Gracious Creator of the whole human race! hast thou created such a being as woman, who can trace Thy wisdom in Thy works, and feel that Thou alone art by Thy nature exalted above her, for no better purpose . . . [than] to submit to man, her equal – a being who, like her, was sent into the world to acquire virtue? Can she consent to be occupied merely to please him – merely to adorn the earth – when her soul is capable of rising to Thee?
(VRW 5:136)
Admirers of Mary Wollstonecraft are often reluctant to see her as a religious thinker. This should not surprise us. The reiterated “appeals to God and virtue,” in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman are “a dead letter to feminists now,” a leading feminist critic tells us, and if by dead letter is meant a failed communication, then it is certainly true that of all aspects of Wollstonecraft’s thought it is her religious faith that has failed to speak to modern interpreters.1 Most studies do no more than gesture toward it, and then usually dismiss it as ideological baggage foisted on her by her times, with no positive implications for her views on women. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is generally located in a tradition of Enlightenment humanism that is assumed to have been at least indifferent to religion, if not actively hostile to it.
So it is startling, on looking closely at the Rights of Woman, to find that it contains at least fifty discussions of religious themes, ranging from brief statements on one or other doctrinal point to extended analyses of women’s place within a divinely-ordered moral universe. Nor are these discussions in any sense peripheral to the main message of the text. If Wollstonecraft’s faith becomes a dead letter to us, then so does much of her feminism, so closely are they harnessed together. The famous call for a “revolution of female manners” in the Rights of Woman on close inspection proves to be first and foremost a summons to women to a right relationship with their Maker. “In treating . . . of the manners of women, let us, disregarding sensual arguments, trace what we should endeavor to make them in order to cooperate . . . with the Supreme Being” (VRW 5:90):
. . . for . . . if they be really capable of acting like rational creatures, let them not be treated like slaves; or, like the brutes who are dependent on the reason of man, when they associate with him; but cultivate their minds, give them the salutary sublime curb of principle, and let them attain conscious dignity by feeling themselves only dependent on God.
(VRW 5:105)
It is through the exercise of “a rational will that only bows to God” that women may achieve that self-respect on which inner freedom is founded. “These may be Utopian dreams,” Wollstonecraft writes, but “thanks to that Being who impressed them on my soul, and gave me sufficient strength of mind to dare to exert my own reason, till, becoming dependent only on Him for the support of my virtue, I view, with indignation, the mistaken notions that enslave my sex” (VRW 5:105). It was thanks to God, in other words, that Mary Wollstonecraft became a feminist.
Wollstonecraft’s family were inactive members of the Church of England, and according to her husband and biographer, William Godwin, she “received few lessons of religion in her youth.”2 Nonetheless, for the first twenty-eight years of her life she was a regular churchgoer and her first published work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), was steeped in orthodox attitudes, advocating “fixed principles of religion” and warning of the dangers of rationalist speculation and deism. For women in particular, the young Wollstonecraft argued, clear-cut religious views were essential: “for a little refinement only leads a woman into the wilds of romance, if she is not religious; nay more, there is no true sentiment without it, nor perhaps any other effectual check to the passions” (TED 4:33). In the same year that Thoughts was published, however, Wollstonecraft stopped attending church, and by the time she produced her last published book, A Short Residence in Sweden, she had performed an apparent volte face, writing approvingly of free-thinkers who “deny the divinity of Jesus Christ, and . . . question the necessity or utility of the christian system” (SR 6:276). The abandonment of christian orthodoxy, however, only served to underline her commitment to what had become a highly personal faith. “Her religion,” as Godwin wrote in his Memoirs of her shortly after her death, “was almost entirely of her own creation. But she was not on that account less attached to it, or the less scrupulous in discharging what she considered as its duties” (Memoirs, 215).3
At the time Godwin met Wollstonecraft she had not been a churchgoer for over four years. Nonetheless, on that occasion they managed to have a row about religion in which, as Godwin recalled, “her opinions approached much nearer to the received one, than mine” (Memoirs, 236). When they met again, in 1796, Godwin was an atheist. This meeting was much more successful than the first: they became friends, then lovers, then husband and wife – and meanwhile went on disagreeing about religion. “How can you blame me for taking refuge in the idea of a God, when I despair of finding sincerity here on earth?” Wollstonecraft demanded at one low point two months before her death.4 At any rate, little as he would have wanted it, it was Godwin who had the last word, since after his wife’s premature death it was left to him to produce an account of her religious beliefs in his Memoirs.
