THE WORLD AS IT WAS
AS WOLLSTONECRAFT LOOKED AROUND HER, she saw war, poverty, inequality, subjugation, ignorance, and enslavement. Humanity was divided between warring nations, the rich and poor, the envied and the scorned, the enlightened and the prejudiced. She sought to expose the actual condition of humanity and railed against its inequities and, as we saw most particularly so, against slavery. The language and images of enslavement infused her rhetoric as she deplored other types of subjugation: the subjugation of children to parents, of women to men, of men to one another, and the true to the false self. To be sure, her pronouncements on these, as on any other subjects, have to be taken in context; but she condemned all manner of domination and their attendant inequities, even as she was well-aware that some would be very difficult to eradicate. She valued independence and abhorred all forms of dependencies. Unsurprisingly, she had little, if any, acceptance of deference in her own life or writings, and while she does not come across consistently as a leveler of all social distinctions, she came close to that position, if only by implication, on occasion.
She saw the human species as marked by vanity. The desire to shine and thereby stand above others seemed to taint humanity. Burke, Rousseau, and Adam Smith among many contemporary authors also perceived it as such and did so in the wake of many predecessors, such as Hobbes, who described it using a variety of terms, most often “pride.” Her condemnation of the domination of others, be it those of a different race, class, or gender, must not, however, obscure her efforts to highlight what might be called servitudes to the self, through false desires and beliefs, including delusions of superiority or inferiority to others. These she endeavored to expose and she ridiculed them in her writings. Racial, social, interpersonal subjugations and enslavement to one’s own desires and pursuits were intricately related. No form of domination stood on its own, and oppressing others was part and parcel of a web of dependencies, including to false needs and psychological addictions. This makes unraveling her views on any one of these subjects in isolation somewhat challenging and on occasion problematic. While her opinions on these and related issues are recognizable, if not all fully voiced, in her first publications and early correspondence, they came together in her first Vindication, that on the rights of men, arguably her most thought-provoking work. They were then expanded in her second Vindication, where responding to Burke’s Reflections prompted her to attempt to establish the sources of social and political distortions. A Vindication of the Rights of Man, In a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; occasioned by his reflections on the Revolution in France therefore provides much of the basis of what follows, but one needs to also draw on her subsequent works, including her second Vindication, and those written during her time in revolutionary France and her travels in Northern Europe to obtain a better sense of her understanding of the course humanity had taken to arrive at the social order she knew and deplored.
Benevolence, we saw Wollstonecraft perceived as a natural human trait. Yet, she evidently did not think that contemporary society reflected this. It had to be nurtured to be sure, but why had it not been? What, in her view, was the root cause of what was wrong with the world: Social distinctions? Ancient institutions? Hereditary rule? Wealth? Scarcity? Men? Women? Aspects of human nature? However pronounced the wrongs might have been in her own time, Wollstonecraft did not consider the history of mankind as the tale of a fall from an idyllic first or so-called primitive society, least of all as she composed her later books. More often than not, she seemed to think that the rot had in essence set in from the start. Yet hers was not a view of humanity marked by original sin—quite the contrary, as Sapiro and other scholars have rightly argued.1 Mankind as a whole was perfectible, as were individuals.
By the last few years of her tragic life, Wollstonecraft thought better of civilization than she had ever done previously and certainly than she allowed herself to do at the time of her response to what she presented to her readers as Burke’s unqualified defense of the status quo and ancient, or in her word “gothic,” institutions. Yet, she had never entirely condemned it. “The more I see of the world,” she was to write from Gothenburg in the early summer of 1795, “the more I am convinced that civilization is a blessing not sufficiently estimated by those who have not traced its progress; for it not only refines our enjoyments, but provides a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations.”2 Judged by her own standards, she was in an ideal position to appreciate civilization, having just traced its progress, prior to her setting off on her four-month journey through Northern Europe, in her An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe. It is more than likely that composing that work led her to continue to reflect on the history of humanity and the nature of civilization while in Scandinavia.
Although her assessments of the civilizing process in her The French Revolution did not depart entirely from her earlier position on the subject, they were developed and modified to an extent. She had long quarreled with the view—generally associated with Rousseau since his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1754)—that the history of humanity was one of decline, let alone that this was inevitably so. As she had already memorably declared in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: “Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right.”3 Rousseau’s significance as one of Wollstonecraft’s important interlocutors should not be overestimated relative to that of Burke, for instance; given the popularity of his pedagogical work, Émile, ou De l’éducation (1762), throughout Europe, Wollstonecraft could not but engage with it in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, for although she shared its aspiration to raise independent men, she greatly deplored its aim to raise dependent women. The educational prescriptions it contained for women, namely that they should be both a creation for man’s delight and dutiful mothers, epitomized everything she stood against. As we glimpsed already, she mocked or denigrated the man himself and praised him in near equal amounts, going beyond exposing the internal contradictions of the one work she sought to demolish, to deride Rousseau’s other publications. She was well acquainted with his work, not least as a result of having reviewed two translations of Les Pensées de J. J. Rousseau (1763) in October 1788, publications on him, including one by Madame de Staël in May 1789, works that quoted him extensively, and in April 1790, the Second Part of Confessions of J. J. Rousseau (1784). Like Burke, Rousseau shaped part of Wollstonecraft’s thinking, not because she agreed with him, but because clashing with him as she did with the author of Reflections forced her to engage on his intellectual terrain, the questions he had addressed, and the replies he gave to them. As a result, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is so much more than it might have been. What could have been a straightforward treatise itemizing her recommendations for the education of girls became a complex critique of civilization, with reflections on its history mixed with quarrels both old and new with the principal theorists she chose as adversaries, and reflections on the moral and political topics that emerged as a result.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman opens with what might be called “the civilization question,” one that incorporated inquiries about its course, virtues, and failings as well as its engine, its beneficiaries, and its victims. Its introduction begins with the confession: “After considering the historic page, and viewing the living world with anxious solicitude, the most melancholy emotions of sorrowful indignation have depressed my spirits, and I have sighed when obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial.”4 In fact, although she would not own it outright, Wollstonecraft held both these views. She did to some degree think nature had made a great difference between man and man taken as individuals and believed unqualifiedly that civilization had been a very partial phenomenon. In the introduction, she chose to pursue the latter view, namely, that the civilizing process had been uneven. She went on to say that “the neglected education of my fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore; and that women, in particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes.”5 Whatever progress had been achieved and however partial it might be, it had been enjoyed only by men—indeed, only by some men. History was effectively lopsided, a reading of the history of civilization that J. S. Mill was to share in The Subjection of Women (1869).6 The minds of women were not in a healthy state, Wollstonecraft explained; returning to the motif of temporality we saw her emphasize in the previous chapter, she wrote: “for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.”7 One cause of this, she contended, was that females were treated as creatures whose sole aspiration was to inspire love rather than as autonomous rational human beings, “when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.”8 Although she specifically mentioned “the civilized women of the present century,” there was nothing in the rest of the work, or indeed in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, to suggest that this condition was a relatively new occurrence, one without precedent in the history of humanity.
Was that it then? Was the civilization question to be solved by resolving the woman question? Would providing the right kind of education to women be the answer? Would it rectify the lopsided nature of civilization? If there had not been a revolution in France, and Wollstonecraft had not risen to the defense of the Rev. Richard Price in the face of Burke’s attack on him in his Reflections, it is likely that the Vindication of the Rights of Woman would have redressed the wrong by educating the other half of humanity. To be sure, the second Vindication does that, but it is also much more than that precisely because of Wollstonecraft’s reactions to Price, Burke, and the French Revolution.
Thus, the first chapter of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman tackles the civilization question and the nature of mankind with which the work as a whole begins. What distinguished man from the rest of animal creation was reason, Wollstonecraft maintained. The perfection of the species could be measured, she thought, in relation to its development. Wollstonecraft did not deny that it had indeed developed, but, not pointing to the condition of women in this instance, she claimed that most of mankind used their enhanced rational powers to defend prejudices and untruths. These would, of course, have included unsubstantiated notions about femininity and falsehoods about women, but instead of focusing on them, she returned to a subject raised by her engagement with Burke in her first Vindication. Reason had been and was being used against itself, to deprive men (or women) of their natural rights and to justify “the wretchedness that has flowed from hereditary honours, riches, and monarchy” as the “dispensations of providence,” and thus seemingly rational arguments were presenting the evil in the world as the product of unalterable divine will.9 She was throwing a punch in Burke’s direction here, but she immediately launched one toward Rousseau as well. It should be noted from the onset, however, that the Rousseau with whom Wollstonecraft chose to wrestle was not the Rousseau a less combative reading would take him to be. He was not committed to the positions she attributed to him in relation to the state of nature, or at least not as she presented them.
So according to her interpretation of his work, by preferring the state of nature to civilization, Rousseau was also misusing reason. Based on the false hypothesis that man was a solitary animal by nature, his arguments, while “plausible,” were “unsound”; it was “as unphilosophical as impious” to believe that man had been created to live alone in a stationary state, for how could an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God have made all things right, including mankind, and knowingly made it evil and stationary. It was Wollstonecraft’s belief that God had willed the passions to unfold human reason, “because he could see that present evil would produce future good.”10 That was how she dealt with the problem of evil. It was indeed the product of a God-given human nature, but that same nature could, and needed to, be perfected; its intellectual and moral character were perfectible through the activity of the passions, as He willed it. The state of nature, even when rendered by Rousseau’s skillful argumentation, could not possibly be conceived “as a state in which a single virtue took root.”11 That man had been created to remain in a state in which he could not blossom as a moral and rational being was a position wholly incompatible with God’s nature. It would mean that mankind had been created for no purpose other than to decorate His garden. As someone who believed (as she did) in the immortality of the soul, Rousseau could not consistently think such a thing. In a series of rhetorical questions she asked what God’s purpose in creating mankind could conceivably be thought to be if not to improve ourselves through his “inestimable gift” and thus “to rise above the state in which sensation produced brutal ease”:
For why should the gracious fountain of life give us passions, and the power of reflecting, only to imbitter our days and inspire us with mistaken notions of dignity? Why should he lead us from love of ourselves to the sublime emotions which the discovery of his wisdom and goodness excites, if these feelings were not set in motion to improve our nature, of which they make a part, and render us capable of enjoying a more godlike portion of happiness?
