Writing for Society as It Is and for Society as It Ought to Be
Wollstonecraft repeatedly evoked an ideal society that might exist in what sometimes seemed a very far-off and very different future. The disparity between the world as it was and the world as she wanted it to be presented Wollstonecraft with a dilemma: to write for the world that was or to write for the world as it ought to be. Mostly, the two kinds of perspective were intertwined in her writings. On most occasions, it is a matter of the reader’s overall sense of what Wollstonecraft stood for, which of the two vantage points one takes her to be speaking from at any one time. While some questions of interpretation might not be easily resolved, an awareness that she wrote at times for the present state of things and at others for that of an ideal to come, helps to disentangle her many, sometimes seemingly conflicting, pronouncements. She appears to have been conscious herself of her double identity as ameliorator and transformer. She offered a glimpse of this when she wrote, as we saw in the introduction, of the difficulty she faced explicitly in relation to her aspirations and hopes for her infant daughter, Fanny, in a letter to the baby’s father, Imlay. You know that as a female I am particularly attached to her,” she divulged, adding
I feel more than a mother’s fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex. I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart. With trembling hand I shall cultivate her sensibility, and cherish delicacy of sentiment, lest, whilst I lend fresh lushes to the rose, I sharpen the thorns that will wound the breast I would fain guard—I dread to unfold her mind, lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit—Hapless woman! What a fate is thine!1
Was a mother to prepare her daughter for the world or bring her up as she should be and try to create the world one would wish for one’s daughter? Whether writing for the present or an imaginable future, however, what mattered for Wollstonecraft were ideas, not because she was indifferent to practice, but because she was intent on delivering it. How one conceptualized the world and everything in it set limits to what was possible within it, in her view. Conversely, a critical examination of our most important categories could open up new prospects and thus transform social reality.
The dedicatory preface of the second edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman takes the form of a letter addressed to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), whom she had met during his diplomatic visit to England in the summer of 1792. She dedicates the second edition to him, as a leading member of the Revolution in its early stages and the author of Rapport sur l’instruction publique, fait au nom du Comité de constitution à l’Assemblée nationale, les 10, 11, et 19 septembre 1791, and speaks of her hope that her ideas might be tested and disseminated throughout the whole of France. In her concluding paragraph, she entreated Talleyrand with the following words:
I wish, Sir, to set some investigations of this kind afloat in France; and should they lead to a confirmation of my principles, when your constitution is revised the Rights of Woman may be respected, if it be fully proved that reason calls for this respect, and loudly demands JUSTICE for one half of the human race.2
Exactly how France was to become the testing ground for her principles, she did not specify. It was, after all, only a dedicatory letter. She did, however, offer at least some practical suggestions in terms of early schooling, hints that she admitted borrowing from Talleyrand’s own work on education, as shall be discussed below.3 Nonetheless, the strategy the letter itself revealed should not be overlooked. Wollstonecraft sought to convince an emissary of the Constituent Assembly and author of a report on public education for both the sexes to consider her arguments, allow them to be tested by implementation, one presumes, and, upon their confirmation, to ensure that the rights of women be enshrined in a revised constitution. What her letter indicates, and her Vindication confirms, is that however much justice for one-half of the human race called for the constitutional assertion of that half’s rights, what was needed for those rights to be proclaimed and protected was a conceptual shift in the general understanding of what a woman was.
Woman, Wollstonecraft made clear, was not simply a physical form. For as long as she was perceived as such, progress, by which she meant moral progress in the widest sense, would be halted. However, woman was also not to be conceived as a mere body to which a few affective and intellectual attributes were added, begrudgingly or not, by various individual authors or societies at large. She was one human creature.4 “I shall first,” she wrote in her introduction, “consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties.”5 Once she was seen as such by men and women, her rights would be observed as a clear matter of justice. Difficult as it was to make those in power accede to women’s rights, even equal rights, the greater challenge was to alter their conception of women. Following Wollstonecraft’s recasting, as it were, of women as human beings, she would “more particularly point out their peculiar designation.”6
Before all else, Wollstonecraft had to assuage Talleyrand’s fears and indeed those of all men and of many women, that to think of women as human beings, to treat them as such, would lead to the collapse of the social order. She chose to do this by arguing that it was the present condition that was morally bankrupt, and that it was largely so because women were misconceived as bodies for men’s pleasure and reproduction. Most of Wollstonecraft’s argument rested on exposing the contradictions in the world as it was. She took the overt aims of society, the assumptions as to what was required for its maintenance and continuity over time, and held a mirror to it. What was wanted were good citizens and parents, who would in turn engender good citizens and parents, but society produced neither. To do so, society had to make both, and for this to happen, both the sexes had to be reconceived, as did the relationship between them and that of society to children and the young. “The conclusion which I wish to draw,” she wrote toward the end of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “is obvious; make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives, and mothers; that is—if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.”7
Good citizens, parents, and children were those who performed their duty qua citizens, parents, and children. This was what Wollstonecraft took to be the accepted understanding, and it reflected social expectations. At present, Wollstonecraft explained in her first Vindication, these expectations could not be met given the conflicting norms prevalent in contemporary society, which treated marriage as a conduit to the acquisition and consolidation of property and therefore as a market in which men and women were traded by their families. We considered in chapter 3 some of the consequences of this practice and its attendant, primogeniture: it warped “natural parental affection, that makes no difference between child and child,” placed an “insuperable bar […] in the way of early marriages,” made “young men become selfish coxcombs,” “weaken[ed] both mind and body, before either has arrived at maturity,” and produced “a finical man of taste, who is only anxious to secure his own private gratifications and to maintain his rank in society.” As for girls, they were either “sacrificed to family convenience, or else marry to settle themselves in a superior rank, and coquet, without restraint, with the fine gentleman” just described.8
None of this produced dutiful fathers and mothers, nor citizens: “[t]he character of a master of family, a husband, and a father, form the citizen imperceptibly, by producing a sober manliness of thought, and orderly behaviour.”9 Duties were interconnected and mutually reinforcing, in her view. “The being who discharges the duties of its station is independent,” she claimed, “and, speaking of women at large, their first duty is to themselves as rational creatures, and the next, in point of importance, as citizens, is that, which includes so many, of a mother.”10 Duty made the woman as well as the man. That was independence. That was freedom. For both the sexes it was the performance of familial duties that made the citizen; it laid the ground for true citizenship. Their fulfillment as individual human creatures depended to a great extent on the realization of their duties as social beings, in Wollstonecraft’s view. We shall see further how she might have envisioned such a family and the parents within it. But such understanding was not the way of the times. Women neglected children for lovers, devoting themselves instead to their self-adornment, and “to coquet, the grand business of genteel life, with a number of admirers, and thus to flutter the spring of life away, without laying store for the winter of age, or being of any use to society.”11 And so the world continued. And spread. It spread from one class to another,12 and with it a general culture that did not respect women, because, in truth, they were not worthy of respect.13
Among other things, but essential to her other wishes, Wollstonecraft wanted marriage to be based on respect and, for this to happen, both men and women had to be different from the way they were currently made. They had to be in a position to be deserving of respect.
Her view was firmly anchored in what had developed in the eighteenth century into a near commonplace, that “[t]he two sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other.”14 Certainly, Wollstonecraft wished, indeed, demanded (given that she was in no doubt that her reasoning was sound and that the experiment she proposed in France would prove it) justice for one-half of the human race—women. But this was not about rectifying an imbalance by raising women to the level of men, by granting the one sex the rights that were being affirmed in law in France by and for the other sex. Wollstonecraft wanted women and men to be remodeled into a different type of women and men. She wanted them to consider and think of themselves as human beings “placed on this earth to unfold their faculties,” as we have just seen her say. She wanted the revolution to go much further than it appeared to be going at that stage and was likely to venture, given its self-imposed limitations of rights for man and not woman, that is, beyond being a civil and political phenomenon to one leading to a moral metamorphosis of humanity. What she wished for was an entirely new way of thinking about women and men as wholesome beings, and this necessitated an entirely new way of thinking about everything else.