Wollstonecraft’s religion, Godwin wrote, was “in reality, little allied to any system of forms” and “was founded rather in taste, than in the niceties of polemical discussion”:
Her mind constitutionally attached itself to the sublime and the amiable. She found an inexpressible delight in the beauties of nature, and in the splendid reveries of the imagination. But nature itself, she thought, would be no better than a vast blank, if the mind of the observer did not supply it with an animating soul. When she walked amidst the wonders of nature, she was accustomed to converse with her God. To her mind he was pictured as not less amiable, generous and kind, than great, wise and exalted.
(Memoirs, 215)
This representation of Wollstonecraft’s deity as a wishful mental projection owes too much to Godwin’s own religious skepticism to be wholly reliable.5 Her friend Mary Hays’s alternative depiction of Wollstonecraft’s God as “a being higher, more perfect, than visible nature” whom she “adored . . . amidst the beauties of Nature, or . . . in the still hour of recollection,” better captures Wollstonecraft’s credo.6 Both Godwin and Hays rightly stress the central role of passion and imagination in Wollstonecraft’s theology. Both also – much less plausibly – represent her as indifferent to theological controversy. Her “faith relied not upon critical evidence or laborious investigation,” Hays claimed,7 which in Godwin’s version became a depressingly condescending portrait of his wife’s mind in action. “She adopted one opinion,” Godwin wrote, “and rejected another, spontaneously, by a sort of tact, and the force of a cultivated imagination; and yet, though perhaps, in the strict sense of the term, she reasoned little, it is surprising what a degree of soundness is to be found in her determinations” (Memoirs, 272–3).
“She reasoned little . . .”: and this of the woman who translated and reviewed theological works in three languages, was conversant with major theological debates of her period, and who consistently argued that true religion was not a mere matter of enthusiastic sentiment but rather “a governing principle of conduct, drawn from self-knowledge, and rational opinion respecting the attributes of God” (VRW 5:184). This refusal to take Wollstonecraft seriously as a religious thinker was symptomatic of the anxieties aroused in Godwin by his wife’s intellectual status. But it was also indicative of an important shift of opinion in the eighteenth century, as religious belief became increasingly aligned with the feminine and both came under the rule of sentiment, what Godwin described as the “empire of feeling.” In the second edition of his Memoirs Godwin revised his account of Wollstonecraft’s “intellectual character” so as to make some of these connections more explicit. The difference between the sexes, he argued there, corresponds to the psychological opposition between reason and emotion – and he and Wollstonecraft exemplified this divide, he being dominated by “habits of deduction” while she enjoyed an “intuitive sense of the pleasures of the imagination” which eventually aroused his own emotions as well: “Her taste awakened mine; her sensibility determined me to a careful development of my feelings” (Memoirs, 276–7). So while the Philosopher could not follow his wife into her religious beliefs, he nonetheless became a convert to the deep sense of personal truth reflected in them, the “fearless and unstudied veracity” of Wollstonecraft’s womanly heart.
This portrait of the woman of sensibility (at one point Godwin called Wollstonecraft a “female Werther”) tells us less about Wollstonecraft than it does about prevailing sexual mores – and Godwin’s haphazard attempts to keep his wife’s stormy history within the boundaries of them. This is not to deny that Wollstonecraft enjoyed donning the cloak of female Wertherism at times. But the idea of a uniquely feminine emotionality was anathema to her, a central target of her feminism. Religious sentimentality of the kind typically associated with women she particularly disdained. Drawing a line between this sort of “irrational enthusiasm” and the deep emotions of the true believer was not easy, however, and Wollstonecraft worked hard at clarifying the distinction. Her ambiguous attitude toward sensibility (which has so received much attention from recent commentators) is best understood in this context, as part of her wider endeavor to define an authentic religious subjectivity. What shape does a woman’s inner life take when it is lived in a right relationship with her Maker?