By contrast to Rousseau, Wollstonecraft continued, she was “[f]irmly persuaded that no evil exists in the world that God did not design to take place,” and she built this “belief on the perfection of God.”12
Diverging forms of the belief in the perfectibility of man were widely held in the eighteenth century, including by Rousseau and Godwin. As she made clear, Wollstonecraft’s was grounded in a Providential view of human nature. Though she was not to reiterate the point as she did so explicitly in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, there is no reason to think that her trust in perfectibility was stubbed out in the latter part of her life, though the horrors she was to witness in France under the Terror made it falter. As suggested previously, she also appears to have retained her faith until the end of her life, though it too may have wavered at certain low points in her life. Where Rousseau had gone wrong, she contended, was to see only the evils attendant to every stage of society, without thinking of “tracing the gigantic mischief up to arbitrary power, up to hereditary distinctions that clash with the mental superiority that naturally raises a man above his fellows.”13 Having asserted this, Wollstonecraft went on to decry standing armies, the navy, and the clergy. Any profession that required subordination to rank as opposed to ability was necessarily “highly injurious to morality.”14 Given that she made a point of noting their indolence, she might also have added that any profession that allowed for periods of idleness, which standing armies and the navy invariably did, had a negative effect not only on the men themselves but also on the inhabitants, especially the women, of the communities in which they happened to be stationed. We will follow these thoughts further in this chapter. Insofar as her disagreement with Rousseau went, she concluded the first chapter of her second Vindication with the following: “had Rousseau mounted one step higher in his investigation, or could his eye have pierced through the foggy atmosphere, which he almost disdained to breathe, his active mind would have darted forward to contemplate the perfection of man in the establishment of true civilization, instead of taking his ferocious flight back to the night of sensual ignorance.”15 As Rousseau never claimed that such a return was either possible or desirable, though he was widely caricatured as doing so, not least by Voltaire, and as he endeavored to establish the conditions under which man could fulfil his nature in Du Contrat Social (1762), Wollstonecraft can hardly be said to be either a fair or attentive reader of his work, certainly not of that particular work, as Sapiro has rightly noted.16 Fortunately, accurate Rousseauian scholarship was not Wollstonecraft’s business. She was a combatant and sharpened her blade opportunistically. This is not to suggest that the disagreements she had with Rousseau, as she took him to be or presented him as being, were not genuine. However much she, like him, deplored artifice and artificiality, the progress of civilization was not, in her view, a tale of the unqualified alienation of man from nature, and certainly not the story of a secular fall.
Yet it took her sojourn in Northern Europe for Wollstonecraft to appreciate and value the advancement of civilization most fully. There she began to distinguish artificiality from civility and to soften the divide she had so sharply drawn in a Vindication of the Rights of Men and a Vindication of the Rights of Woman between morality and manners. Traveling through Scandinavia made her think better of the French and France than she ever had. That nation and its people had been associated in her mind with the dictates of superficial politeness and fashionable deportment. Far from such refinements, she ceased to think of them as unqualified inauthenticity and affectedness, and the benefits of civilization rose in her opinion.
While in Scandinavia, Wollstonecraft came to think that one could experience the progress of civilization directly by traveling through Europe. To do so, one had to proceed on a specific route, one that happened to be in the opposite direction of her own travel, and one that included nations normally not included in the Grand Tour: “If travelling, as the completion of a liberal education, were to be adopted on rational ground,” she wrote from Copenhagen, “the northern states ought to be visited before the more polished parts of Europe, to serve as the elements even of the knowledge of manners, only to be acquired by tracing the various shades in different countries.” However, it was important, she warned, not to let the hospitality one received on one’s journey cloud one’s judgment and become the gauge of their “virtues.” Those she thought to be directly proportionate to “their scientific improvements.”17
Yet Wollstonecraft did not put forward a systematic or consistent account of the progressive stages of civilization. Although she returned to the topic at various points in The French Revolution as well as subsequently, some of the longest unbroken treatment she offered on the subject can be found in Book IV Chapter I of that treatise, written while living in France. The study as a whole was intended to rise above the reactions triggered by the tumult and violence taking place in France, and thereby demonstrate that the revolution had not been caused “by the abilities or intrigues of a few individuals; nor the effect of sudden and short-lived enthusiasm; but the natural consequence of intellectual improvement, gradually proceeding to perfection in the advancement of communities, from a state of barbarism to that of polished society, till now arrived at the point when sincerity of principles seems to be hastening the overthrow of the tremendous empire of superstition and hypocrisy, erected up the ruins of gothic brutality and ignorance.”18 The French Revolution was essentially, but by no means solely, a resumption of the battle she had waged against Burke’s Reflections four years earlier in A Vindication of the Rights of Men. She continued to engage with the judgment Burke had delivered on the revolution in its early stages as well as his reading of European history. She took him to venerate the past, to think age conferred legitimacy to laws and systems of government, that the status quo had to be preserved intact at all cost, and that he revered the aristocracy and was infatuated with Queen Marie Antoinette. She had other reasons to argue with him, as we have already seen, and would do so again, but those were the principal bones of contention she had with him in The French Revolution. It must be said, however, that she did not name him explicitly, quoting him only once, and that her tone in her dispute with him was now more muted.19 Her appraisal of the English constitution was also more positive, and she became more visibly appreciative of the liberty enjoyed in her own country.
In the advertisement of what she then thought would be the first of two or three further volumes, Wollstonecraft explained that the work had grown under her hand as she needed to describe “manners and things” and had also been led into “several theoretical investigations, whilst marking the political effects that naturally flow from the progress of knowledge.”20 Prominent among these was the question of the origins of society and government, but as it was not her actual subject matter, her views on it are scattered through the text. Yet, her returning to it indicates that it was of obvious interest and importance to her and her project, as indeed it had been with renewed vigor since Hugo Grotius’s and Thomas Hobbes’s respective accounts of the state of nature and the advent of social and political institutions. Her intermittent discussion of the issue led to variations in her accounts that point to some genuine tensions in her thought about the deep cause of humankind’s predicament, indeed its very nature.
The opening paragraph of The French Revolution described man in his infancy as being miserably weak, taken in isolation from other human beings, and as being crude in “his first notions respecting the nature of civil society,” a rather surprising additional characterization, since one might have thought this would have been true of his first notions of anything at all.21 This original crudeness was taken to explain why it had taken so long for the advent of political knowledge and why “public happiness” had been so slow in being generally diffused. From its onset, then, Wollstonecraft appeared to think that humanity had labored under a fundamental form of stupidity about the political. Although not directly contradictory, this claim did not sit entirely well with what we saw were Wollstonecraft’s early reflections that humanity was at its most poetic and eloquent in the first period of its history; it was, she thought, the age in which the imagination flourished. How could the mind both be able to stretch imaginatively beyond its experiences and yet be so incomprehensibly limited? A possible answer is that human beings in the first stage of society had no cause to expect the political tribulations to come and their imaginations might have been exercised by other aspects of their life and environment. Leaving such speculation aside, like all other political theorists, what Wollstonecraft considered to be the state of nature and the first moments of social organization were determined by her own normative objectives. In order to be able to cast the French Revolution as an expression of social and political enlightenment, she chose to portray the past as marked by varying degrees of ignorance. In her account of the causes of the revolution, she wished to both stress the increased knowledge humankind had gradually gained over time and present the revolution as a monumental shedding of the false beliefs and prejudices humanity had assimilated in the course of its history. That proved more conceptually difficult than it might have initially appeared.
What she sought to achieve was complicated by the fact that she thought the principles embedded in the Déclaration des Droits de L’Homme (1789) to be self-evident truths, so this inevitably raised the question of why they had taken so long to be realized. Indeed, it seems that it was not even wholly evident to her that they were being realized in 1790s France. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, here too she seemed to think men were equal and yet not. She wanted to give an approving account of the forward march of history, while almost always reproving its constitutive features. Her history should have told of the gradual improvement of human understanding, but it did not.
Acknowledging that the Ancient Greeks and Romans had a highly developed culture posed one problem for a gradualist history of human improvement, but it was not the only difficulty. Wollstonecraft wished to show that the benefits of the arts and sciences had been the privileged enjoyment only of the elite, and in so doing seemed rather dismissive of the advantages of the development of the arts and sciences. Yet, while depicting the moral and political corruption of elites, she maintained that the arts and sciences were required for moral emancipation of humanity. But if the arts and sciences had been for the exclusive delight of the privileged, why had even this minority not profited from their morally edifying effects? Had elites been necessary to the flourishing of the arts and sciences or rather had social and political inequality been requisite for them to blossom? As other partly or mostly conjectural histories, hers raised many questions in the process of seeking to answer their chosen one. It could be said that she wanted to achieve too much in too little time and in difficult personal circumstances, or that she sought to reconcile the intractable. Although some of the incongruities of what was after all entitled a “moral” as well as a “historical” view cannot easily be reconciled, her changing views should not be disregarded nor should their apparent inconsistencies be ignored. Wollstonecraft still proffers some interesting opinions on the state of nature and the subsequent changes mankind underwent before arriving at the stage of the society she lived in and that witnessed an unprecedented social and political revolution.