Stressing her independence and “disinterested spirit,” she explained that she wrote for her sex, not herself, and did so out of “an affection for the whole human race.” Her motive was “the cause of virtue,” and this led her to “earnestly wish to see woman placed in a station in which she would advance, instead of retarding, the progress of those glorious principles that give a substance to morality.”15 Wollstonecraft wished for moral progress, and for it to take place necessitated more than the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) to be recast as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Woman.
Neither A Vindication of the Rights of Men nor A Vindication of the Rights of Woman are aptly named. The first was so named ironically, we saw, to remind Burke of his own Vindication, in which he had so aptly laid bare the dreadful inequities of contemporary society that he was now upholding, in Wollstonecraft’s and his many critics’ view. The second title was likely to have been chosen as a match to her first. More than campaigning for rights or making a case for them, both of Wollstonecraft’s Vindications argue against those whom she took to be implicitly or explicitly denying men and women their rights to liberty, security, and property. However, both depart from what their labels might lead one to expect to make much more extensive assessments of civilization. This is not to say that Wollstonecraft was indifferent to the cause to which her titles committed her. In the Advertisement heading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but following the Letter to Talleyrand in the second edition, Wollstonecraft stated that
[w]hen I began to write this work, I divided it into three parts, supposing that one volume would contain a full discussion of the arguments which seemed to me to rise naturally from a few simple principles; but fresh illustrations occurring as I advanced, I now present only the first part to the public.
Many subjects, however, which I have cursorily alluded to, call for particular investigation, especially the laws relative to women, and the consideration of their peculiar duties. These will furnish ample matter for a second volume, which in due time will be published, to elucidate some of the sentiments, and complete many of the sketches begun in the first.16
Since she only mentioned a second volume in relation to the existing first, it is not entirely clear what might have been the three parts into which the initial project was to be divided.17 It is not improbable that she meant the first two parts to consist, as we just saw her saying, to show woman as a human creature, and next to consider her “peculiar designation.” In the event, it proved difficult to keep the two entirely apart. Her Hints, which are taken to have been notes toward a sequel to the Vindication, are, it must be said, more in line with such topics as the imagination, the sublime, imitation, and character than they are with law.
The Declaration of the Rights of Woman, Patriotism, and the Progress of Civilization
Inasmuch as Wollstonecraft contended for the rights of woman, she was not alone. Most notably, Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793) had composed her Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne in September 1791. Its twenty-seven articles called for equality between the sexes, including full legal and political rights as well as the division of power, the end of celibacy of priests, and argued for a constitutional monarchy in an addendum. The two authors shared many convictions, including the abhorrence of slavery and domination more generally. In making their case for the rights of women, both campaigners sought to allay any possible fear that this would undermine morals. Far from leading to sexual depravity, both stressed, as many others would well into the following centuries, it would have the opposite effect and strengthen morality and benefit society. For all the similarities in their stance of rights and morality, however, Wollstonecraft and Gouges differed in at least one major respect, that is, that the Englishwoman was not seeking to incorporate women into a man’s world, even a reformed one. Hers was part of a developing, but extensive, critique of civilization. It is possible that Gouges’s might also have become one, or more clearly so if it be taken to constitute one in embryo, had she not been guillotined by the Jacobins on November 3, 1793.
Asserting first that there was “a more general diffusion of knowledge” in France “than in any part of Europe,” which Wollstonecraft attributed to “the social intercourse which had long subsisted” there, she then proceeded to speak freely and, indeed it is hard to deny, insulted the French. She thought them under the empire of “a kind of sentimental lust,” the French character endowed of a “sinister sort of sagacity,” due to the duplicitous nature of their political and civil government, which they termed “finesse,” and their polished manner drove sincerity out of society.18 French women were even more immodest than their English counterparts, and despised the pillars of modesty, that is, the “personal reserve, and sacred respect for cleanliness and delicacy in domestic life.”19 If patriotism had at all touched them, Wollstonecraft urged, “they should labour to improve the moral of their fellow-citizens, by teaching men, not only to respect modesty in women, but to acquire it themselves, as the only way to merit their esteem.”20 Wollstonecraft did not seem to know of Gouges’s work, and almost certainly not the price the French playwright and political actor paid for her endeavoring to do just what her English counterpart urged.
Woman, Wollstonecraft continued, would hamper the progress of knowledge and virtue for as long as she was left unprepared by education to become man’s genuine companion. The revolution would ultimately fail, if women were not granted freedom to develop their reason in order to understand wherein their duty lay. The “true principle of patriotism,” as she called it, could only be taught by a mother who was a true patriot herself. That by “the true principle of patriotism,” Wollstonecraft had the love of humanity in mind is clear from what she next declared: “the love of mankind, from which an orderly train of virtues spring, can only be produced by considering the moral and civil interest of mankind; but the education and situation of woman, at present, shuts her out from such investigations.”21 Thus mixed with Wollstonecraft’s national characterization, of which these comments on French women, and her Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation are but two examples, was an expression of a cosmopolitanism that can be detected in earlier writings.
That true patriotism knew no boundary was Price’s view and argument. This was the love of country that he had extolled in his 1789 Discourse on the Love of our Country, which was the subject of much of Burke’s Reflections. The latter work had by no means been her first encounter with the Newington Green’s minister’s sermon. In the December 1789 issue of the Analytical Review, she had reviewed the Dissenting Minister’s address, delivered on November 4, 1789 to the Revolution Society, which had first celebrated the Glorious Revolution on its centenary the previous year. In 1788, Three Resolutions had been passed which Price effectively reiterated and Wollstonecraft had highlighted in her review article. After applauding Price’s unaffected style and sincerity, she focused on his account of patriotism, saying: “Dr P. gives us a forcible definition of that love which we ought to cherish for our country; love, the result of reason, not the undirected impulse of nature, ever tending to selfish extremes.22 True patriotism, rather than being incompatible with the love of humanity, was thus a particular expression of a more expansive love. She reproduced his defense of Christianity’s prescription of universal benevolence against those who argued such sentiment to be incompatible with the love of one’s country. On his view, and Wollstonecraft’s who quoted him to an unusual length in her review, Christianity “recommended that UNIVERSAL BENEVOLENCE which is an unspeakably nobler principle than any partial affection.” She noted his claim that “[t]he noblest principle in our nature is the regard to general justice, and that good-will which embraces all the world.” From this, it followed on his view, one that Wollstonecraft seemed to share: “Our first concern, as lovers of our country, must be to enlighten it.”23
Given her perception of herself, this made her a patriot, but what of the rest of her sex? The difficulty was that women were generally thought to be capable neither of patriotism nor of loving mankind, and much less so of both, that is, of true patriotism, as she, following Price, conceived the matter. Indeed, as we have had occasion to see already, Wollstonecraft herself did not think the majority of women capable of anything much beyond the narrowest conception of self-love. This had to be changed. She wanted it to change for the sake of women themselves and very much also for that of humanity. The progress of the species hung on it.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman detailed the condition of women, how they had come to be as they were, and how they were so very far from what they ought and needed to be. Much of her indictment of their condition had already been spelled out in her first Vindication. In a world in which people were defined and defined themselves by what they owned and the status this accorded them, marriages were used instrumentally, with the results just described. This contributed to the commodification of women, who in turn treated themselves as objects of desire, making their physical appearance the center of the universe. Wollstonecraft would not have minded half as much had that appearance been one of health and strength. Indeed, not only would it not have mattered, she would have celebrated such a concern. In her view, we saw, men were not at all exempt from the consequences of the materialism of society, but they did not labor under an imposed ideal of fragility and weakness. Some, if not all, could, at least in principle, strive to reach their full potential as human beings. If this was true only of an elite of men, and had been so for much of history, the French Revolution seemed in its first years to extend that possibility at least in principle to all men by granting them civil and political rights. No such prospect was visible for women. Yet without it the revolution would only perpetuate the world as it had found it. Wollstonecraft envisioned a different future, one that necessitated a more radical political revolution, as well as a social and economic one, and above all a moral one.