For a feminist, this question inevitably raised issues of power and entitlement. The centrality of religion to Wollstonecraft’s worldview is evident in virtually every aspect of her thought, from her uncompromising egalitarianism to her hostility toward British commercialism – modern mammon, as she saw it – to her ardent faith in an imminent age of universal freedom and happiness. The utopian optimism coloring her politics was basically Christian in origin, although marked by other influences too, most notably Rousseauism. Elsewhere I have traced in detail the religious roots of her radical credo, in its many diverse manifestations.8 In this essay I concentrate specifically on her feminist ideals, as enunciated in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and prefigured in her first novel, Mary, A Fiction (1788). Historians seeking to identify the origins of modern Western feminism have generally located them in secular developments: the rise of liberal political ideals, the reformist intellectual programme inaugurated by Enlightenment, the expressive opportunities opened to women by the eighteenth-century expansion of print culture. These, inter alia, are important factors. But for proto-feminist lines of argument with the longest pedigree and greatest ideological clout, we must look first to religion, or rather to that body of Christian doctrine which, at its most consistent, had strongly positive implications for women’s private and public status. Pushed to the limit of their revisionary potential, teachings pertaining to the equality of souls and human likeness to God offered female believers a vision of sacralized selfhood sharply at odds with worldly subordination. Gender distinctions and their social consequences were both thrown into question. “Human nature itself, which is complete in both sexes, has been made in the image of God,” Saint Augustine had written, and thus in the spirit “there is no sex,”9 or as Simone de Beauvoir put it with characteristic trenchancy centuries later, “religion. . . . cancels the advantage of the penis”.10 Attacking misogynist representations of women as weakly infantile, Wollstonecraft repeatedly accused their inventors of purveying the Muslim viewpoint that women “have not souls” (VRM 5:45; VRW 5:73,88) (a popular misreading of Islamic doctrine at the time). As children of God, we are all equal in His sight, Wollstonecraft reminded readers of the Rights of Woman; thus “[i]t be not philosophical to speak of sex when the soul is mentioned” (VRW 5:103).
The appeal of this stance to pro-woman thinkers long antedated Wollstonecraft, and has long survived her. Feminism, it is worth recalling, has for most of its history been deeply embedded in religious belief. Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century western feminists were nearly all active Christians, and even the more secularized varieties of feminism that emerged in western societies in the 1970s still carried powerful undercurrents of religious belief. Obviously, the religions which have engaged feminists internationally over the centuries have been so varied that any attempt to offer a general account of them would be foolhardy. But given the centrality of Wollstonecraft to the self-image of western feminism, understanding her theology may give us more than local insights into the religious impulse as it has operated across the feminist tradition.
In Wollstonecraft’s Protestant England, the spiritual equality of women had long been an important minority theme. Puritan sects in particular, with their fierce emphasis on the democracy of God’s grace, had provided generations of female believers with a language of spiritual self-assertion; and even the Church of England had harbored godly feminists. “Whatever . . . Reasons Men may have for despising Women, and keeping them in Ignorance and Slavery, it can’t be from their having learnt to do so in Holy Scripture,” the High Anglican Mary Astell claimed in 1700, adding stoutly that “the Bible is for, and not against us . . .”11 Calls to a higher life – whether it meant an intensification of female piety in the home or even, as in the case of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women preachers, leaving their households to spread God’s Word – was a route to enhanced self-esteem and moral status, and sometimes to the potential subversion of Female Duty. “I chose to obey God rather than man,” one female preacher wrote on abandoning her husband in order to serve her Maker,12 and the appeal of such forms of religious obedience to many insubordinate female spirits is easily imagined.
The religious revival which swept Britain from the 1730s on carried such aspirations in its wake, although with mixed results. The decline of the militant spirit which had fostered the revival, combined with stricter policing of sexual divisions within its ranks, led to women’s claims often being pushed to the margins of the movement or outside evangelicalism entirely. By the 1780s, at the point when Wollstonecraft began pronouncing on such matters, St. Paul’s strictures against the ministry of women had become a staple of popular sermonizing. The eruption of female voices that occurred during the early stages of the French Revolution intensified repressive criticism. “The influence of religion is to be exercised with discretion [by women],” the leading Evangelical tractarian Hannah More (one of Wollstonecraft’s fiercest detractors) warned in 1799, since “a female Polemic wanders almost as far from the limits prescribed to her sex, as a female Machiavel.”13
These fluctuations in the fortunes of female believers were accompanied by changing perceptions of the significance of gender in the Christian self. The soul may be sexless, but its earthly vehicles patently are not: a fact assigned increasing significance over the course of the eighteenth century. From the mid-century on preachers of all stripes could be heard arguing that female religious feeling was intrinsically more powerful than that of men, a view reinforced by the idealization of pity as the primary Christian sentiment. The cult of feminine sensibility, evident in both fiction and moral literature, derived largely from this source. Womankind, the Newcastle vicar John Brown explained in a sermon delivered in 1765, has a greater “sensibility of pain” than men, and thus a greater capacity to emphathize with the sufferings of others, while at the same time taking its “highest Delight . . . in a grateful Subordination to its Protector.”14 These emotional predispositions, combined with the “calmer” lives women lead, mean that while “in man, Religion is generally the Effect of Reason” in women “it may almost be called the Effect of Nature” (13). Such innate piety, Brown concluded (on a note heard with increasing frequency over succeeding decades) gave women a uniquely authoritative role in moral life, since
a Mind thus gentle and thus adorned exalts subordination itself into the Power of Superiority and Command . . . the Influence and irresistible Force of Virtue.