Wollstonecraft thought that humanity in its infancy was at its most poetic, its mind uncluttered and its imagination lively. If, as mentioned, the first age of man was one of political ignorance, it seems also to have been one of unhampered freedom, according to her. Indeed, Wollstonecraft’s overall position might be given greater coherence if one supposes that it was precisely this freedom that made for the underdevelopment and redundancy of “political knowledge”:
Freedom is, indeed, the natural and imprescriptible right of man; without the enjoyment of which, it is impossible for him to become either a reasonable or dignified being. Freedom he enjoys in a natural state, in it’s [sic] full extent: but formed by nature for a more intimate society, to unfold his intellectual power, it becomes necessary, for carrying into execution the main objects, which induces men to establish communities, that they should surrender a part of their natural privileges, more effectually to guard the most important.22
Unlike Rousseau of the Social Contract (1762), Wollstonecraft followed social contract theorists, such as John Locke, in finding this trade-off, a surrender of some liberties to secure the rest, acceptable or at least not inherently unacceptable. She did not think that this in itself led to unfreedom. The creation of society was the product of the need to cooperate and the dependency to which it gave rise was, as we will see shortly, the only form of dependence she found unobjectionable. As stated in the quote above, the purpose of society was also “to unfold [mankind’s] intellectual power.” Though still enjoying a relatively high degree of freedom as well as imagination, humanity’s ignorance in this period, she claimed, had facilitated the rise of domination:
But from the ignorance of men, during the infancy of society, it was easy for their leaders, by frequent usurpations, to create despotism, which choking up the springs that would have invigorated their minds, they seem to have been insensible to the deprivations under which they lived; and existing like mere animals, the tyrants of the world have continued to treat them only as machines to promote their purposes.23
Beyond saying that ignorance facilitated its beginning, she did not, however, explain why such usurpation arose or hypothesize about the motivation behind the subsequent despotism. The assertion of power by one group over another might seem inevitable to an author who thought human beings inherently selfish or vainglorious, but Wollstonecraft believed them to be naturally benevolent. It might also have made some sense from an author who assumed that scarcity was the condition of the state of nature or became so in time, but Wollstonecraft did not make that assumption either. To understand how she might explain the fact that the domination of a few over the many became established at some point in the early history of humanity, one might need to go back to the discussion of her view of evil. Human beings were created with passions, but with limited understanding. The latter had to be developed, she believed, to control, but not altogether overpower, the passions. What were these passions? They really came down to a single one, it would seem from her account in this context—the passion for “wealth or power” and the concomitant domination over others this entailed.
Freedom for Wollstonecraft is not best understood as freedom from the domination of others, even if it were arbitrary. Here I diverge from the readings of Wollstonecraft by Alan Coffee, Sandrine Bergès, and Lena Halldenius.24 To be sure, she recoiled from the idea of domination by others and fought with all her rhetorical might against the brutal, psychological, and arbitrary domination of slavery, parents over children, men over women, and human beings over animals. The root of the problem for her was the passion for “wealth and power,” and the solution for this could never be political in the first instance. No change of government could bring it about, as the dedication of the second edition of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman to Talleyrand sought to make clear. It could not be solved externally, however much social and institutional forces were at play in the issue. What was needed was a new order of self-understanding and comprehension of the history of society.25
With the advent of relations of power, the progress of humanity was at best uneven. It was the history of a fundamental imbalance. This was not because the development of the understanding and increased learning of one tier of mankind was unparalleled in those they subordinated. That might have been true in some respects, but, although Wollstonecraft failed to make this clear, the ignorance, however general, was really that of the elites: it was they who failed to comprehend the true essence of political community.
Such a history of humanity was relatively easy to narrate, and that was the one that Wollstonecraft mostly chose to tell. It was the history of oppression, one that followed Rousseau’s account of the creation of private property and its subsequent enshrinement in iniquitous laws, but differed from him in its very explicit and unqualified trust in political science:
The first social systems were certainly founded by passion; individuals wishing to fence around their own wealth or power, and make slaves of their brothers to prevent encroachment. Their descendants have ever been at work to solder the chains they forged, and render the usurpation of strength secure, by the fraud of partial laws; laws that can be abrogated only by the exertions of reason, emancipating mankind, by making government a science, instead of a craft, and civilizing the grand mass, by exercising their understandings about the most important objects of inquiry.26
Wollstonecraft’s explicit belief in the emancipatory powers of the science of politics is noteworthy here; she had already urged women to engage in it in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and interestingly for our present purpose, she claimed that it was essential for them to study it as an integral part of understanding the history of man:
They might, also, study politics, and settle their benevolence on the broadest basis, for the reading of history will scarcely be more useful than the perusal of romances, if read as mere biography; if the character of the times, the political improvements, arts, &c. be not observed. In short, if it be not considered as the history of man; and not of particular men, who filled a niche in the temple of fame, and dropped into the black rolling stream of time, that silently sweeps all before it, into the shapeless void called—eternity.27
The progress of political science was, in Wollstonecraft’s view, an index of the advancement of civilization, and her confidence in the positive effect of the study of politics finds a number of varying expressions in The French Revolution.28 One of these was that the incapacity to anticipate future contingencies, indeed that the future might be different from the present, made the laws of early societies inflexible and imperfect.29 Past societies, she thought, could not have foreseen how social participation would unfold the faculties of mankind. The past had not imagined the future and her present. This meant that past legal systems could not have a hold on the present; their antiquity did not, pace Burke, whom Wollstonecraft must have had in mind, grant them any legitimacy—quite the opposite. The present afforded radically new possibilities. The peoples of the past, and especially those in power, had been unconscious of an essential fact about the human condition which was the extent to which their own well-being and that of others were interconnected: “When society was first subjugated to laws, probably by the ambition of some, and the desire of safety in all, it was natural for men to be selfish, because they were ignorant how intimately their own comfort was connected to that of others.” This however was no longer necessarily the case; the end of such blindness was now contemplatable: “But, when men once see, clear as the light of heaven,—and I hail the glorious day from afar!—that on the general happiness depends their own, reason will give strength to the fluttering wings of passion, and men will ‘do unto others, what they wish they should do unto them.’ ”30 Wollstonecraft thus envisaged a world in which the command found in Matthew 7:12 would finally be obeyed. She had the imaginative power, the genius, as we saw in the previous chapter, that few others had, to lead mankind toward a realistic utopia, to borrow a phrase from John Rawls.31
It must be stressed that Wollstonecraft thought man a quintessentially social being32 and that she did not renege on her view that mankind was essentially benevolent. Indeed, she asserted that even the Terror did not undermine her ability “to prove that the people are essentially good.”33 Elsewhere in the text, she also put forward a somewhat different account of humanity’s infancy, one that did not speak of domination of the few over the many. “Men in a savage state, without intellectual amusements, or even fields or vineyards to employ them, depending on the casual supply of the chace, seem continually to have made war, one with another, or nation with nation,” she had contended in Book II, chapter III, adding “and the booty taken from their enemies formed the principal object of contest, because war was not, like industry, a kind of abridgement of their liberty.”34 It was what she next claimed that is most striking and original. Society was the product of a natural sociability allowed to flow in and through the process of the narration of stories by the elderly members of the group:
But the social feelings of man, after having been exercised by a perilous life, flow over in long stories, when he reaches garrulous old age. Whilst his listening progeny wondering at his feats, their hearts are fired with the ambition of equalling their sire. His soul is warmed by sympathy, feeling the distresses of his fellow creatures, and particularly for the helpless state of decrepit age; he begins to contemplate, as desirable, associations of men, to prevent the inconveniences arising from loneliness and solitude. Hence little communities living together in the bonds of friendship, securing to them the accumulated powers of man, mark the origin of society: and tribes growing into nations, spreading themselves over the globe, form different languages, which producing different interests, and misunderstandings, excite distrust.35
Here it would seem communities held together not by the domination of usurpers, but by companionship, was the original condition of society, and war occurred between nations unable to comprehend and trust each other. This too could have been developed into a narrative, but Wollstonecraft did not pursue it. It was however significant that she could conceive of such benign and cooperative existence among human beings, even at the beginning of their history, although it would seem by implication that the unintended consequence of such cooperative groupings was the cause of eventual conflicts. It was in this context that she explained that, with the invention of the arts, by which one can presume she meant agriculture and artisanal skills, humanity became more sedentary, and bellicose: “For whilst [the arts] were in their infancy his restless temper, and savage manners, still kept alive his passion for war and plunder.” Once restlessness, “savage manners,” and “ferocity” receded, “the right of property grew sacred.” Social distinctions arose:
The prowess or abilities of the leaders of barbarians gave them likewise an ascendency in their respective dynasties; which gaining strength in proportion to the ignorance of the age, produced the distinctions of men, from which the great inequality of conditions has originated; and they have preserved long since the necessity has ceased to exist.36
It is also in this part of her discussion that we find her making another significant point for the purposes of understanding her vision for humanity, namely, about the purpose of government, security, property, the development of agriculture and peace:
Fortunately, in spite of the various impediments that have thwarted the advancement of knowledge, the blessings of society have been sufficiently experienced to convince us, that the only solid good to be expected from a government must result from the security of our persons and property. And domestic felicity has given a mild lustre to human happiness superior to the false glory of sanguinary devastation, or magnificent robberies. Our fields and vineyards have thus gradually become the principal objects of our care—and it is from this general sentiment governing the opinion of the civilized part of the world, that we are enabled to contemplate, with some degree of certainty, the approaching age of peace.37
Thus, although we saw her attribute to the passion for wealth and power the cause of the domination of some over others, she also recognized the eventual benefits of the advent of government that protected the lives and property of its citizens when compared to the ages of wars and devastation. Like Rousseau, though not in the same sequence, she also believed that the development of the arts and agriculture, and the growing sedentariness, led to the sacralization of property rights and their enshrinement in law. This entrenched and accentuated social inequalities, which ignorance helped maintain to this day.