It would be true to say that what Wollstonecraft wanted was the undoing of all that we previously indicated she did not like about women as well as men. She wanted an end to feebleness, idleness, dependence, inequality, prejudice, narrowmindedness, ignorance, and more. In other words, she wanted to undo what had gone wrong with the world, rather puzzlingly so given mankind’s natural benevolence. It is also true that she called for rights for women as well as men. Whether she thought that civil and political rights were sufficient means to achieve much of what she hoped for humanity as a whole is doubtful, but what is undoubtable is that she spoke of rights as intrinsically linked to duties and duties to rights: “without rights there cannot be any incumbent duties.”24 What is no less clear is that in the world as it was, rights were indispensable. They were indispensable as the means to accede to the knowledge of one’s duties to oneself and others and to the means of discharging these duties.
Education stood out among the rights Wollstonecraft demanded for her sex. Duties had to be known, of course, but their performance also needed to be made desirable. The century produced many proposals for women’s education. She herself acknowledged that much and said that these pedagogical works could not be ignored. Much of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman consists of reviews and critiques of proposals for the education of women, and of men. Thus, she wrote that “[t]aking a view of the different works which have been written on education, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters [to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)] must not be silently passed over.” 25 She did not mean, as she immediately made clear, “to analyze his unmanly, immoral system, or even to cull any of the useful, shrewd remarks which occur in his epistles.” What she wanted instead was to challenge the pedagogic philosophy permeating the epistolary collection in its entirety, namely, preparing the young for the world as early as possible.26 This was anathema because she did believe, as we saw earlier, that “[f]or everything, […] there is a season.” She thought of education as needing to be appropriate for the age of children and the young. She thought it unnatural to hasten development, and far better for the young to come into the adult world full of ideals rather than with none, with illusions rather than being deluded and corrupted.27 She had much to say on this and other aspects of education, and, it must be stressed, a great deal about that of boys as well as girls, as discussed in later sections.
By a suitable education Wollstonecraft did not just mean the three Rs—reading, writing, and arithmetic—not even one with the addition of the classical education boys and young men enjoyed in schools and universities. What she wanted was an education that would take women out of themselves in the sense of defying what she took to be the prevailing extreme form of self-centeredness. Yet, it was to be an education that would also turn them inward in the sense of taking them away from the searching for validation in the gaze of others, away from the mirrors of appearances, away from parading themselves. For this, women had to be enlightened, and so did men.
Enlightenment called for the breakdown of oppositions. While Wollstonecraft herself made copious polemical use of them, especially, but not just, in her first Vindication, opposing nature to artifice, morality to manners, virtue to politeness, native to foreign and so forth, she was eager to break down many of these for philosophical reasons. Particularly nefarious, in her view, were those oppositions clustered around the idea of femininity and masculinity, such as that of weakness and strength.
To be enlightened was to be made to realize the nonsense of identifying femininity with beauty, beauty with fragility and weakness, and thus seeing the beautiful in contrast to the sublime, the powerful, the strong, and masculinity. Although Wollstonecraft did not want women to be thought of in merely physical terms, she was adamant that women’s bodies had to be made strong, as we saw her argue more generally in chapter 3. Education had to ensure that they develop a robust physique. As her own life and that of those around her evidenced, physical endurance was essential. Everything was contingent on this, not least strength of mind, indeed even financial independence, which Wollstonecraft so valued:
Men have superiour [sic] strength of body; but were it not for mistaken notions of beauty, women would acquire sufficient to enable them to earn their own subsistence, the true definition of independence; and to bear those bodily inconveniences and exertions that are requisite to strengthen the mind.28
Men might be considered physically stronger on average, but that did not mean that women had to be denied physical development. On the contrary, Wollstonecraft made it a requirement of girls’ education from early childhood onward, as well as for boys, to ensure parity of attention to physical development:
Let us then, by being allowed to take the same exercise as boys, not only during infancy, but youth, arrive at that perfection of body, that we may know how far the natural superiority of man extends. For what reason or virtue can be expected from a creature when the seed-time of life is neglected?29
Wollstonecraft’s reflections must always be understood, as noted at the onset of this chapter, either for the world as it is or for one as it should be. This is made evident when she writes that
Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in. In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century. It may then fairly be inferred, that, till society is differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education.30
One had to be realistic. Education, both in the narrow and the wider sense, reflected the spirit of the age. That spirit was one that reigned in a hall of mirrors. Appearances were everything, and they were driven by and exacerbated by the desire for material goods. The age was marked by the seemingly endless growth of luxury consumption, as many had noted from François Fénelon (1651–1715), Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), Rousseau, and Adam Smith. If Wollstonecraft agreed with them and others about the Zeitgeist, she was more sober than most pedagogues of the time about the hopes to be placed in the education of individuals. It could not transcend “the opinions and manners of the society they live in.” These had to be challenged directly, as she was endeavoring to do in all her writings.
This said, something could be done. The education of women could, and had to, go beyond mere “accomplishments.” Both the sexes could be drawn out of ignorance. Borrowing “some hints from a very sensible pamphlet, written by the late bishop of Autun on Public Education,” Wollstonecraft provided some idea of what she had in mind in terms of testing her ideas in France:
Let an enlightened nation then try what effect reason would have to bring [women] back to nature, and their duty; and allowing them to share the advantages of education and government with man, see whether they will become better, as they grow wiser and become free. They cannot be injured by the experiment; for it is not in the power of man to render them more insignificant than they are at present.
“To render this practicable,” she added,
Day schools, for particular ages, should be established by government, in which boys and girls might be educated together. The school for the younger children, from five to nine years of age, ought to be absolutely free and open to all classes. A sufficient number of masters should also be chosen by a select committee, in each parish, to whom any complaint of negligence, &c. might be made, if signed by six of the children’s parents.31
There was to be no subordinate authority, no ushers, as seeing them being treated as servants by teachers would be “injurious to the morals of youth.” Rich and poor were to be taught together, dressed alike, and subject to the same discipline. Given her insistence on the importance of physical exercise, it isn’t surprising to find Wollstonecraft specifying that the schoolroom be situated within a large ground, so as to ensure that children have hourly exercise and to give them the opportunity to learn botany, mechanics, and astronomy through observation. They were to learn the three Rs as well as natural history and sciences, but this “should never encroach on gymnastic plays in the open air.” The Socratic or conversational form should be used to teach “[t]he elements of religion, history, the history of man, and politics.”32 If we recall the importance she gave to the good treatment of animals, it is to be expected that she maintained that “[h]humanity to animals should be particularly inculcated as a part of national education.”33
Specialization, on this scheme, would come after the age of nine, when “girls and boys, intended for domestic employments, or mechanical trades, ought to be removed to other schools, and receive instruction, in some measure suited to the destination of each individual, the two sexes being still together in the morning; but in the afternoon, the girls should attend a school, where plain-work, mantua-making, millinery, &c. would be their employment.”34 The more academic or wealthier young people would then be taught ancient and modern languages, and continue with their study of sciences, history, politics ,and even “polite literature.”35
From this point on, if not earlier, Wollstonecraft’s proposals seem to pertain more to the world as she was wishing it to be than the world as it was. She seemed to realize this herself, and anticipating the fears her plan for mixed education might induce in her readers, she conceded:
Girls and boys still together? I hear some readers ask: yes. And I should not fear any other consequence than that some early attachment might take place; which, whilst it had the best effect on the moral character of the young people, might not perfectly agree with the views of the parents, for it will be a long time, I fear, before the world will be so far enlightened that parents, only anxious to render their children virtuous, shall allow them to choose companions for life themselves.36
Although her pedagogical schema, if put into practice in revolutionary France, as she was suggesting (in the first instance, one presumes), would have made for very different citizens over time, the enlightened world she evoked in the above passage required more than the education of rich and poor, male and female in common.
