MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND

THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN

1792

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore them to their lost dignity – and make them as a part of the human species.

Mary Wollstonecraft,
Vindication of the Rights of Woman

RECIPES FOR CHANGING THE WORLD FLOWED from the presses during the 1790s. Inspired by the French Revolution, they made a torrent of passion-filled pamphlets, and until quite recently most historians felt that Tom Paine’s Rights of Man held pride of place among them. But as we have sought to explain how society is changing in our own times, we have come to focus more closely on a friend of Paine’s whose visionary work was derided at the time and overlooked for nearly two centuries – Mary Wollstonecraft and her Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

‘I am not born to tread in the beaten track,’ declared this brave, insurgent and ultimately tragic woman who is now seen as the first modern feminist. On her birth in April 1759 she was handed over by her mother to be breast-fed by a ‘wet nurse’ – the normal practice in middle and upper-class families. Mary would criticise wet-nursing bitterly in later life: a mother’s love, she wrote, ‘scarcely deserves the name, when it does not lead her to suckle her children’. But she felt still more anger at the behaviour of her father Edward, a drunken and violent tyrant who lorded it over his womenfolk, beating Mary, bullying his wife, and wasting the family fortune on a succession of snobbish attempts to become a country gentleman. As a child Mary would sleep on the landing outside her mother’s door in a vain attempt to protect her from Edward Wollstonecraft’s alcohol-fuelled anger.

Wives were considered to be the property of their husbands in the eighteenth century. The marriage laws were, in effect, property laws that gave a man ownership of his wife, her money and her children: divorce was virtually impossible.

‘How short a time does it take,’ reflected Fanny Burney after spending a few hours at a friend’s wedding in the 1780s, ‘to put an eternal end to a woman’s liberty?’

It was taken for granted that a man could beat his womenfolk – a court case of 1782 confirmed that beating was legal, provided the stick was no thicker than the man’s thumb. And the idea that a woman of quality might want to work to support herself was dismissed as downright crazy.

Mary was a working woman, compelled by her father’s improvidence to earn her living as a nurse, seamstress, schoolmistress, governess and eventually as a campaigning writer. In 1787 at the age of twenty-eight she published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in which she argued (as a girl who had hated playing with dolls) that women should pursue the same serious studies as men. Education, in her view, was the key to self-respect and hence to female empowerment, the theme of her great work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which she wrote in six furious weeks in 1792. ‘I wish,’ she explained, ‘to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body.’

Mary’s Vindication fiercely disputed the idea that women were the weaker sex. They were not naturally inferior, she argued, but they had tricked themselves into seeing their life’s duty as the pleasing of men. ‘Confined . . . in cages like the feathered race’, she wrote disdainfully, women were raised as fine ‘ladies’ rather than as capable workers, with ‘nothing to do but plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch’. She was particularly alert to ‘the selfish vanity of beauty’ and poured scorn on society women, trapped in their carriages ‘that drive helter-skelter about this metropolis . . . pale-faced creatures who are flying from themselves’.

Published in England, Ireland, France, Germany and the USA, Mary’s trenchantly argued Vindication provoked strong feelings. Horace Walpole, the gossipy youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, denounced her as a ‘hyena in petticoats’. But radical thinkers like Tom Paine applauded her and welcomed her to Paris in 1792, when she arrived to write her own account of the French Revolution – which, as the twentieth-century champion of women’s writing, Virginia Woolf, later wrote, was not merely an event to Mary. ‘The revolution . . . was an active agent in her own blood. She had been in revolt all her life – against tyranny, against law, against convention.’

In Paris she met Captain Gilbert Imlay, a handsome American land speculator with whom she defied convention by embarking on a tempestuous love affair, bearing a daughter out of wedlock in May 1794. But the romance cooled, and returning to London, Mary discovered that Imlay had a mistress. In despair she rented a rowing-boat that took her to Putney, where she threw herself from the bridge, having walked up and down in the pouring rain for half an hour to drench her clothes and make sure she would sink.

Mary was rescued. The recently established Royal Humane Society was offering rewards to boatmen who foiled would-be suicides, and one of these dragged Mary from the water. The mixture of depression and resolve that characterised her suicide attempt ran right through her life. Volatile and self-dramatising, with a deep-rooted sense of personal grievance, she was emotionally fragile, but she kept on fighting the male-dominated conventions of her day. In her uncompleted novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, she advanced the shocking assertion that a woman could have sexual desires that were as strong as a man’s.

In 1797 Mary fell pregnant again, by William Godwin, a critic and reformer in whom she finally found a soulmate. Godwin shared her contempt for marriage – Mary had condemned the institution as tyranny and legalised prostitution, deciding at the age of twelve that she would never marry and suffer her mother’s fate. But she and Godwin married anyway, and enjoyed five months of happiness before Mary died that September, following the birth of another daughter.

This Mary, like her mother, would defy convention, running off with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and writing the myth-making novel Frankenstein, the story of a man who fashioned a creature that he thought he could control, but which escaped from his power and eventually destroyed him.