Wollstonecraft’s reflections on the origins of society, property, social distinctions, and governments were woven into her history of Europe, one that narrowed in scope as it proceeded to focus on France and its Ancien Régime. She did not follow the trajectory of stadial history which would have taken her conjectural history from hunting and gathering, the beginnings of herding, through agricultural, and finally to commercial, society. Although she spoke of agriculture as we just read, she turned instead and never entirely sequentially to conventionally demarcated periods of European history, those of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, of the barbaric invasions, chivalry, Renaissance Italy, the Reformation, and, finally, that of modern commercial society. In other words, she could be said to have interlaced episodes of European history between the two stages of a theoretical history of society—early society and modern commercial society. Yet, it was principally the state of nature and the beginnings of societies that provided the backdrop and context for her history of France and its revolution, and she returned to these topics repeatedly for explanatory purposes and to defend her pronouncements on the merit of civilization and demerit of some of its features, not least social distinctions.
Wollstonecraft did not envy the socially and economically privileged. In fact, she did not seem to think they were genuinely privileged at all. She mocked and ridiculed them, but her doing so did not expose what she termed “hissings of envy.”38 Rather, the expression of her scorn was tinged with pity. This did not make her idealize the poor either, though on occasion she did idealize rural life. The rich and the poor had their respective vices, “insincerity, want of natural affections, with all the specious train that luxury introduces” were “the polished vices of the rich,” while the poor exercised their cruelty, as we saw above, on creatures below them, and had
all those gross vices which the example of the rich, rudely copied, could produce. Envy built a wall of separation, that made the poor hate, whilst they bent to their superiors; who, on their part, stepped aside to avoid the loathsome sight of human misery.39
Nevertheless, though she declared her hands led her to be mistaken for a lady, Wollstonecraft was glad not to be a member of the nobility.40 She seemed to have developed a particular dislike of that class as a whole, not least of its “ladies.” Indeed, her conception of the upper classes was indelibly gendered, and its watermark was an image firmly etched in her mind by her stay in Ireland. Working as a governess for the Kingsborough family lent proof, if proof were needed, to whatever preconceptions she might have had before joining them in the Autumn of 1786. These preconceptions had already begun to find expression in her first publication, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, written after the closure of her failed attempt to maintain a school on Newington Green forced her to take up the position of governess.
It is important to note that her assessment of the nobility and the poor did by no means make her an admirer of the middle ranks of society, especially as her experience widened. It is undeniable that she did state that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was primarily addressed to that class, “because they appear to be in the most natural state.”41 This was not praise. It simply meant that they had not yet fully copied the “ladies” and the process of their doing so could conceivably be arrested by her words. The women she had overwhelmingly in mind were the “ladies,” like Lady Kingsborough. In later years, when the French Revolution and her travels in Scandinavia gave her a glimpse of a bourgeois order and the ascendency of the middle class as well as closer encounters with merchants, she was led, as we shall see, to reconsider her assessment of aristocratic society. What is common to her critique of either class or indeed any group of people is her evaluation of the psychological impact their activity, or lack thereof, had on the individual members of that class: the more their pursuits stripped them of fellow feelings, the worse she thought of the pursuits and the class of people engaged in them.
To be sure, with regard to her comments on the nobility, it is not easy to disentangle her disappointment or anxiety at finding herself in Ireland, a governess aged twenty-seven, from her account of the character and habits of Lord and Lady Kingsborough and their circle. Uprooted and strangely alienated, Wollstonecraft found her reaction to her situation confusing even to her. Of her unhappiness, however, there can be little doubt. In a letter dated October 30, 1786, to her sister, Everina, she described her arrival at Mitchelstown castle in the following terms: “[t]here was such solemn kind of stupidity about this place as froze my blood—I entered the great gates with the same kind of feeling as I should if I was going to the Bastile [sic].”42 Her spirits sank. This was not due to any overt mistreatment. She wrote shortly before Christmas 1786: “I am a GREAT favorite in this family”;43 and by her own earliest account, she was “treated like a gentlewoman by every part of the family,” adding most significantly for our purposes, “but the forms and parade of high life suit not my mind.”44
What appalled her, and was made explicit in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman some six years later, were what she took to be aristocrats’ values, their attitudes toward matrimony, to themselves, each other, and above all to their children. Recalling her abhorrence of blind imitation, it is understandable that the fact that this privileged class might be held up as a model to the rest of society was irksome. Her contempt for it was encapsulated in the same letter to Everina, in which, quite apart from everything else, she worried that she might not be “up to the task” (an important turn of phrase to which we shall return) but her fear that her French be deemed inadequate for a governess did not stand in the way of her derision:
Lady K. is a shrewd clever woman a great talker—I have not seen much of her as she is confined to her room by a sore throat—but I have seen half dozen of her companions—I mean not her children, but her dogs—To see a woman without any softness in her manners caressing animals, and using infantine expression—is you may conceive very absurd and ludicrous—but a fine Lady is new species to me of animals.45
Notwithstanding what we saw in the preceding chapter of Wollstonecraft’s own consideration for animals and her belief that learning to treat them well was central to human development, that sort of rapport with pets was morally abhorrent to her. As Todd remarks, “[t]his passion for dogs marks the portrait of the trivial mother in Mary, A Fiction (ch. 1) and the unmaternal fashionable lady in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (ch. 12).”46 Lady Kingsborough epitomized a kind of woman Wollstonecraft did not want to be or have others become. Though her ladyship was not the sole target of Wollstonecraft’s rejection of a certain conception of womanhood, she and her female relations were to play a very important role in the theorist’s social and political imaginary, and provided much of the background of her discussion of marriage, love, and parenthood in both her Vindications.
It should be noted that Wollstonecraft did not think Lady Kingsborough unkind or stupid, or even particularly ignorant, unless one believes emotional deficiency to be a kind of moral ignorance.47 What she lacked was even a modicum of devotion to her children, and a hint of the kind of selflessness that Wollstonecraft valued then and would do more so with the years. Lady Kingsborough was the center of her own attention; even her dogs seemed no more than an extension of herself. Her world was one of appearances: “She rouges.” “Lady K’s animal passion fills up the hours which are not spent in dressing,” Wollstonecraft reported.48 When her children were ill with a severe fever, she had visited them “in a formal way—though their situation called forth my tenderness,” yet she “lavished awkward fondness on her dogs.” Wollstonecraft was witnessing what she had described already in the very first paragraph of her first publication:
As I conceive it to be the duty of every rational creature to attend to its offspring, I am sorry to observe, that reason and duty together have not so powerful an influence over human conduct, as instinct has in the brute creation. Indolence, and thoughtless disregard to every thing, except the present indulgence, make many mothers, who may have momentary starts of tenderness, neglect their children. They follow a pleasing impulse […] I mean vanity and self-love.49
Vanity and self-love constituted humanity’s Achilles’ heel. They were part of human nature, but not essentially so. We saw earlier how Wollstonecraft’s conception of education as character formation was one that made for personalities that resisted that “pleasing impulse.” And while it was a natural tendency it produced unnatural results, notably, the “unnatural fashionable” mother, to draw on Todd’s phrase again.
Lady Kingsborough, her friends, relations. and daughters exemplified the very opposite of the ideals Thoughts on the Education of Daughters sought to instill. That pedagogical work not only celebrated the duties of motherhood, of the care that should be taken of providing children with a strong constitution and self-discipline and of developing their sense of benevolence, but also ridiculed makeup and the like, commending simplicity of dress together with unaffected manners. These are manners that, Wollstonecraft claimed, “demand respect, and will be admired by people of taste, even when love is out of the question.”50
Thus, while she already entertained some such thoughts prior to her time in Ireland, what she saw of the lives of the Kingsboroughs led her years later to conjoin the idea of aristocracy or of the rich with an idea of femininity that she was to deride. It was by no means the only similitude she drew; as mentioned previously, she was frequently to liken women to slaves in her second Vindication, and it was a very important comparison.
When Wollstonecraft searched through Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful for ammunition to attack him all the better for his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Lady Kingsborough must have come to mind, not least because Wollstonecraft had deployed some of the same language to describe her as Burke used in his early work to describe the ways of women. Wollstonecraft told her sister: “I think now I hear her infantine lisp”; the “lisp of the nursery” was something that she had warned against in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.51 She was to berate Burke for claiming that because the idea of beauty in women carried with it that of “weakness and imperfection,” women “learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness, and even sickness.”52 Given her stance on the importance of physical strength, this could only have triggered anger in Wollstonecraft. Although Burke presented his view as a reflection of an alleged reality, she wrote as if he had single-handedly persuaded women to behave in this preposterous manner: “You may have convinced them that littleness and weakness are the very essence of beauty.”53 Continuing in what is one of her most memorable passages:
And that the Supreme Being, in giving women beauty in the most supereminent degree, seemed to command them, by the powerful voice of Nature, not to cultivate the moral virtues that might chance to excite respect, and interfere with the pleasing sensations they were created to inspire. Thus confining truth, fortitude, and humanity, within the rigid pate of manly morals, they might justly argue that to be loved, woman’s high end and great distinction! They should “learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, and nick-name God’s creatures.”54
This last quotation owed more to Hamlet (“You jig and amble, you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness your ignore,” III.i.146–148) than it did to Burke, who may have been inspired by it, but it is not improbable that Wollstonecraft was especially pricked by those comments, because their truth was confirmed by her own observations.