(15)
Women may be men’s inferiors in social and political life, but in matters of the spirit they are preeminent. This line of argument clearly had attractions as a defense against women’s secular claims. But it could also pose serious hazards for sexual conservatives, particularly in its more militant formulations. Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary, A Fiction exemplified these dangers. Mary, published in 1788, features a heroine of such radiant piety that she outshines the feebler moral lights of all around her. Even as a child, Mary’s emotional life is dominated by “devotional sentiments” (M 1:11); as a young adult, which is where the novel finds her, she is, if anything, even more saintly, with a mind focused always on God and a heart so attuned to the needs and sufferings of her fellow man that for her no “sensual gratification” can compare to the joy of feeling her “eyes moistened after having comforted the unfortunate” (M 1:59). This compassionate sensibility benefits everyone around her (although they remain disappointingly ungrateful) while at the same time bestowing an “enthusiastic greatness” on Mary’s soul. She “glanced from earth to heaven,” Wollstonecraft tells us, and “caught the light of truth” which, like her author, she was then ever eager to shed on others – “her tongue was ever the faithful interpreter of her heart” (M 1:59). And why should Mary keep silent, when heart and soul have so much to say? Christian militancy irresistibly posed the question, and even women ostensibly opposed to all that Wollstonecraft stood for, often found themselves responding to the call in unconventional ways. Hannah More may have held female polemicists to be ungodly, but this didn’t prevent her from publishing tens of thousands of pious works exhorting women to use their superior moral influence against Satan, the slave trade, and French “democratical” politics. Soon (although not in Wollstonecraft’s lifetime) many women Evangelicals began explicitly linking doctrines of female moral leadership to demands for practical improvements in women’s own political and legal status.
Being a proper Christian woman, then, was a paradoxical affair, bestowing important ethical prerogatives to be exercised only under conditions of psychological and practical submission. In Book V of Emile, his famous statement on women’s nature and entitlements, Rousseau had argued that a woman should always defer to the religious views of her father or husband,15 and most women probably agreed – “conforming”, as Wollstonecraft put it, “as a dependent creature should, to the ceremonies of the Church which she was brought up in, piously believing that wiser heads than her own have settled that business . . .” (VRW 5:118). Certainly mainstream moralists were as likely to denounce women with independent religious views as they were to condemn the godless. The immensely influential handbook of advice to young women written by Dr. John Gregory (and criticized by Wollstonecraft in the Rights of Woman) specifically counseled them against all religious study while at the same time emphasizing that “even those men who are themselves unbelievers dislike infidelity in you.” Lack of piety in women, Gregory noted, was taken as “proof of that hard and masculine spirit, which of all your faults, we [men] dislike the most” while its presence was men’s best security for “that female virtue in which they are most interested,” i.e., chastity.16 James Fordyce similarly condemned any sign of intellectual independence in women while at the same time recommending public devotions as a way of displaying female face and form to most pleasing effect.17 “Why are women to be thus bred up with a desire of conquest?” was Wollstonecraft’s irritable response to all this: “Do religion and virtue offer no stronger motives, no brighter reward?” (VRW 5:164).
