ought to be treated as such by the legal, educational, and political institutions of any society that claimed to operate on rational principles. The position has been substantially absorbed into the formal commitments of contemporary Western democracies. It has also been substantially contested by subsequent feminist traditions that have argued that Wollstonecraft’s framework its dependence on a particular conception of rationality, its hostile attitude toward what she called feminine weakness, its general preference for the masculine virtues embedded problems that later feminism has had to work through.
The question we’re asking: what did Wollstonecraft actually argue in the Vindication, why did it take two centuries for the argument to be substantially accepted, and what survives of her framework in contemporary feminist thought?
What we’ll see: the London context, the structure of the argument, the long career of the book, and what survives.
Table of contents
01A radical Englishwoman in revolutionary London
Mary Wollstonecraft had been born in 1759 in Spitalfields, London, into a family on a downward economic trajectory. Her father had inherited money from a successful silk-weaver grandfather and spent most of it on failed agricultural ventures. The household was violent; her father drank heavily and beat her mother, and Mary, in her adolescence, took up the practice of sleeping on the landing outside her parents’ bedroom to physically interpose herself during the worst nights.
Her early career was unusual for a woman of her background. She worked as a lady’s companion in Bath, opened a school in Newington Green, and took a position as governess to an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family in County Cork. Each role ended badly. By 1787, at twenty-eight, she had decided to attempt a career as a professional writer in London an unusual decision for a woman of her time, and a financially risky one.
02The argument the book made
The central claim of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was that women were rational beings. The argument sounds, in contemporary ears, so obvious that it is hard to recognize what was at stake. In the late eighteenth century, the dominant view across European political thought including Rousseau’s Émile, which Wollstonecraft addresses at length in the book was that women possessed a different kind of mental constitution than men. Women were, on the standard view, emotional rather than rational, intuitive rather than analytic, designed by nature for domestic and decorative roles rather than for the kind of intellectual and civic life that men pursued. The implication was that women’s education ought to be different from men’s, that women’s political rights were correspondingly limited, and that women’s social roles were determined by their natural constitution.
Wollstonecraft’s argument cut through this framework directly. The differences between women and men, she argued, were not natural. They were produced by education. Women were educated to be decorative, dependent, and emotionally manipulable, and the education was effective. The women who emerged from this system had been made into the creatures the system claimed they naturally were. The argument was a sociological observation as much as a philosophical claim. The same rational faculties that men used to navigate the world were present in women, but had been deliberately atrophied through a system of upbringing that treated rational development as inappropriate to the female sex.
03The reception, the suppression, and the long recovery
The Vindication had a substantial immediate reception. The book sold well, was widely reviewed, and produced a substantial public discussion in the first eighteen months after publication. The reviews were divided. The radical press was enthusiastic. The conservative press was hostile, often personally. The book was being read seriously by 1793, was already being argued about in Parliament by 1795, and looked, in its first reception, like a major intervention in the broader political conversation about rights and equality that the French Revolution had opened.
The reception then collapsed, and the collapse had a specific cause. Wollstonecraft had moved to Paris in late 1792, become involved with an American businessman named Gilbert Imlay, had a daughter with him, been abandoned, and attempted suicide twice. In 1797 she married William Godwin and died eleven days after the birth of their daughter, also Mary, who would later marry Percy Bysshe Shelley and write Frankenstein. Godwin, in his grief, published a memoir disclosing the suicide attempts, the affair with Imlay, and the unconventional sexual history. The memoir destroyed her public reputation.
04What survives, two and a quarter centuries on
The argument Wollstonecraft made in 1792 has been substantially absorbed into the formal commitments of contemporary Western democracies. Women have access to education on the same terms as men in most developed countries. Women have the legal right to participate in political and professional life. Women’s economic independence has been recognized as a precondition for full citizenship. The specific institutional consequences Wollstonecraft argued for in the book have, with significant variation and with continuing exceptions, been implemented. The argument that took two centuries to be accepted has, in this sense, become the operating consensus of the societies that descended from the British and French Enlightenment.
The implementation has been substantially partial. The structural conditions Wollstonecraft addressed the division of household labor, the assumption of women’s primary responsibility for childcare, the cultural expectations shaping women’s professional possibilities have proved more resistant to formal legal change than the visible exclusions her book attacked. The work Wollstonecraft’s framework did not fully address has been done by subsequent feminist traditions analyzing patriarchy as a structural system.
05Conclusion
Mary Wollstonecraft died in London in September 1797, at thirty-eight, from septic complications eleven days after the birth of her second daughter. She did not live to see the long career her book would have. The book itself was largely unreadable in respectable society for the better part of a century after her death.
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