The letters from Ireland thus presage some of the arguments of her political works, not least the account given of contemporary attitudes to marriage described in the Vindication of the Rights of Men, a little more than three years later. “You cannot conceive my dear Girl,” she wrote to Everina in mid-May 1787, “the dissipated lives the woman of quality lead.” “When I am in spirits I will give you a faithful picture,” she promised, adding:
In many respects the Great and little vulgar resemble and in none more than the motives which induce them to marry. They look not for a companion and are seldom alone together but in bed—The husband, perhaps drunk and the wife’s head full of the pretty compliment that some creature, that Nature designed for a Man—paid her at the card table.55
Wollstonecraft was much disturbed by the mercenary approach to marriage disclosed in the conversations she witnessed:
Confined to the society of a set of silly females, I have no social converse […] The topics of matrimony and dress take their turns—Not in a very sentimental style—alas poor sentiment it has no residence here—I almost wish the girls were novels readers and romantic, I declare false refinement is better than none, at all; but these girls understand several languages, and have read cart-loads of history, for their mother was a prudent woman.56
As we will see again in subsequent sections, she believed that marriage and personal relationships, more generally, should be anchored in genuine feelings for the persons themselves and, above all, in mutual respect. Treating people as a means was profoundly wrong. Treating people as property or the conduit to its acquisition or accumulation shocked her; indeed, so much so that she raised the subject somewhat out of the blue in her rebuttal to Burke’s Reflections. Such instrumental conceptions of marriage led to a world in which both men and women were things, a world that was all the worse for women, a world that Burke not only seemed to her to defend but to extoll in his Reflections. Its publication made her articulate her rejection of every inch of that world and its deeply embedded and overwhelming selfishness.
One might have expected A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to The Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Wollstonecraft’s first major intervention in politics, to be a straightforward political tract, a meticulous critique, say, of Burke’s interpretation of the nature of the events in France up to November 1790, or even a conscientious defense of the Rev. Richard Price and his A Discourse on the Love of our Country, delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain. Insofar as it approximated any or all of these things, it was arguably surpassed by other ripostes, but it was the first.57
The Reflections had appeared on November 1. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, dashed off in less than a month, the pages printed almost as fast as she was able to write them, was first published anonymously on November 29, and again, this time bearing her name, on December 18. It is not the most famous of the replies Burke’s Reflections elicited, much less is it the most widely read. That title goes to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution (1791). Nor was it the only response by a woman. Catherine Macaulay’s Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France (1790) was at least one other; there might have been others among the anonymous publications. A fraction of the length of Burke’s Reflections, let alone of Paine’s two-part work (Rights of Man. Part the Second. Combining Principles and Practice appeared in 1792), Wollstonecraft’s Vindication does not offer a single flowing argument and, while the various points it makes are each undoubtedly comprehensible, what they constitute as whole cannot be said to be systematic. It is not a measured rebuttal building on specific points sequentially, unlike James Macintosh’s initially very successful Vindiciae Gallicae: A Defence of the French Revolution and its English Admirers (1791). Indeed, one of its striking features is that it does not really even live up to its title: A Vindication of the Rights of Men is not is a vindication of the rights of men in the sense that it provides a theoretical defense of the existence of these rights. It asserts most forcefully that men have God-given rights but does not set out to deliver an argument for their existence, if by “argument” one means a discursive practice that could, at least in principle, convince the incredulous. As far as rights are concerned it preaches to the converted, though as Botting has argued, its effect in this respect should not be underestimated.58 To search for such a defense would be to mistake its tone and spirit. It is not a vindication even of those involved in the events that had taken place in France up to the time of its composition. The best such defense is found in Wollstonecraft’s later work, The French Revolution (1794). Nor does it truly endeavor to justify Richard Price and the Revolution Society, the other chief targets besides the revolutionaries themselves, of Burke’s Reflections. It does criticize Burke for the manner of his censure of Price, whom the former had condemned for abusing the power of the pulpit. While she conceded that the pulpit was not the place for political discussions, she thought the occasion, namely, the commemoration of 1688, excused the nature of Price’s sermon, and noted that “no stated duty was encroached upon.”59 Mostly, however, she chastised Burke for the lack of respect he had shown an elderly preacher and admired figure. She thought Burke “[i]n reprobating Dr. Price’s opinions […] might have spared the man,” although she herself did not hold back in her attack on Burke. To the degree that hers is a vindication at all, it is a vindication of itself, of the need to challenge Burke and all he appeared to be standing for on the publication of the Reflections. It is an attack, a vilification of Burke, as a politician and theorist; it is an attack that ventures beyond his Reflections, on what Wollstonecraft takes to be his conceptual framework and assumptions, on his style, on his own attacks, and more. It questions his analytical and moral competence, his independence, morality, and patriotism. It questions his very self, and most significantly, his masculinity.
The length to which Wollstonecraft went in so doing makes the work stand out. A Vindication distinguishes itself from the other retorts to the Reflections, because it deploys a discourse that broke down any barrier one might have assumed existed between the public and the domestic, the political and the moral, and brought into the mix of an already complex debate the condition of women as well as the slave trade, the nature of earthly and divine love as well as the distribution of property, and aesthetic as well as moral considerations. From its earliest stage, Burke believed that what was taking place in France was not merely a political revolution, in the same vein as the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution, as the Reverend Richard Price had argued, but a civilizational one with neither precedent nor equal, one that would entirely transform every aspect of European societies, down to the relations between the sexes.60 Wollstonecraft thought that this was precisely what needed to happen for the revolution to achieve what she took to be its central aim, liberty. Thus, what makes Wollstonecraft’s an exceptional text is that it rather unexpectedly spoke in some detail of interpersonal relationships and the way they were distorted by power and property ownership. It related the personal to the political. It treated the two as one. What is more, it also provided a stage on which to present herself: it is a diptych. In depicting him, she depicted herself. She presented herself to the world through it and asserted herself as she diminished him.
As its full title makes clear, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France, was a direct epistolary address to Burke. Its three very short paragraphs, “Advertisement,” explained the increasing “indignation” that Burke’s “sophistical arguments” had produced in her as they had been presented “in the questionable shape of natural feelings and common sense” by him. What had been mere “effusions of the moment” grew and became the publication that has come down to us, thanks to the encouragement of Joseph Johnson, her publisher. Wollstonecraft further explained that she had confined her critique “to the grand principles at which he has levelled many ingenious arguments in a very specious garb.”61
This was at best seriously misleading, in fact, plainly untrue. She came close to admitting so herself, as we shall see in the next section. Whatever else it contained, Wollstonecraft’s text was a very personal attack on Burke and its reach extended, as mentioned already, beyond his Reflections, and as far back as A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The merit of Wollstonecraft’s reply rests in large part on her being one of Burke’s “closest readers,” who, as his eminent intellectual biographer, David Bromwich, has remarked, “had no doubt that the Sublime and Beautiful had left its mark on Reflections on the Revolution in France.”62 In so doing, she was led to speak of love, friendship, marriage, and women, none of which can be said to be found in the Reflections or in other contemporary responses to it. To be sure, Burke did speak of women in it. He referred in the most derogatory terms to the women who partook in the debates as well as the violence of the first stage of the revolution, and in the most laudatory tone about queens, Marie Antoinette in particular, in other words of women at both ends of the social spectrum. In so doing, he conjured an idea of femininity defiled by the revolutionary women themselves and a violation of civilization in the vandalism of the royal bedchamber and the attack on the queen of France. He evoked the demise of chivalry, the marker of the progress of civility, but he did not speak of friendship, marriage, and love as Wollstonecraft was to, although he did implicitly do so about respect. While it should be clear from the preceding that she had given these subjects some consideration prior to her rebuttal to his Reflections, her outrage toward his work caused her to knit them together and think well beyond the framework of the issue at hand.63
From the very first sentence of her Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Wollstonecraft drew a line in the sand. She was not about to indulge in the customary, but false, courtesies with which a reply such as hers might be expected to open. Even the choice of “A Vindication” as her title gives a taste of the ironic tone to come. In echoing Burke’s own early satirical work, A Vindication of Natural Society: or, A View of the Miseries and Evils arising to Mankind from every Species of Artificial Society. In a letter to Lord ****By a late Noble Writer (1756), she was evoking a text that had been so very effective in denouncing the misery of the poor, their dreadful working conditions to satisfy the absurd vanity of the rich, and the absurdity of modern society, that in the preface to the second edition in 1757 Burke had to spell out its satirical nature and explain his purpose: to show how the kind of critical light that Lord Bolingbroke had shone on the Christian religion could just as easily be turned to expose the inanity of the social order.64 Burke had been ruthless in his parody of Bolingbroke and in showing up society. Now he seemed to be defending that same society with all the rhetorical might he had previously used to attack it or simulate such an attack.
Possibly taking her cue from what had been Burke’s mercilessness in his Vindication, Wollstonecraft would neither offer apologies for taking up his time nor profess it an honor to engage with him. She would not desist from expressing “contempt, and even indignation.” Placing herself firmly on the side of truth, she also conjured up his Sublime and Beautiful, declaring: “for truth, in morals, has ever appeared to me the essence of the sublime; and in taste, simplicity the only criterion of the beautiful.”65 She would speak as she felt. Describing herself as “[r]everencing the rights of humanity,” she would assert them fearlessly. She would write as she was. There was only one Mary Wollstonecraft.