In the as yet distant world Wollstonecraft imagined, there would be neither rich nor poor. Some would be richer or poorer than others, but not markedly so, or at least not to the extent experienced in late eighteenth-century society. There would be private property. She did reveal that “under whatever point of view I consider society, it appears, to me, that an adoration of property is the root of all evil.”37 Yet, Wollstonecraft not only did not call for its abolition, but thought ownership of property a natural and good thing. Moreover, she indicated that “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.”38 Labor was the rightful means for the acquisition of property. “The only security of property that nature authorizes and reason sanctions is,” she had told Burke, “the right a man has to enjoy the acquisitions which his talents and industry have acquired, and to bequeath them to whom he chooses.”39 Still overtly addressing him, she had asked in her first Vindication, “Why cannot large estates be divided into small farms? These dwellings would indeed grace our land.”40 Likewise, some of the commons might be given to industrious peasants to cultivate.41 In other words, property, which she conceived mostly as land, should be more evenly distributed, in her view. Providing the means of subsistence to all would mark the end of both idleness, which we know she so deplored, and poverty. It would be wrong, however, to infer from this that she believed the problem facing modern society was reducible to the poverty question.
Much was needed to solve it and much more to usher in an enlightened society. The lives of men and women would have to be altogether unlike that of Wollstonecraft’s contemporaries. They would have to have other conceptions of themselves, each other, and the purpose of their being. While she did not draw anything like a blueprint of such a society, taking together some of her hints, expressed desires, and critical comments goes some way toward producing a sketch of her ideal. That ideal was not utopian, if by this one means denying the issue of scarcity and assuming human beings to be angels or near angels. It was also not a return to an imagined or historical past. It might be deemed unrealistic or, indeed undesirable, and therefore utopian in a derisory sense, but that is a different matter.
We can infer from Wollstonecraft’s profound critique of commerce that the society of the future would have little of it. She decried the impact commerce had on those engaged in it. This was particularly pronounced during her last few years. It became evident in the later part of her French Revolution and her Letters from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The rising commercial class was a source of concern for her. They were both cause and symptom of a growing social phenomenon that augured ill for all.
The destructive influence of commerce, it is true, carried on by men who are eager by overgrown riches to partake of the respect paid to nobility, is felt in a variety of ways. The most pernicious, perhaps, is it’s [sic] producing an aristocracy of wealth, which degrades mankind, by making them only exchange savageness for tame servility, instead of acquiring the urbanity of improved reason.42
She was so affected by what she saw of business in her travels that it made her think better of the past:
During my present journey, and whilst residing in France, I have had an opportunity of peeping behind the scenes of what are vulgarly termed great affairs, only to discover the mean machinery which has directed many transaction of the moment. The sword has been merciful, compared with depredations made on human life by contractors, and by the swarm of locusts who have battened on the pestilence they spread abroad. These men, like the owners of negro ships, never smell on their money the blood by which it has been gained, but sleep quietly in their beds, terming such occupations lawful callings; yet the lightning marks not their roofs, to thunder conviction on them, “and to justify the ways of God to man.”43
Similarly, in one of her final reviews, she wrote of the “rapacious whites, from whose bosoms [sic] commerce has eradicated every human feelings.”44 “You may think me too severe on commerce,” she wrote to Imlay, “but from the manner it is at present carried on, little can be advanced in favour of a pursuit that wears out the most sacred principles of humanity and rectitude.”45 Indeed, she even told him (unaware of his past business in the slave trade) that his character had been affected by engaging in it: “Ah! Shall I whisper to you—that you—yourself, are strangely altered, since you have entered deeply into commerce—more than you are aware of—never allowing yourself to reflect, and keeping your mind, or rather passions, in a continual state of agitation.”46
Commerce generated demographic changes and with it a shift from agriculture to manufacturing: “Commerce also, overstocking a country with people, obliges the majority to become manufacturers rather than husbandmen.”47 Both the most secure and “the least arduous road to pre-eminence,” commerce “turned [vast numbers of men] into machines, to enable a keen speculator to become wealthy; and every noble principle of nature is eradicated by making a man pass his life in stretching wire, pointing a pin, heading a nail, or spreading a sheet of paper on a plain surface.” She thus deplored how “the division of labour, solely to enrich the proprietor, renders the mind entirely inactive.”48 She was drawing on Adam Smith’s description of the psychological impact of the division of labor in Wealth of Nations, and she went on to paraphrase him as follows:
The time which, a celebrated writer says, is sauntered away, in going from one part of an employment to another, is the very time that preserves the man from degenerating into a brute; for every one must have observed how much more intelligent are the blacksmiths, carpenters, and masons in the country, than the journeymen in great towns; and, respecting morals, there is no making a comparison.49
Given her emphasis on the unity of mind and body, it is to be expected that she thought the respective physiques of those employed in monotonous manufacturing labor and those of craft workers said all: “[t]he very gait of the man, who is his own master, is so much more steady than the slouching step of the servant of a servant, that it is unnecessary to ask which proves by his actions he has the most independence of character.”
As her insistence on the importance of a healthy and strong body together with her desire to foster all that makes for “independence of character,” we can assume that her enlightened society of the future would not have an economy that was marked by an intense, let alone intensifying, division of labor. Rather, it would be artisanal and agricultural. The very last pages of her French Revolution provide further clues as to how she envisioned work. “Besides, it is allowed,” she claimed,
That all associations of men render them sensual, and consequently selfish; and whilst lazy friars are driven out of the cells as stagnate bodies that corrupt society, it may admit of a doubt whether large work-shops do not contain men equally tending to impede that gradual progress of improvement, which leads to the perfection of reason, and the establishment of a rational equality.50
We can infer from this that a forthcoming world of “rational equality” would be devoid of large single-sex working units. This, together with what we saw of her pedagogical recommendations, would mean that men and women would be educated, work, and therefore remain together throughout life.