Women conduct-book writers by contrast tended to emphasize women’s intellectual relationship to God, urging close study of the Bible and familiarity with major theological works. Women writers published biblical commentary, entered into public debate with male theologians, and wrote essays in which Female Duty was spelled out with fierce moral stringency. The brand of female devotion promoted by these women was based on mind as well as heart, and in this they were clearly spiritual sisters to the heroine of Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction, and also to the redoubtable Mrs. Mason of Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories From Real Life, written for children. Mrs. Mason, a Christian propagandist with a formidable sense of her own self-worth, tells her little pupils that they must learn not only to love God but also to mimic Him. “[T]o attain any thing great,” she informs them, “a model must be held up to our understanding, and engage our affections” in such a way that we learn “to copy his attributes” and “imitate Him.” “We are his children when we try to resemble Him . . . convinced that truth and goodness must constitute the very essence of the soul . . .” (OS 4:423, 431). The tone is conventionally didactic, but to urge a little girl to find “dignity and happiness” from mimicking God when the most to which she was generally meant to aspire was (in the words of the Rights of Woman) “to model her soul to suit the frailities of her [husband]” (VRW 5:101) was not just pious conventionalism. This affirmation of women’s capacity to apprehend and identify with the divine, expressed in nearly all female writings of the period, was so fundamental to women’s sense of ethical worth, and so far-reaching in its egalitarian implications, that it can properly be described as one of the founding impulses of feminism.
The young Mary of Wollstonecraft’s first novel is clearly indebted to these protofeminist elements of English Protestantism while at the same time rejecting evangelical extremism and Establishment reaction. “The cant of weak enthusiasts have made the consolations of Religion . . . appear . . . ridiculous,” Wollstonecraft wrote to her sister in 1784,18 and by the time she wrote Mary, A Fiction this view was hardening into a wholesale condemnation of all varieties of Christian “fanaticism.” The fictional Mary begins her career as a professing Anglican with an evangelical tinge. But as the novel progresses she becomes increasingly unorthodox. Like her author, she feels closest to God not in church but in the contemplation of His works, particularly “the grand or solemn features of Nature” in which her sensitive heart delights. She does not scorn Scripture, but nor does she unthinkingly accept it, for “her mind was not like a mirror” merely reflecting what was before it, but an instrument of rational criticism. Traveling in Portugal, she enters a Catholic church in the company of some “deistical” Englishmen, and then:
Mary thought of both the subjects, the Romish tenets, and the deistical doubts; and though not a sceptic, thought it right to examine the evidence on which her faith was built. She read Butler’s Analogy, and some other authors: and these researches made her a christian from conviction, and she learned charity, particularly with respect to sectaries; saw that apparently good and solid arguments might take their rise from different points of view; and she rejoiced to find that those she should not concur with had some reason on their side.
(M 1:29)
Mary, in other words, is well on her way to becoming a typical Enlightenment intellectual, eschewing blind faith and evangelical purism in favor of “rational religious impulses” and liberal toleration. The trajectory roughly followed Wollstonecraft’s own. Four years before the publication of Mary she had moved with her sisters to Newington Green, north of London, to run a girls’ school there. Newington Green had long been a hotbed of religious and political radicalism; its presiding spirit at the time of Wollstonecraft’s arrival was Richard Price, minister to the local community of Rational Dissenters (or Unitarians, as they became known). Price and his fellow Unitarian, the Birmingham scientist and preacher Joseph Priestley, were leading figures in the English radical intelligentsia, and while Wollstonecraft never became a Unitarian she attended Price’s chapel, studied his sermons, and came to deeply admire his personal and political integrity. Price was “one of the best of men,” she wrote shortly after his death, in the Rights of Woman (VRW 5:85).
Rational Dissent was a variety of Protestant Nonconformity forged by and for the avant-garde educated middle class. The most cerebral of the Nonconformist sects, Rational Dissent offered its adherents a bracing brew of Lockean psychology, Newtonian cosmology, rationalist morality and reform politics. Its creed was anti-trinitarian (the divinity of Christ was denied) and its deity was a benign Supreme Being with a judicious regard for all His creatures and no taste for hellfire. Calvinism, with its savagely anti-humanist ethos, was repudiated in favor of a vision of mankind as essentially good and inherently perfectible. “We must get entirely clear of all the notions . . . of original sin . . . to leave room for the expansion of the human heart,” as Wollstonecraft wrote in 1794 (HMV 6:21–2).