Not so Burke. She peeled off the private person she detected beneath his public persona, but was kind to neither one, judging him to be “a good, though vain man.” She described him as a superficial and ambitious wit, and “the weather-cock of unrestrained feelings.” This was the kind of inconsistency associated with women. He was fanciful, weak, and manipulative.66 Given all this, and more, it was unsurprising that when he argued, he “would become impassioned” and his imagination inflamed.67
Thus, from the very beginning of her Vindication she garlanded Burke with the terms of fickle femininity. By implication, and as was to become more evident as her assault unfolded, she garbed herself in masculinity. Who but herself had she in mind when writing that “truly sublime is the character that acts from principle, and governs the inferior springs of activity without slackening their vigour; whose feelings give vital heat to his resolves, but never hurry him into feverish eccentricities.”?68 She stood for simplicity, vitality, and authenticity. She was true to herself. She was consistent. She was rational. Hers was a character strengthened by principle. She was the independent agent. She made him her opposite, and it was a presentation of herself as much as it sought to expose him.
One of the most interesting aspects of this first Vindication is the opportunity that it offered Wollstonecraft to display a nuanced understanding of the psychological impact of depending on others for wealth, power, employment, or good opinion. The kind of subjection it generated distorted human relations and dug deeply into the character of those on both sides of the dependency. She had much to say on the subject, but one example is particularly revealing. Though its presence in her Vindication was due to her seeking to undermine a point Burke made about the importance of an independent Church, the way she took him up on this point is nonetheless surprising. He had written of the importance of the pedagogical role played by the clergy and illustrated it in part by alluding to the Grand Tour, when clerics accompanied their noble charge on their journey through Europe. Far from dismissing what was after all but a rather incidental example, Wollstonecraft dug into it, thinking through the likely nature of the companionship.
On November 2, 1789, the land and property of the Catholic Church was seized by the French National Assembly, and assignats were issued as paper currency in December. Then on July 12, 1790, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy subordinated the Church to the state. Burke vented his outrage at this unprecedented attack on the Church at some length and detailed its multifaceted significance for society as well as argued for the importance of religion to the maintenance of the state. He declared religion to be the basis of civil society.69 Wollstonecraft, though she did not say so explicitly, would not have quarreled with that or disputed the importance of faith to individuals and society as a whole. Whether that entailed an organized religion, and the Catholic Church in particular, is another matter, as she was strongly anti-papist and High Church more generally in that period. Burke also said that God “willed the state.”70 It is just conceivable that she also might have agreed with that, though not without copious qualifications, and it is clear that she would not have thought that God had willed anything remotely like the Ancien Régime. There is more to say on this topic in the next chapter, but the point for the moment is that the target of her critique of that part of Burke’s Reflection was different; she homed in on the illustration he provided in support of his belief in the essential task the clergy performed in society. As Burke developed his argument for the indissolubility of the link between Church and State in the minds of the people of England, he wrote:
Our education is in a manner wholly in the hands of ecclesiastics, and in all stages from infancy to manhood. Even in our youth, leaving schools and universities, enter that most important period of life which begins to link experience and study together, and when with that view they visit other countries, instead of old domestics whom we have seen as governors to principal men from other parts, three-fourths of those who go abroad with our young nobility and gentlemen are ecclesiastics; not as austere masters, nor as mere followers; but as friends and companions of a graver character, and not seldom persons as well born as themselves. With them, as relations, they most commonly keep up a close connexion through life. By this connexion we conceive that we attach our gentlemen to the Church; and we liberalise the church by intercourse with the leading characters of the country.71
The passage warrants quotation in full as, along with that from The Sublime and the Beautiful claiming that women “learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, and nick-name God’s creatures,” it constitutes one of the greatest influences on the shape and content of the Vindication of the Rights of Men and Wollstonecraft’s subsequent thoughts on affective relations. In rejecting it, she came to articulate one of her principal beliefs, namely, that “Among unequals there can be no society;—giving a manly meaning to the term; from such intimacies friendship can never grow; if the basis of friendship is mutual respect, and not a commercial treaty.”72 Far from denying the omnipresence of the clergy in education or of resisting the view that this engendered long-lasting links in the minds of the young, Wollstonecraft’s retort to what she read as Burke’s maudlin account of the tutor/pupil association on the Grand Tour was to remind him and her readers of the distribution of power in such relationships. Burke’s belief that the clergy could exercise moral authority over those on whom they depended for preferment was ludicrous: “How, indeed, could they venture to reprove for his vices their patron: the clergy only give the true feudal emphasis to this word.”73 Proximity to the nobility corrupted the clergy, Wollstonecraft claimed; it made clerics both more servile to their superiors and more tyrannical toward their inferiors.74 As for “our young men of fashion, by a common, though erroneous, association of ideas,” they “conceived a contempt for religion, as they sucked in with their milk a contempt for the clergy.”75
Whereas Burke saw in the property of the established Church in France or England the source of its independence and moral authority over the rich and powerful, Wollstonecraft highlighted the dependency of the individual members of the clergy on the latter’s good will. Ironically, she and Burke were in agreement. He wanted the clergy to have means and thus to be more on a par socially and financially with the rich and powerful they had to guide spiritually and morally. He knew that the respect they were owed hung on their not having been seen as servants.76 For Wollstonecraft, the reality was that individual clergymen could not escape the conditions set by patronage. From her perspective, nothing healthy could come out of this kind of relation. That kind of dependence vitiated all it touched.
It is therefore not altogether surprising that she sought to add to her relentless denigration of Burke in casting him as a dependent, as himself prey to relations of clientage by virtue of being in receipt of a government pension, which he in fact was only to receive in the summer of 1794.77 Early in the Vindication she questioned his moral integrity; she asked Burke to examine his heart and ask himself
how it is consistent with the vulgar notions of honesty, and the foundation of morality—truth; for a man to boast of his virtue and independence, when he cannot forget that he is at the moment enjoying the wages of falsehood; and that, in a sulking, unmanly way, he has secured himself a pension of fifteen hundred pounds per annum on the Irish establishment?78
Dependence unmanned. Women were dependent. Children were dependent. Women remained so for life. The implicit contrast with her situation ran through her attack on the Reflections and was made explicit in the opening paragraph of her dedication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to M. Talleyrand-Périgord, Late Bishop of Autun: “Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue—and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren health.”79 Wollstonecraft wanted this grand blessing to be extended to all human beings, and not, as we will see in the next chapter, thanks to the asceticism of extreme poverty. It would necessitate a total transformation of humanity from its conceptions of children to its view of wealth, in fact, an end to misconceptions. As things were, “[t]he child is not left a moment to its own direction, particularly a girl, and thus rendered dependent is called natural.”80 The dependence that Wollstonecraft did think natural, unavoidable, and indeed desirable was the interdependence that arose and engendered genuine cooperation. She made this clear in her Original Stories, one of her earliest publications, but there is no reason to suppose that she departed from the view. Crucially, it did not entail either inferiority or superiority in those engaged in it. Indeed, that kind of dependence was the sphere in which virtues were developed.81 That, of course, was as it ought to be, not as it was; as it was, subservience in one form or another was the watermark of society.
The first distortions in human relations occurred at birth. Before even those brought about by education, male primogeniture meant that inequality was at the very heart of the family the instant infants came out of the womb, as Wollstonecraft and her siblings knew only too well.82 A fixed system of inheritance tended to warp what ought to be the purest relationship, namely, that between parents and children as well as between brothers and sisters, and within family members more widely. The fact that she brings up the subject and its ramifications is one of the most striking features of Wollstonecraft’s riposte to the Reflections. It followed from her contention that “[t]he perpetuation of property in our families is one of the privileges you most warmly contend for,” to which she added, “yet it would not be very difficult to prove that the mind must have a very limited range that thus confines its benevolence to such a narrow circle, which, with great propriety, may be included in the sordid calculations of blind self-love.”83 Identifying Burke as the champion of property rather than of liberty, as he had been generally considered prior to the publication of his Reflections, brought her to focus on inherited wealth and that led her to what she clearly conceived of as closely related topics, even though they were unusual in a combative political pamphlet, namely, marriage and love.
The desire to maintain property within a family, and indeed to increase it through arranged marriages, made tyrants of parents and cowed their children, who were made to break promises to those they imprudently loved, and forced “to do violence to a natural impulse, and run into legal prostitution.”84 “Who can recount.” she asked, “all the unnatural crimes which the laudable, interesting desire of perpetuating a name has produced?”85 At its root was a false sense of pride perverting “that first source of civilization, natural parental affection, that make no difference between child and child, but what reason justifies by pointing out superior merit.”86 What is more, this ambition to secure “good” unions prevented early marriages, Wollstonecraft argued, thereby making for a world in which “young men become coxcombs” and seducers; such a world debauched them as well as their conquests. It wrecked the making of “sober manliness of thought, and orderly behaviour,” essential to the character of a “master of a family, a husband, and a father.”87 Nor were women spared from the consequences of a matrimonial system driven by property. On the contrary, it made them aspire to form an advantageous alliance, which once sealed enabled them to engage freely with the aforementioned coxcombs. Only (presumably rich) widows and the poor married for love.