What the concluding pages of Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution also indicate and can be garnered from nearly all her works is that the enlightened society of tomorrow would not be differentiated by rank or driven by the desire for luxury. We saw just how it was “men who are eager by overgrown riches to partake of the respect paid to nobility” who entered into commerce, triggering the baneful consequences she outlined. Besides the dim view she had of the nobility, acquired or reinforced by her work as a governess for the Kingsboroughs, she deplored the way in which the middle ranks sought to appear richer than they were and endeavored to mimic their social superiors, copying the manners and all that the latter made fashionable: “[t]he vanity of leading the fashions, in the higher orders of society, is not the smallest weakness produced by the sluggishness into which people of quality naturally [fall].”51 The deplorable results this produced were more particularly fueled by royal courts:
Since the existence of courts, whose aggrandisement has been conspicuous in the same degree as the miseries of the debased people have accumulated, the convenience and comfort of men have been sacrificed to the ostentatious display of pomp and ridiculous pageantry. For every order of men, from the beggar to the king, has tended to introduce that extravagance into society, which equally blasts domestic virtue and happiness. The prevailing custom of living beyond their income has had the most baneful effect on the independence of individuals of every class in England, as well as in France; so that whilst they have lived in the habits of idleness, they have been drawn into excesses, which, proving ruinous, produced consequences equally pernicious to the community, and degrading to the private character.52
All ranks and every individual were thus adversely affected by the luxury consumption of monarchs and the aristocracy attending them at court, not excluding the courtiers themselves: “[e]xtravagance forces the peer to prostitute his talents and influence for a place, to repair his broken fortune; and the country gentleman becomes venal in the senate, to enable himself to live on a par with him, or reimburse himself for the expenses of electioneering, into which he was led by sheer vanity.” All followed suit: the professions becoming “equally unprincipled,” and the merchants “selling any thing for a price far beyond that necessary to ensure a just profits, from sheer dishonesty, aggravated by hard-heartedness, when it is to take advantage of the necessities of the indigent.” 53
The trickle-down effect, Wollstonecraft described, was not one of wealth or comfort, but of economic, moral, and psychological degradation. Unlike Adam Smith, with whose Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Wealth of Nations she was well acquainted, she did not take comfort from any aspect of commercial society. She shared his concern for the effects of repetitive labor on the character of workers and he was explicit about the gullibility displayed in acquisitiveness: neither he nor she believed it could conceivably secure happiness or even be a conduit to it. Smith, however, thought that for all its nefarious consequences, the division of labor and luxury economy could in the long term mean that the poor would be better off in absolute terms than in a more equal society. Wollstonecraft did not. Even when she had cause to reconsider her views about luxury during her travels in Scandinavia, there is no evidence that it led her to revise her position about its economic, not to mention moral, effect. If there was a consolation prize for modern commercial society, it was not measured in the improved condition of the laboring poor.
Had rank been what it once was, it may well not have incurred the opprobrium that Wollstonecraft leveled at it. Wollstonecraft noted earlier in her account of the history of France how offices had been sold under “the insidious Mazarine,” who had thereby broken the “independent spirit of the nation,” and how under Louis XIV, by drawing the nobles and “concentrating the pleasures and wealth of the kingdom in Paris, the luxury of the court become commensurate to the product of the nation.” To this she added:
Besides, the encouragement given to enervating pleasures, and the venality of titles, purchased either with money, or ignoble service, soon rendered the nobility as notorious for effeminacy as they had been illustrious for heroism in the days of the gallant Henry.54
Effeminacy was, of course, not confined to France or its nobility. Like many other eighteenth-century authors concerned with its seeming preponderance, Wollstonecraft saw it as one with luxury.55 For more reasons than one, therefore, in addition to a limited division of labor and level of commerce, an ideal society would know neither rank, nor luxury.
Effeminacy was not only linked to luxury but associated with, and the product of, a number of varied practices and institutions in Wollstonecraft’s writings. Thus she claimed contra Burke that the newly assembled members of the French National Assembly “knew more of the human heart and legislation than the profligates of rank, emasculated by hereditary effeminacy.”56 She thought, for instance, that educating boys at home would result in making them “become vain and effeminate.”57 This comment was part of a discussion of the relative merits of boarding and home schooling. She admitted that she “should, in fact, be averse to boarding-schools, if it were for no other reason than the unsettled state of mind which expectation of the vacations produce.”58 The reason she was not outrightly against them was because at home they would acquire too high a sense of their own importance, through tyrannizing servants, and “from the anxiety expressed by most mothers, on the score of manners, who, eager to teach the accomplishment of a gentleman, stifle, in their birth the virtues of a man.” They would then be brought into adult company by their mothers, and “treated like men when they are still boys,” which was, as we saw, a great pedagogical error in Wollstonecraft’s view, and which would make them vain and effeminate.59
Vanity and effeminacy were mutually reinforcing and facets of the same persona. As we have seen, “effeminacy,” “unmanliness,” and cognate words were all featured negatively in her register. She used “unmanly,” for instance, as a term of abuse in upbraiding Burke,60 or referred to the “unmanly servility” that primogeniture generated.61 By contrast, she appropriated masculinity when she addressed him: “And, Sir, let me ask you, with manly plainness.”62 However, she wrote that she refused to speak of Catharine Macaulay as having “a masculine understanding, because I admit not of such an arrogant assumption of reason; but I contend that it was a sound one, and that her judgement, the matured fruit of profound thinking, was a proof that a woman can acquire judgement, in the full extent of the word.”63 Speaking to the fears that the arguments of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman would engender “masculine women,” she rejoined:
If by this appellation men mean to inveigh against their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming, I shall most cordially join in the cry; but if it be against the imitation of manly virtues, or more properly speaking, the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raises the females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind;—all those who view them with a philosophic eye must, I should think, wish with me, that they may every day grow more and more masculine.64
We can surmise then that in the ideal world, men and women would not be effeminate, but manly. They would not be vain or feeble, but pursue the same virtues the attainment of which a just education would prepare them. This would be an education that fostered natural benevolence, which we saw in chapter 2, was a potential that needed to be cultivated in human beings, as did all virtues.