In common with all Nonconformists, Rational Dissenters were subject to the Test Acts – discriminatory laws barring them from holding office under the Crown or in municipal corporations, and from taking degrees at Oxford and Cambridge. The struggle to repeal the Acts, which lasted many decades, was at its height when Wollstonecraft was attending Price’s chapel, and the political stridency with which it infused the Unitarians’ rhetoric clearly struck a chord in their young fellow-traveler. The analogy between the oppression of women and the penalties suffered by Dissenters was readily drawn, and Wollstonecraft herself drew it in the Rights of Woman (where she also claimed however that both Dissenters and women were psychologically deformed by their secondary status). But more important for her feminism was Unitarianism’s emphasis on private reasoned judgment as the foundation of true religion: a principle to which the circumstances of both Dissenters and women gave real political bite. The fictive Mary’s cool weighing of doctrinal choices, and her insistence that all religious beliefs (including those of “sectaries,” i.e. Dissenters) be respected, reflected this viewpoint – its radicalism much heightened in this instance by the sex of its proponent. By 1790, in her A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft was prepared to be more explicit. “I look into my own mind,” she wrote,
my heart is human, beats quick with human sympathies – and I FEAR God. . . . I fear that sublime power, whose motive for creating me must have been wise and good; and I submit to the moral laws which my reason deduces from this view of my dependence on him. It is not his power that I fear – it is not to an arbitrary will, but to unerring reason I submit.
(VRM 5:34)
“[T]o act according to the dictates of reason,” she wrote further on, “is to conform to the law of God” (VRM 5:51).
This appeal to the inner authority of the individual believer was at the heart of all varieties of Enlightened theism. “Intra te quaere Deum,” as Basil Willey has noted, was the motto of the age:
look for God within thyself. And what exactly would you find when you looked within? Not the questionable shapes revealed by psycho-analysis, but something much more reassuring: the laws of God and Nature inscribed upon the heart . . .19
The will of God, as Rousseau put it in his immensely influential credo of the Vicar of Savoyard, is “written by nature with ineffaceable characters in the depths of my heart. I have only to consult myself . . .”20 Wollstonecraft’s fictive Mary, contemplating scenes of public devotion, observes that true religion “does not consist in ceremonies” but in doing good and loving God. She, like her author, experiences her deepest religious emotions during moments of solitary contemplation, when the absence of all loved ones makes her particularly “sensible of the presence of her Almighty Friend” (M 1:27).
Rational Dissent did not go so far as this in rejecting religious observance, but its political case for toleration was founded on the same reverence for personal conviction. “Every man ought to be left to follow his conscience because then only he acts virtuously,” Price argued. 21 No earthly power has any rights over our private judgments, and no restriction on conscience is ever legitimate. “Liberty,” Price wrote in his 1758 Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals (with which Wollstonecraft was clearly familiar) “is the power of acting and determining: And it is self-evident, that where such a power is wanting, there can be no moral capacities.”22 Liberty and reason, Price went on, “constitute the capacity of virtue”; or as Wollstonecraft put it: “the conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the operations of its own reason; or on what foundation rests the throne of God? . . . Liberty is the mother of virtue” (VRW 5:105). Only those free to think and act for themselves will take their place by God’s throne. Rousseau’s ideal woman may have expected men to legislate for her in religious matters, or Milton’s Eve may have willingly deferred to male spiritual authority – “God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more/Is women’s happiest knowledge and her praise” Eve warbles away to Adam in Paradise Lost – but against these models of feminine self-abnegation Wollstonecraft invoked the protestant imperative for direct dealing with one’s Maker. If no priest may stand between creature and Creator, why should a mere man stand between a woman and her God?
For if it be allowed that women were destined by Providence to acquire human virtues, and, by the exercise of their understandings, that stability of character which is the firmest ground to rest our future hopes upon, they must be permitted to turn to the foundation of light, and not forced to shape their course by the twinkling of a mere satellite.
(VRW 5:89)
Only a soul “perfected by the exercise of its own reason” is “stamped with the heavenly image,” but “man ever placed between [woman] and reason, she is always represented as only created to see through a gross medium” and so is estranged from her own moral potential. This alienation from grace is the nadir of female oppression, since it denies to women that inner mirroring of God’s virtues which leads to ethical fulfilment. Universal reason is God’s gift to all, the manifestation of His presence within, but men’s jealous claims to reason’s prerogatives would damn women to spiritual ignorance, and thus flout God’s purpose. For if the Father of All Creation smiles equally on all His offspring, who are men to raise themselves to a higher position in His sight? “Let us then, as children of the same parent . . . reason together, and learn to submit to the authority of Reason . . .” Wollstonecraft urges her readers. For “they alone are subject to blind authority who have no reliance on their own strength. They are free – who will be free!” (VRW 5:170–1).