The adultery such a marriage market engendered made wives neglectful mothers. However, rather than dwelling on the impact this had on children, as one might have expected of Wollstonecraft given her early writings on education, she remained on the subject of women, thinking of their moral standing and their view of themselves and of life. These were not respectable.88 This was not so much on account of their adulterousness, but their slavish devotion to their physical appearance. Henceforth Wollstonecraft appeared to generalize. Women worshiped their own looks: “A woman never forgets to adorn herself to make an impression on the senses of the other sex, and to extort homage which it is gallant to pay, and yet we wonder that they have such confined understandings!”89 Shifting from speaking about them, women, as “they,” as if she were not of the same sex, Wollstonecraft addressed women directly in one of the most significant paragraphs of this Vindication and, one might add, of her writings in their entirety: “Have ye not heard that we cannot serve two masters? an immoderate desire to please contracts the faculties, and immerges, to borrow the idea of a great philosopher, the soul in matter, till it becomes unable to mount on the wing of contemplation.”90 “But, till hereditary possessions are spread abroad,” Wollstonecraft claimed, “how can we expect men to be proud of virtue? And, till they are, women will govern them by the most direct means, neglecting their dull domestic duties to catch the pleasure that sits lightly on the wing of time.”91
Thus, property seemed to have a lot to answer for. It was to blame for the web of appearance that Wollstonecraft so decried as she saw most, if not all, members of her society irretrievably caught in it. It made people seek to appear richer than they were. It made the middle ranks imitate the upper one. It made all strive to be other than they were and live outside themselves. It was however not property as such that was the evil. Its unequal distribution was the wrong: “Property, I do not scruple to aver it, should be fluctuating, which would be the case, if it were more equally divided amongst all the children of a family; else it is an everlasting rampart, in consequence of a barbarous feudal institution, that enables the elder son to overpower talents and depress virtue.”92 Creating such a rampart was precisely what Burke valued in the accumulation of property in some families. He realized it to be the necessary condition for the creation of a political class in the country of his birth and education, Ireland. And it was exactly what the English sought to prevent by disallowing primogeniture among Catholic families and thereby preserving the Protestant ascendancy.93 His critique of the penal laws against the Catholics, known as Tracts on the Popery Laws and drafted in 1762–1765, remonstrated against their injustice, arguing they violated natural justice, and he exposed them as the cause of the depressed state of the country. They stood in the way of economic recovery and “frustrated Catholics ‘in every road of industry,’ threw ‘almost all sorts of obstacles in their way’: and not merely, but industry devoted to developing their property.”94 It remained unpublished in his lifetime and there is no reason to think that Wollstonecraft would have been aware of it, though Burke was not the only person to decry the injustice of the penal laws. Yet, juxtaposing their respective stance on primogeniture and inherited property shows that for all the differences between the two authors, both thought of the subjects in terms of natural justice and industriousness.
Wollstonecraft did not call for the abolition of private property. Ownership was not in itself a wrong to be eradicated. In fact, it was authorized by nature, a term that Wollstonecraft often used interchangeably with “God.”95 Its legitimacy was conditional on the manner of its acquisition: “The only security of property that nature authorizes and reason sanctions is, the right a man has to enjoy the acquisitions which his talents and industry have acquired.”96 Paradoxically, legacies and therefore the process of inheriting were far from excluded in this account of what stood for legitimate private ownership, since Wollstonecraft added: “and to bequeath them to whom he chooses.”97 While there is no doubt a potential tension at the very least between this definition of justly acquired property and the description we saw her give of inheritance’s nefarious influence on families, marriages, and human personality, Wollstonecraft may have assumed that, given the freedom, legacies would be left to those deserving them. This she might be taken to imply when she wrote of the “natural parental affection, that makes no difference between child and child, but what reason justifies by pointing out superior merit.”98 What she meant by “superior merit” in this instance is not explained; given what we know from the tenor of her writings, one might surmise that she meant some form of moral or intellectual achievement, possibly like hers.99 When in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she described how all aim to obtain respect through their property, she did say that “and property, once gained, will procure the respect due only to talents and virtue.”100
Wollstonecraft did not only advance an account of admissibly acquired property, but also ventured some proposals for partial redistribution of lands, both from private and common ownership. “Why cannot large estates be divided into small farms?,” she asked, adding,
These dwellings would indeed grace our land. Why are huge forests still allowed to stretch out with idle pomp and all the indolence of Eastern grandeur? Why does the brown waste meet the traveller’s view, when men want to work? But commons cannot be enclosed without acts of parliament to increase the property of the rich! Why might not the industrious peasant be allowed to steal a farm from the Heath?101
Though she was prone to romanticize rural life, she could also see it as if from the windows of a great house. In her characteristically frank manner, Wollstonecraft owned that there was “something disgusting in the distresses of poverty, at which the imagination revolts, and starts back to exercise itself in more attractive Arcadia of fiction.” She could imagine how one might be led to create vast and sumptuous gardens around the halls and mansions of the wealthy, adding however:
[e]very thing on the estate is cherished but man; yet, to contribute to the happiness of man, is the most sublime of all enjoyments. But if, instead of sweeping pleasure-grounds, obelisks, temples, and elegant cottages, as objects for the eye, the heart was allowed to beat true to nature, decent farms would be scattered over the estate, and plenty smile around. Instead of the poor being subject to the griping hand of an avaricious steward, they would be watched over with fatherly solicitude, by the man whose duty and pleasure it was to guard their happiness, and shield from rapacity the beings who, by the sweat of their brow, exalted him above his fellows.102
Landscapes could be re-conceived, she argued, conjuring up a tableau of a clean, industrious, and no less aesthetically pleasing rural idyll. A fairer distribution of the land would be as visually appealing to the proprietor as his current gardens, and he would be a much happier man for it. Whether for the sake of winning them over or out of sheer realism, Wollstonecraft contended for greater distributive justice on the basis of its spiritual benefits to the rich, on their well-being, not by appeals to equality. Even when more radical in tone, the perspective reveals itself, in the end, to be as much that of the privileged as of the subjugated. She did not lose sight of either end of the spectrum:
This sight I have seen;—the cow that supported the children grazed near the hut, and the cheerful poultry were fed by the chubby babes, who breathed the bracing air, far from the diseases and the vices of the cities. Domination blasts out all these prospects; virtue can only flourish amongst equals, and the man who submits to a fellow-creature, because it promotes his worldly well-being, and he who relieves only because it is his duty to lay up a treasure in heaven, are much on a par, for both are radically degraded by the habits of their life.103
A world in which property was more evenly divided would be one in which virtue could prevail. Inequality stood in the way of virtue as it did the possibility of friendship.
The indictment of inherited property that Wollstonecraft delivered in her first Vindication continued with the same level of virulence in her second. She devoted the entirety of chapter 9 to “The Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society.” Its opening sentence reads: “From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.” Outdoing even her own rhetorical heights, Wollstonecraft continued: “For it is in the most polished society that noisome reptiles and venomous serpents lurk under the rank herbage; and there is voluptuousness pampered by the still sultry air, which relaxes every good disposition before it ripens into virtue.”104 The yearning for wealth and the respect it conferred led to the neglect of duties, the division between morality and religion, and “a den of sharpers or oppressors.”105 It fostered idleness. Though Wollstonecraft never missed an opportunity to decry it as a vice, its mention here is particularly striking given the serpentine imagery of her opening gambit. The image could not but evoke Adam and Eve’s ejection from the Garden of Eden and the Divine condemnation of mankind to labor. Rather than associating freedom from labor with a paradisiacal condition, Wollstonecraft chose to make the want of it sinful.