Wollstonecraft contrasted modesty with chastity, though the two were ultimately mutually reinforcing. The effect of the latter was a “purity of mind” whereas the former was a “simplicity of character that leads us to form a just opinion of ourselves, equally distant from vanity or presumptions, though by no means incompatible with a lofty consciousness of our own dignity.” “Modesty,” she added, “is that soberness of mind which teaches a man not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think, and should be distinguished from humility, because humility is a kind of self-debasement.” Thus, General George Washington was not immodest in accepting the command of the American forces, she thought, because “[a] modest man often conceives a great plan, and tenaciously adheres to it, conscious of his own strength.”65
What Wollstonecraft strongly balked at was the kind of sexual modesty, that is chastity, demanded of women; but she did not object to either being regarded as virtues as long as they were deemed so for both the sexes.66 Indeed, to expect any virtue of one sex and not the other counted as one of the most significant contradictions within the culture of her day. In truth, the wantonness of men was far more consequential in her view than it would be of women, as we shall see. Abhorrent to her, however, was not sexuality, but the lasciviousness to which she thought unequal and distorted human relations inevitable led, and which in turn poisoned marriages. A culture in which a woman, raped, lost her honor and bore the shame that ought to have covered the rapist was absurd beyond absurdity:
When Richardson makes Clarissa tell Lovelace that he had robbed her of her honour, he must have had strange notions of honour and virtue. For, miserable beyond all names of misery is the condition of a being, who could be degraded without its own consent!67
A society that made chastity and virginity a sexual attribute that added, or, when failing, took away the value of a woman as an object of desire or marriage was one that Wollstonecraft wanted to leave behind. So too was a world in which neither man nor woman was “rendered amiable by the force of those exalted qualities, fortitude, justice, wisdom and truth.”68 She wanted women to pursue and be enabled to pursue the same virtues as men, even if one were to grant (which she did not) that females might not “attain the same degree of strength of mind, perseverance, and fortitude.”69
Of each of “those exalted qualities, fortitude, justice, wisdom and truth,” she wrote explicitly only to varying degrees. The body of her work makes it clear however that she thought of these virtues as inseparable and mutually necessary. In the closing sentence of chapter 23 of her early work, Original Stories, which appeared in three London editions in her lifetime,70 Wollstonecraft said of justice that it was the foundation of all virtues. She was to make a similarly strong claim about truth in her posthumously published novel, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria.71 Both works were fictional, both moralizing, and Wollstonecraft wrote little explicitly about either justice or truth. Yet, her entire corpus might be said to have been about both, either through her descriptions of the injustices of the world or in the ways individuals could seek to counter it or alleviate some of its disastrous consequences. She generally conceived justice as social justice and by highlighting specific injustices. In Original Stories, it was in relation to the “Mischievous Consequences of delaying Payment” of debts, the title of the chapter in which the claim of the foundational nature of justice occurs. That brief chapter also made a point regarding bartering about which Mrs. Mason tells her young charges, “[b]argains I never seek, for I wish every one to [receive] the just value of their goods.”72 What is clear is that in her view, to be disposed to undertake any social and political redress on whatever scale, minor or large, one needed to be compassionate and sensitive to the conditions of others. One also had to be able to recognize justice and injustice. In other words, one needed the kind of character that was sensitive to injustices, and this required knowledge and to see the truth as it stood. This explains why she conceived of justice as the cornerstone of the virtues in her early intellectual life and of truth holding that position in later life. Psychological disposition and knowledge were fundamental to the exercise of all the virtues. Thus, she explained that justice called on self-command: “[e]conomy and self-denial are necessary in every station, to enable us to be generous, and [to] act conformably to the rules of justice.”73 Ideally, charity, we saw in chapter 2, would not be needed, but in an unjust society it was. Writing with respect to girls deemed “ruined,” in the language and view of her day, she rejected the practice of placing women in “Asylums and Magdalens,” explaining: “It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world!”74
Of fortitude Wollstonecraft spoke in the highest terms.75 It was in her view what “distinguishes steadiness of conduct from the obstinate perverseness of weakness”; along with physical and mental exercise, she thought of it as essential to the maternal, and one can assume also paternal, character; those without it, especially the “indolent, become rigorous, and to save themselves trouble, punish with severity faults that the patient fortitude of reason might have presented.”76 Fortitude was necessary to the pursuit of happiness.77 It presupposed strength of mind, and that could only be acquired by a rational education that developed the faculties gradually in the order appropriate to the age, thereby fostering independent judgment.
With age another virtue should become apparent: forbearance. Together with liberality of sentiment, it was a virtue of maturity.78 Children, she believed, should not “be taught to make allowance for the fault of their parents, because every such allowance weakens the force of reason in their minds, and makes them still more indulgent of their own.” The reverse was true of adults: “[i]t is one of the most sublime virtues of maturity that leads us to be severe with respect to ourselves, and forbearing of others.”79 She believed that forbearance was intimately linked to benevolence and wrote of it in religious terms in her first publication under an essay on “The Benefits which arise from Disappointments”:
The Author of all good continually calls himself, a God long-suffering, and those most resemble him who practice forbearance. Love and compassion are the most delightful feelings of the soul, and to exert them all that breathes is the wish of the benevolent heart.80
Wollstonecraft was to do so again in Original Stories in a passage that ties together a number of her beliefs discussed in chapter 2:
When Mrs. Mason returned, she mildly addressed Mary. I have often told you that every dispensation of Providence tender to our improvement, if we do not adversely act contrary to our interest. One being is made dependent on another, that love and forbearance may [soften the human heart, the whole family on earth might have a fellow-feeling for each other]. By these means we improve [one another]; but there is no real inferiority.
In a possible future, humanity would be at one with itself, with individuals understanding their dependence on the rest and thereby their true self-interest. For that future to be realized, individuals needed to be made virtuous. As she thought “[s]tealing, whoring, and drunkenness [as] gross vices” and “over-reaching, adultery, and coquetry” but “venial offences, though they reduce virtue to an empty name, and make wisdom consist in saving appearances,” one can assume that none would be prevalent in an age to come.81 Nor would “adulterous lust.”82
While Wollstonecraft did not renege on the need to recognize human mutual interdependence, she did not wish to undermine the importance of eliminating some forms of dependency. Above all, whether in the present or in an ideal future, women had to be free not to marry and they should never have to marry out of financial need. They therefore had to be able to earn a living, and more especially so if they wished to remain single or not to remarry in widowhood. However, the independence Wollstonecraft wanted for women (and indeed men) went far beyond financial or even social independence. She wanted women and men to remain individual persons within a marriage.83 The distinctiveness of individual identity was something she valued. Marriage did not dissolve two people into one, in contrast to the way Novalis (1772–1801) or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), for instance, were to conceive of it.
For marriages to be “the parent of those endearing charities which draw man from the brutal herd,” men had to be chaste before matrimony. The reason for this was that promiscuous men had little respect for women. Additionally, male promiscuity had very baneful consequences on the physical relationship between the married pair:
To adulterous lust the most sacred duties are sacrificed, because before marriage, men by a promiscuous intimacy with women, learned to consider love as a selfish gratification—learned to separate it not only from esteem, but from the affection merely built on habit, which mixes a little humanity with it.84
For Wollstonecraft, philanderers were selfish even in the act of sex itself. Moreover, sex without affection between both parties was bestial. But this was not all. It had to be the right feeling, it had to be sexual desire. Sex, Wollstonecraft contended in the novel she began a year before her death, was not elevated, but degraded, by lack of passion, by frigidity:
When novelists or moralists praise as a virtue, a woman’s coldness of constitution, and want of passion; and make her yield to the ardour of her lover out of sheer compassion, or to promote a frigid plant of future comfort, I am disgusted. They may be good women, in the ordinary acceptation of the phrase, and do no harm; but they appear to me not to have those “finely fashioned nerves,” which render the sense exquisite. They may possess tenderness; but they want that fire of the imagination, which produces active sensibility, and positive virtue.85
She may have had in mind Rousseau’s phenomenally successful epistolary novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), in which Julie marries the older man her family chose for her, despite her love for her younger tutor. What was one to think of a woman, she continued, “who marries one man, with a heart and imagination devoted to another?” Wollstonecraft’s point went beyond this kind of scenario:
Is she not an object of pity or contempt, when sacrilegiously violating the purity of her own feelings? Nay, it is as indelicate, when she is indifferent, unless she be constitutionally insensible; then indeed it is a mere affair of barter; and I have nothing to do with the secrets of trade.86
Sex called not only on the right feelings, but importantly also the mind: “understanding is necessary to give variety and interest to sensual enjoyments, for low, indeed, in the intellectual scale, is the mind that can continue to love when neither virtue nor sense give a human appearance to an animal appetite.”87 Thus, physicality had to be rendered human and sexual intercourse never remotely come close to rape, neither outside nor inside marriage. For this, the totality of the person had to desire it, and as it would be put today, consent to it. To be untrue to one’s feelings of whatever kind, including physical attraction or revulsion, could never be virtuous, according to Wollstonecraft. “Truth is the only basis of virtue,” she declared, “and we cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us.” It could be that men to “enslave” women inculcated a “partial morality,” making sex a duty regardless of women’s true desires, but this was symptomatic of what could not be, that is, attributing specific duties to specific groups of people. Virtues applied to all or none, as for physical desire, she urged: “let us not blush for nature without a cause!”88 This said, Wollstonecraft looked forward to a time when desires lined up with the morally good and away from the vicious. She had already expressed such a wish, unaware of what her own future desires were to be: “Supposing, however, for a moment, that women, were, in some future revolution of time, to become, what I sincerely wish them to be, even love would acquire more serious dignity, and be purified in its own fires; and virtue giving delicacy to their affections, they would turn with disgust from a rake.”89 Whether this was a possible world, given the often-ineffable natures of physical desire and love, remains an open question, but it is one that Wollstonecraft seemed to have wrestled with.90
She wanted marriages to be grounded in mutual respect and esteem in addition to, as we just saw, physical attraction.91 The latter might well pass and the nature of love change over time. “To seek for a secret that would render it constant,” she contended, “would be as wild a search as for the philosopher’s stone, or rather grand panacea.” More than this, the discovery of this secret would not only be useless but “pernicious to mankind.” “The most holy band of society,” she believed, “was friendship.”92 It was in the context of this discussion in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that Wollstonecraft uttered what she knew would be shocking, namely, that “an unhappy marriage is often very advantageous to a family, and that the neglected wife is, in general, the best mother.”93 This is best understood by stressing that this statement came just after her assertion that “[i]n order to fulfil the duties of life, and to be able to pursue with vigour the various employments which form the moral character, a master and mistress of a family ought not to continue to love each other with passion.”94 Her point, as she explained herself, was that a fixation on one single object, in this case one person, was mentally and morally enfeebling. There were stages in a relationship, as there were in a human life more generally, we recall her having argued, and indeed also in the history of humanity.