Seen in this light, women’s emancipation is not only a desideratum for this life, but the chief prerequisite for women’s eternal salvation. This emphasis in the Rights of Woman on secular gains as a means to spiritual goals is possibly one of the most difficult to appreciate today, yet Wollstonecraft’s text is suffused with it. The line of argument is clear. If the human soul were not immortal – if our brief existence invariably terminated at death – then female oppression, however censurable in itself, would be only one more of those infinite woes which make up our lot in this vale of tears. Social revolution throws into relief the injustice of women’s subordinate status and offers opportunities for change; but it is the prospect of life beyond all such mortal contrivances which makes women’s sufferings as a sex wholly reprehensible – for in enslaving women on earth men have also been denying them heaven. Rational Dissent held mortal existence to be a probationary state, a trial period, from which the souls of the virtuous alone would emerge into eternal bliss. Wollstonecraft consistently endorsed this view, and then pointed out its implications. For if women are disallowed the conditions necessary for the acquisition of virtue, then “how [they] are to exist in that state where there is neither to be marrying nor giving in marriage, we are not told”:
For though moralists have agreed that the tenor of life seems to prove that man is prepared . . . for a future state, they constantly concur in advising woman only to provide for the present. Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection are, on this ground, consistently recommended as the cardinal virtues of the sex; and disregarding the arbitrary economy of nature, one writer has declared that it is masculine for a woman to be melancholy. She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.
(VRW 5:102).
But “if morality has an eternal foundation” then “whoever sacrifices virtue, strictly so called, to present convenience . . . lives only for the passing day” at the expense of futurity. To propitiate men, women neglect absolute morality in favor of the relative merits – chastity, humility, diffidence – assigned to their sex, and the result is their spiritual nullification. “I wish to sum up what I have said in a few words,” Wollstonecraft wrote in conclusion to the third chapter of the Rights of Woman, in what could well serve as a coda to the entire text: “for I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues. . . . For man and woman, truth must be the same” (VRW 5:120).
Here indeed is the puritan voice, stiff with ethical rigor. Moral absolutism of this kind has always had strong appeal for feminists, wary of the laid-back pragmatism of elite sophisticates, and hostile to the traditionalist morality of Burkean conservatives. It is all very well, as Wollstonecraft told Burke, for those in power to pretend to moral instincts which are somehow, mysteriously, always in accord with the status quo; for the disenfranchised, however, the assertion of ethical imperatives that transcend and potentially subvert the moral commonsense of an age is a powerful weapon against established authority. “It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners” she insisted in the Rights of Woman (5:114), to bring all humanity under God’s law. But as far as women are concerned,
the fanciful female character, so prettily drawn by poets and novelists, demanding the sacrifice of truth and sincerity; virtue [to them] becomes a relative idea, having no other foundation than utility; and of that utility men pretend arbitrarily to judge, shaping it to their own convenience.
(VRW 5:120)
Where there is no absolute standard of right, power maintains its own codes of expedience. Men, like all despots, seek grounds for their rule in precept and custom, so that the ruled appear duty-bound to obey. Wollstonecraft’s refutation of this authoritarianism further revealed her debt to Rational Dissent, and in particular to its anti-voluntarist view of the respective obligations of God and mankind. Anti-voluntarist theology, at its simplest, holds that the power of God is constrained by His goodness; or as Price put it, in his Review of Morals, God’s “sovereign authority” derives “not merely from his almighty power” but from the “infinite excellencies of his nature as the foundation of reason and wisdom”.23 Worship, in other words, is not blind submission to an omnipotent force, for (in Wollstonecraft’s words) “what good effect can the latter mode of worship have on the moral conduct of a rational being?” (VRW 5:115). Conservatives like Edmund Burke might hold that unthinking deference was authority’s due, but for Wollstonecraft, as she told Burke in the Rights of Men, true worship was never servile but a rational reverence for those divine perfections that human virtues mimic. It is not to arbitrary might but to Virtue itself to which she submits:
Submit – yes; I disregard the charge of arrogance, to the law that regulates his just resolves; and the happiness I pant after must be the same in kind, and produced by the same exertions as his – though unfeigned humility overwhelms every idea that would presume to compare the goodness which the most exalted being could acquire, with the grand source of life and bliss.
(VRM 5:34)
We love God because He deserves our love, not because He commands it; and the fruit of this worship is that “enlightened self-love” which is every believer’s entitlement.