That Wollstonecraft valued activity and labor is clear from all her works. Both mind and body had to be exercised. Neither could be fully developed without exercise. Obviously, the same was true of virtue: it could only be acquired through the discharge of duties.106 Necessity, the need for activity to meet needs, was required to motivate exertion of mind, body, and morality. Inherited wealth annulled this kind of necessity. It even stood in the way of true education: “[i]s it among the list of possibilities that a man of rank and fortune can have received a good education.”107 “How can he discover that he is a man,” she continued, “when all his wants are instantly supplied, and invention is never sharpened by necessity?” Inherited wealth paid for others to provide for the needs of its possessors, and, in so doing, stifled the flourishing of all. In Wollstonecraft’s conception of human fulfillment, the importance of striving and effort, indeed of struggle, cannot be overestimated. It shaped her thoughts on every subject. She believed that “every thing valuable must be the fruit of laborious exertions.”108 Whether she thought indolence was one of humanity’s natural traits or socially induced is not entirely clear, but, whatever its origins or cause, there is no doubt that she was convinced that it had to be overcome. This is exemplified in the Preface to her Female Reader:
As we are created accountable creatures we must run the race ourselves, and by our own exertions acquire virtue: the utmost our friends can do is to point out the right road, and clear away some of the loose rubbish which might at first retard our progress.—If, conquering indolence, and a desire of present enjoyment, we push forward, not only the tranquil joy of an approving conscience will cheer us here, but we shall anticipate in some degree, which we advance to it, that happiness of which we can form no conception in our present state, except when we have some faint glimpse from the pleasures arising from benevolence, and the hope of attaining more perfect knowledge.—We are indeed all children educated by a beneficent Father for his kingdom—some are nearer the awful close than others, to their advice the young should listen—for respectable is the hoary head when found in the path of virtue.109
In the present condition of mankind, labor was degraded as well as unrewarded. Pleasure was falsely associated with leisureliness. This was “enervating pleasure” and inverted “the order of nature, which has ever made true pleasure the reward of labour.”110 Lady Kingsborough, and her circle, certainly had left their mark on Wollstonecraft. This said, Wollstonecraft was not entirely closed to the possibility that a degree of idleness might be conducive to the sophistication the French exhibited. In seeking to understand The Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, she wrote that “it is perhaps, in a state of comparative idleness—pursuing employments not absolutely necessary to support life, that the finest polish is given to the mind, and those personal graces, which are instantly felt, but cannot be described.” She did express the hope, however, “that the labour of acquiring the substantial virtues, necessary to maintain freedom, will not render the french [sic] less pleasing, when they become more respectable.”111
Wollstonecraft vented her abhorrence of many features of modern society. Much of what she despised was the consequence of inequality, unequal power that generated dependency, which itself was the result of unequal property, aggravated by unequal inheritance. Given that material inequality was the source of so much misery and denaturation, did she look to equality as the greater corrector of the wrongs of the world? Did her belief in the unity of mankind commit her to the equality of human beings? Inequality plays a very large role in her indictment of society, but it does not quite find a match in calls for equality to rectify it. Despite her repeated contention that “[a]mong unequals there can be no society,”112 her arguments, be they decrying injustices or asserting the rights of men and women, were not firmly grounded on claims about the equality of men, much less on the equality between men and women. She did on rare occasions refer to “the natural equality of man” or imply it, but it was not the foundation of her condemnation of the ills of society or her vision of a better future.113 She does in other instances speak of the natural inequality between people and, more important still, of the role of government in relation to it:
Nature having made men unequal, by giving stronger bodily and mental powers to one than to another, the end of government ought to be, to destroy this inequality by protecting the weak. Instead of which, it has always leaned the opposite side, wearing itself out by disregarding the first principle of it’s [sic] organization.114
She did not believe it to be the business of governments to obliterate inequalities so much as she thought that it ought to protect “the weak.” Eradication of the consequences of innate differences was neither possible nor possibly even desirable:
That there is a superiority of natural genius among men does not admit of dispute; and that in countries the most free there will always be distinctions proceeding from superiority of judgment, and the power of acquiring more delicacy of taste, which may be the effect of the peculiar organization, or whatever cause produces it, is an incontestable truth. But it is a palpable errour [sic] to suppose, that men of every class are not equally susceptible of common improvement: if therefore it be the contrivance of any government, to preclude from a chance of improvement the greater part of the citizens of the state, it can be considered in no other light than as monstrous tyranny, a barbarous oppression, equally injurious to the two parties, though in different ways. For all the advantages of civilization cannot be felt, unless it pervades the whole mass, humanizing every description of men—and then it is the first blessing, the true perfection of man.115
Thus, what Wollstonecraft expected of governments and society more generally was the end of conditions that prevented any citizen from having the chance to flourish and excel. Greatness was not the monopoly of any one class. While she did not appeal for any form of leveling, she wanted barriers to individual developments to be removed. Interestingly, Wollstonecraft did not turn to governments for the changes that were needed. Whether she thought governments unwilling or incapable of effecting them is not entirely clear, though one might surmise that she believed both to be the case. Her address was to individual men and women or society more generally. Only they could undertake the momentous transformation she envisaged. For, while she held property responsible for much of the wretchedness in the world, property alone would not have led to the current state of affairs were it not for certain features of human nature. More specifically, were it not for the fact that human beings measured their worth and the worthiness of their lives by the esteem acquired through ownership, no ill would come out of property. In an ideal world, the desire for property would be, if not entirely limited, then more closely related to meeting the needs of self-preservation. For all her condemnation of the inequality of property-holding, its impact on industry and injustice, Wollstonecraft never let go of the central plank of her moral critique, that it was vanity and the craving for self-worth through the admiration in the gaze of others that was the root of all evil.
It is principally thanks to her clash with Burke over his attack on Price that Wollstonecraft gave her thoughts about inequality and its attendant consequences greater philosophical depth. It was he who, more than anyone else, brought her to ponder the relationships of power, the master/pupil relation, that between rich and poor, men and women, and, consequently, also love and respect. Plundering Burke’s writings to better belittle his Reflections, she read or re-read his first major publication, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Replying to him made her angry, perhaps even angrier than she had been, about the perverted relationships between human beings at every level and in every sphere, which she believed a society based on inequality created. Such a society was sustained by as well as bred ignorance, and that, ultimately, was the greatest obstacle to a better one.
1. Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, pp. 43–52.
2. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, p. 250.
3. VW, p. 82.
4. VW, p. 74.
5. Ibid.
7. VW, p. 74.
8. Ibid.
9. VW, pp. 80–81.
10. Ibid., p. 81.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 82. See Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, pp. 44–52.
13. VW, p. 83.
14. Ibid., p. 84.
15. Ibid., p. 86.
16. Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, p. 171.
17. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, p. 327.
18. The French Revolution, Works, vol. 6, pp. 6–7.
19. Ibid., p. 189.
20. Ibid., p. 5.
21. Ibid., p. 15.
22. Ibid., p. 115.
23. Ibid.
24. Lena Halldenius, Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015); Alan Coffee, “Independence as Relational Freedom,” Women Philosophers on Autonomy, edited by Sandrine Bergès and Alberto Siani (New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 94–112; Alan Coffee, “Marie Wollstonecraft, Public Reason, and the Virtuous Republic,” pp.183–200, and Sandrine Bergès, “The Republican Approaches to Motherhood of Mary Wollstonecraft and Sophie de Grouchy,” pp. 200–217, in The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
25. Onora O’Neil makes a very interesting and comparable point when she argues that it is not so much that we need more trust in society, but that we need to make ourselves more trustworthy. See her A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
26. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 18.
27. VW, p. 238.
28. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 225.
29. Ibid., p. 20.
30. Ibid., p. 21.
31. Rawls, The Laws of Peoples.
32. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 223.
33. Ibid., p. 46.
34. Ibid., p. 146.
35. Ibid. My emphasis.
36. Ibid., p. 147.
37. Ibid.
38. VW, p. 223.
39. VM, p. 62.
40. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, p. 246.
41. VW, p. 76.
42. Letters, p. 84.
43. Ibid., p. 97.
44. Ibid., p. 85. For a succinct and insightful account of this period in Wollstonecraft’s life, see Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, pp. 87–116.
45. Letters, p. 87.
46. Ibid., n.188.
47. Ibid., pp. 81–82.
48. Ibid., p. 91.
49. Education of Daughter, Works, Vol. 4, p. 7.
50. Ibid., p. 17.
51. Letters, p. 91, my italics; and Works, Vol. 4, p. 10.
52. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 110.
53. VM, p. 47.
54. Ibid.
55. Letters, p.125.
56. Ibid., p. 91.
57. On Wollstonecraft as a critic of Burke, see Conniff, “Edmund Burke and His Critics”; Bromwich, “Wollstonecraft as a Critic of Burke”; and de Bruyn, “Edmund Burke.”
58. See her introduction to The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2014), as well her Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights, chapters 1 and 2.
59. VM, p. 17.
60. See Pocock, “The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution,” and “ ‘Introduction’ to Edmund Burke.”
61. VM, p. 3.
62. Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, p. 83.
63. For a nuanced analysis of Burke, honor, and government, see Bourke, “Edmund Burke and Enlightenment Sociability”; on Burke and chivalry, see de Bruyn, “Edmund Burke the Political Quixote”; on the debate between Burke and Wollstonecraft, see O’Neill, The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate.
64. Burke’s title was itself echoing the titles of works published in the 1750s in reaction to John Bolingbroke’s attack on the tenets of established Christian religion, e.g., Robert Clayton, A Vindication of the Histories of the Old and new Testament, in Answer to the Objections of the Late Lord Bolingbroke (1752), and Peter Whalley, A Vindication of the Evidences and Authenticity of the Gospels from the Objections of the Late Lord Bolingbroke (1753). See The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 1, p. 129 n.7.
65. VM, p. 5.
66. Ibid., pp. 5–6.
67. Ibid., p. 7.
68. Ibid., p. 6.
69. Reflections, p. 141.
70. Ibid., p. 148.
71. Ibid., pp. 149–150.
72. VM, p. 39.
73. Ibid.
74. Mr. Collins in Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) comes to mind.
75. VM, p. 39.
76. Reflections, p. 152.
77. Bourke, Empire and Revolution, pp. 846–847.
78. VM, p. 12. My emphasis.
79. VW, p. 67.
80. Ibid., p. 113.
81. Original Stories, Works, Vol. 4, pp. 412 and 432.
82. For an account of inheritance in her family, see Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, pp. xxi and 3.
83. VM, p. 21.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., p. 22. At this point, Wollstonecraft, seemed to slip self-contradictorily into allowing for preference of one child over another, something her pronouncements here and elsewhere would not permit.
87. Ibid.
88. See Tomaselli, “Reflections on Inequality, Respect, and Love,” pp. 4–33.
89. VM, pp. 22–23.
90. Ibid., p. 23. We will return to this passage below. See also Tomaselli, “ ‘Have Ye Not Heard That We Cannot Serve Two Masters?.’ ”
91. VW, pp. 140–141.
92. VM, p. 23.
93. “Introduction,” Tracts on the Popery Laws, in Burke, Pre-Revolutionary Writings, pp. 88–93.
94. Ibid., p. 91.
95. VW, p. 99: “Nature, or, to speak with strict propriety, God, has made all things right.”
96. VM, pp. 23–24.
97. Ibid., p. 24.
98. Ibid., p. 22.
99. Male primogeniture and frustrated or failed expectations of inheritance made itself felt in her own family. See Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, pp. 25–26.
100. VW, p. 230. We can only guess whether she thought she was more deserving of her grandfather’s legacy than her oldest brother.
101. VM, pp. 60–61.
102. Ibid., p. 59.
103. Ibid., pp. 60–61. My emphasis.
104. VW, p. 230.
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid.
107. VM, p. 43.
108. Ibid., p. 44.
109. “Preface,” The Female Reader, Works, Vol. 4, p. 60.
110. VW, p. 140.
111. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 148.
112. VM, p. 39.
113. For an insightful reading of Wollstonecraft’s liberal critique of social distinctions and inequality, see Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, esp. pp. 77–166. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem; and Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination also underline Wollstonecraft’s attacks on inequality but locates her in the radical egalitarian tradition of the 1790s and beyond.
114. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 17.
115. Ibid., p. 220.