The most sublime of all affections, friendship, unlike love, strengthened with time.95 True friendship itself was, however, not easily found. Indeed, quoting François de La Rochefoucauld’s (1613–1680) Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (1665), Wollstonecraft admitted it might be rarer still than true love.96 Importantly, she was not unaware of the inherent tension between maintaining the distance between individuals which respect for their integrity commanded and the total intimacy that her view of true sexual desire and sex itself no less commanded. Sex and friendship seemed to pull in different directions.97
And yet, the ground for friendship needed to be laid. That it could not exist between unequals, she insisted in a Vindication of the Rights of Men. Besides equality, it required respect, which in turn demanded a shared sense of the nature of virtue and its pursuit. It called for education, which we have seen should be of both the sexes together, and impart knowledge of the world and an interest in its affairs. Husbands and wives needed to be able to converse and to flourish as human beings within the context of marriage, if it “be the cement of society.”98 They needed to be equally necessary and independent of each other, because each fulfilled the respective duties of their station, possessed all that life could give.”99 By this, it must be stressed, Wollstonecraft did not mean that women’s duties were those of parenting and men’s those of citizenship. As we have seen repeatedly, Wollstonecraft was insistent that both should be parent and citizen, but parenting as well as citizenship could take on different forms. Men did not breastfeed, which Wollstonecraft along with many others in the eighteenth century strongly advocated. Women did not usually fight in wars, but they died giving birth to the next generation of citizens more often than men did defending their country on the battlefield. If self-sacrifice was the measure, women more than earned their civic entitlement.100
Yet neither women nor men should be made to marry. Indeed, Wollstonecraft quoted Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) The Essaies (1612) that “the best works, and of the greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men”; she thought the same was true of great women.101 She added, however: “the welfare of society is not built on extraordinary exertions; and were it more reasonably organized, there would be still less need of great ability, or heroic virtues.”102 Thus, here as elsewhere, Wollstonecraft was thinking on two levels simultaneously, that of the world as it was, and that as it ought to be. In the world as it was, seducers should be legally obliged to maintain both the women they seduced and the children they fathered.103 In the future, they would either not exist or, if they did, women would not fall for them; indeed, they would choose “the calm satisfaction of friendship, and the tender confidence of habitual esteem” over the unequal prerogatives of love.104 While she did not overtly call for divorce to be facilitated, she had her characters note or reveal the inequity of the laws regarding matrimony and divorce, but noted how in Sweden divorce could be obtained by either party.105 In the here and now, laws could be and needed to be changed.
In a more equitable society, not only adults but children would be freed from unjustified restrictions on their flourishing. They could be and needed to be unfettered from the shackles of false conceptions. For this, they would have to be educated so they could exercise their reason and come in due course to an understanding of the grounds behind parental instructions: “but, till society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed, because they will be obeyed, and constantly endeavour to settle that power on a Divine right which will not bear the investigation of reason.”106 New ways of thinking were necessary. Fixed association of ideas had to be reconfigured.
While she did not refrain from deploying them, Wollstonecraft wanted to break down dichotomies, such as those between wit and judgment,107 manners and morals, and the beautiful and the sublime. Of these, the last pair was probably the most critical one to demolish or fundamentally realign. Important though the discussion of these two concepts were in eighteenth-century Europe, particularly in Britain and Germany, Wollstonecraft was more especially drawn to their opposition as a result of reading or re-reading Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) in battle with him for his Reflections. Had he not associated the sublime with the strong, the admirable, respect, perfection, and the masculine, and the beautiful with the weak, the pitiful, love, imperfection, and the feminine, Wollstonecraft might have overlooked the work entirely. As it was, it infuriated her. There were theological reasons for her to be so angered, as well as dismayed. As Wollstonecraft saw it, the primary consequence of Burke’s severance of the beautiful and love from the sublime and respect in what had become a highly influential work throughout Europe when she turned to it, would be that “Plato and Milton were grossly mistaken in asserting that human love led to heavenly, and was only an exaltation of the same affections; for the love of the Deity, which is mixed with the most profound reverence, must be love of perfection, and not compassion for weakness.” Great though it was, her concern, as she was quick to add, was not only for her sex for its being identified with the pathetic and fragile, but also for men: “[t]o say the truth, I not only tremble for the souls of women, but for the good natured man, whom everyone loves. The amiable weakness of his mind is a strong argument against its immateriality, and seems to prove that beauty relaxes the solids of the soul as well as the body.”108 On Burke’s view, she argued, respect and love were “antagonist principles” and beauty would have to be eradicated from civil society lest it diminished virtue among men. As can be observed from the preceding chapters, both her Vindications and much of her work more generally endeavored to tear apart those associations and solder together the ideas of beauty and strength, love and respect, femininity and fortitude and the “manly virtues.” She wanted a future in which men and women were respected, and for this they had to be made respectable. That, in turn, required that they be educated into new beings in a new society.
The world that Wollstonecraft called for would not be a return to a golden age of the past. In The French Revolution, she wrote of being “confident of being able to prove, that the people are essentially good, and that knowledge is rapidly advancing to that degree of perfectibility, when the proud distinctions of sophisticated fools will be eclipsed by the mid rays of philosophy, and man be considered as man—acting with the dignity of an intelligent being.”109 In her subsequent Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, she explained that she had not hitherto thought as much as she now did about the “advantages obtained by human industry.” “The world require[d],” she thought, “the hand of man to perfect it; and as this task naturally unfolds the faculties he exercises, it is physically impossible that should have remained in Rousseau’s golden age of stupidity.”110 Happiness could not consist in ignorance, and she went so far as to follow that thought with the opinion that “[t]he increasing population of the earth must necessarily tend to its improvement, as the means of existence are multiplied by invention.”111 As we saw in the first two chapters, the early history of mankind was not devoid of attraction, in her view. It was the age of imagination and poetry, and it may be that she believed some of this might be recaptured once the world was set right, stripped of false illusions, affectations, and delusions about the true end of life.112
In an ideal world, girls and boys would be raised together, and their bodies, senses, imagination, and understanding would be educated to different extents appropriate to their ages in such a way as to make them physically strong and psychologically resilient, and thus prepared to perform their duties as citizens, husbands and wives, and parents in due course. Spouses would be freely chosen and those who did not wish to marry would be free not to do so. All would be equipped to support themselves as all would have a skill or profession to secure employment. All would have inner resources and know the pleasures of the mind as well as such pleasures as can be had roaming the countryside. Property rights would be protected, but economic inequality minimal. It would be a decentralized society in order to avoid risking the kind of vanity and display that could be seen in courts and capitals such as Paris, with a division of labor that would stop short of the kind we saw her decry, one that involved stupefying mechanical repetitive work. Having been educated together, the sexes would also work together in farms, shops, and small-scale workshops. Both parents would discharge their duties as parents.
It would be a world in which the erroneous and nefarious oppositions of the sublime and the beautiful, respect and love, indeed sex and respect, would long have been dissolved. One in which men and women would be prepared and expected to exercise the same virtues and judged by the same moral and legal standards. They would be friends, once passion subsided. It would be a world graced with the fairest virtues, those of benevolence and generosity, one can also presume.113
Would there be wars? If any, only defensive ones, “the only justifiable war[s].”114 And she did say that “[o]ur 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.”115 Would there be punishments? Probably not very many, as there would be fewer crimes, given the changed relations between people and relative economic equality, but almost certainly not solitary confinement (except possibly in the case of murder),116 and certainly not capital punishment, least of all public executions, which depraved spectators.117 Would there be religion? Perhaps, though probably not clerics, not as she saw them in the world as it was at any rate, though if some, if they resembled the Rev. Dr Richard Price; from what we saw of her invoking God throughout her writings, there would certainly be faith. Virtue would be pursued for its own sake and never in fear of Divine retribution, as she thought the idea of retributive punishment incompatible with God’s nature. In an enlightened world, only reformative punishment would be deemed legitimate and in accordance with the attributes of God.118 In “the next stage of existence,” she indicated in her notes toward a second volume of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, there would not be punishment, but only amplified happiness. Those, such as the first Roman emperor, Augustus, whose vices, acquired to retain his power, “must have tainted his soul,” would not enjoy this augmented happiness.119 But, of course, the earthly society of the future would be free of figures like Augustus.
At the end of the penultimate chapter of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft explained that in her discussion of the advantages to be had from the education she proposed:
I have dwelt most on such as are particularly relative to the female world, because I think the female world oppressed; yet, the gangrene, which the vices engendered by oppression have produced, is not confined to the morbid part, but pervades society at large: so that when I wish to see my sex become more like moral agents, my heart bounds with the anticipation of the general diffusion of that sublime contentment which only morality can diffuse.120
This passage alone underscores the importance of reading her most famous text as part and parcel of a comprehensive view of the human condition, society, and its history. Pace Godwin, Wollstonecraft should not be thought of as the famous author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However much that work contributed to her fame, it can easily be taken to contain but one aspect of her assessment of civilization. It should not eclipse the rest of her corpus, nor can it be fully appreciated outside of it. Its critical nature might also lead one to think of her as one of the greatest nay-sayers. She was no such person. As the opening chapter indicated, she enjoyed and loved many things, and was eager to share those she did. For true happiness to be within reach of all, however, the closing chapters have shown that nothing short of a moral revolution would do. While not consistently optimistic (who can be?), her “heart [did] bound with the anticipation of the general diffusion of that sublime contentment which only morality can diffuse.” As the ill was general and profound, so the remedy had to be general and profound. Women and men had to change to change the world together.
1. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, p. 269.
2. VW, p. 70.
3. Ibid., p. 263 n.5.
4. Ibid., p. 74.
5. Ibid., p. 75.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 275.
8. VM, p. 22.
9. Ibid.
10. VW, p. 235.
11. VM, pp. 22–23.
12. Ibid., p. 23.
13. Ibid., p. 22.
14. VW, p. 229.
15. Ibid., p. 67.
16. Ibid., p. 71.
17. Ibid., p. 235.
18. Ibid., pp. 67–68.
19. Ibid., p. 68.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Analytical Review, Vol. 5, December 1789, Works, Vol. 7, p. 185.
23. Ibid.
24. VW, p. 235.
25. Ibid., p. 188.
26. Ibid., pp. 188–189.
27. See Botting, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, pp. 63–88.
28. VW, p. 165.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., p. 89.
31. Ibid., p. 263. In a note, Wollstonecraft acknowledged her debt to Talleyrand’s Rapport.
32. Ibid., pp. 263–264.
33. Ibid., p. 268.
34. Ibid., p. 264.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, p. 325.
38. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 147.
39. VM, pp. 23–24.
40. Ibid., p. 60.
41. Ibid., p. 61.
42. French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 233.
43. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, p. 344. The reference is to Paradise Lost, I, 26.
44. Analytical Review, Vol. 25 (1797), Works, Vol. 7, p. 480.
45. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, p. 304.
46. Ibid., pp. 340–341.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., pp. 233–234.
50. Ibid., p. 234.
51. Ibid., p. 225.
52. Ibid., p. 233.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., p. 225. She is referring to the French King Henry IV.
55. VM, p. 24.
56. Ibid., p. 41.
57. VW, p. 252.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. VM, p. 12.
61. Ibid., p. 23.
62. Ibid., p. 36.
63. VW, p. 188.
64. Ibid., p. 75.
65. Ibid., p. 207.
66. Ibid., pp. 78, 213, 226–228. See Crafton, “ ‘Insipid Decency’ ”; and Simon Swift, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the ‘Reserve of Reason,’ ” Studies in Romanticism 45, no. 1 (2006): 3–24. JSTOR, www
67. VW, p. 150; see Dorothy McBride Stetson, “Women’s Rights and Human Rights: Intersection and Conflict,” in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Maria J. Falco (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 172–176.
68. VM, p. 47.
69. VW, p. 106.
70. Prefatory Note, Works, Vol. 6, p. 354.
71. Wrongs of Woman, Works, Vol. 1, p. 145.
72. Original Stories, Works, Vol. 6, p. 441.
73. Ibid., p. 445.
74. VW, p. 149.
75. Ibid., p. 96.
76. Ibid., p. 275.
77. Wrongs of Woman, Works, Vol. 1, p. 123.
78. Education of Daughters, Works, p. 43.
79. VW, p. 250.
80. Education of Daughters, Works, pp. 36–37.
81. VM, p. 24.
82. VW, p. 292.
83. Ibid., p. 232.
84. Ibid., p. 292.
85. Wrongs of Woman, Works, Vol. 6, p. 144.
86. Ibid., p. 145.
87. VW, p. 271.
88. Wrongs of Woman, Works, Vol. 6, p. 145.
89. VW, p. 204.
90. See Tomaselli, “Reflections on Inequality, Respect and Love.”
91. See Kendrick, “Wollstonecraft on Marriage,” pp. 34–49.
92. VW, p. 99.
93. Ibid., p. 100.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid., p. 151.
96. Ibid., p. 99.
97. This is discussed at greater length in Tomaselli, “Reflections on Inequality, Respect and Love,” n.471.
98. VW, p. 261.
99. Ibid., p. 232.
100. See Tomaselli, “The Most Public Sphere of All: The Family.”
101. VW, p. 140.
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid., p. 148.
104. Ibid., p. 186.
105. Wrongs of Woman, Works, Vol. 1, pp. 172, 178–179, and 181; Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, pp. 317–318.
106. VW, p. 250.
107. VM, p. 57.
108. Ibid., p. 48.
109. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 46.
110. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, p. 288.
111. Ibid.
112. Hints, 25, pp. 300–301.
113. VM, p. 23.
114. VW, p. 236.
115. The French Revolution, Vol. 6, p. 147.
116. Analytical Review, Vol. 13 (1792), Works, Vol, 7, p. 442.
117. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, p. 323.
118. Hints, 17–21, p. 299.
119. Ibid., 21, pp. 299–300.
120. VW, p. 275.