This emphasis on esteem as the key element in religious devotion had important consequences beyond the theological. For if it is not power but virtue that elicits respect in the divine sphere, why should this not be true of intimate human relationships as well? “It were to be wished,” Wollstonecraft writes, “that women would cherish an affection for their husbands, founded on the same principle that devotion [to God] ought to rest upon” – which sounds shockingly retrograde until one realizes her precise meaning: that husbands, like deities, should be loved inasmuch – and only inasmuch – as they possess virtues entitting them to wifely respect. “No other firm base is there under heaven – for let [women] beware of the fallacious light of sentiment; too often used as a softer phrase for sensuality” (VRW 5:115). It is not power, romance, or – most emphatically – sexual desire which should tie women to their menfolk, but only shared love of the Good.
Wollstonecraft’s astringent attitude to heterosexual love has attracted criticism from some modern feminists, repelled by what they regard as her chilly prudishness. Perusing the Rights of Woman, the grounds for this criticism would seem incontestable. “The depravity of the appetite which brings the sexes together,” Wollstonecraft writes, is deplorable – inside marriage as well as out. “Nature must ever be the standard of taste – the gauge of appetite-yet how grossly is nature insulted by the voluptuary” (VRW 5:208) which is redeemable only, and barely, by the natural requirements of reproduction. “The feelings of a parent mingling with an instinct merely animal, give it dignity” by mixing “a little mind and affection with a sensual gust” (VRW 5:208); but once children have arrived the duties of parenthood are incompatible with further erotic indulgence.
In 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. I mean to say that they ought not to indulge those emotions which disturb the order of society, and engross the thoughts that should otherwise be employed. . . . I will go still further, and advance, without dreaming of a paradox, that an unhappy marriage is often advantageous to a family, and that the neglected wife is, in general, the best mother. . . .
(VRW 5:99)
Even for an age of intensifying sexual restrictions, this was pretty repressive stuff. And it is views like these, unsurprisingly, that have led scholars like Mary Poovey and Cora Kaplan to brand Wollstonecraft a sexual puritan. The Rights of Woman, Kaplan has eloquently and influentially argued, “expresses a violent antagonism to the sexual, it exaggerates the importance of the sensual in the everyday life of women and betrays the most profound anxiety about the rupturing force of female sexuality.”24 Mary Poovey, in her major study of Wollstonecraft’s relationship to eighteenth-century sexual ideology, develops a similar argument, pointing out that Wollstonecraft’s sexual outlook was heavily inflected by the repressive codes of propriety characteristic of the new middle class.25 In one sense this is clearly right. Both in spirit and content, much of Wollstonecraft’s anti-erotic rhetoric can easily be recognized as part of that bourgeois project – so characteristic of the eighteenth-century middle class – to enhance middle-rank standing by contrasting its sober-minded decency to the moral laxity of the idle rich. The image of the eroticized woman to be found throughout Wollstonecraft’s writings is thus both polemical and class specific: a caricature of aristocratic womanhood common to virtually all middle-class morality literature. “Love, in their bosoms, taking place of every nobler passion,” Wollstonecraft writes of “women of fashion,” “their sole ambition is to be fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character” (VRW 5:105).
There is far more to be said on this question of class bias in Wollstonecraft’s sexual thinking than I have space for here. But the emphasis given to it by Kaplan, Poovey, and likeminded commentators has been at the expense of a larger historical point. Evaluating Wollstonecraft’s erotic ideals in isolation from her wider philosophic commitments, particularly her religious convictions, obscures their psycho-ethical content and reduces their revisionary force. Like all eighteenth-century moralists, Wollstonecraft’s ideas about sexual love were not freestanding but embedded in a universalist ethical creed, which in her case meant in her idiosyncratic brand of enlightened Christianity. Erotic attachments were not (or at least not only) the stuff of private passion and politicking, as they are for modern feminists, but modes of psycho-ethical relating – to oneself as well as to others – with transcendent significance. For Wollstonecraft, in other words, love was a sacred affair.
Reflecting on what has been said thus far about the pivotal part played by religion in Wollstonecraft’s feminism, it is not difficult to see why this was so. Striving to free women not just from male power but from the inner corruption induced by oppression, the aspect of female love that concerned Wollstonecraft the most was its impact on women’s moral destiny and ethical self-image: matters for which, in the 1790s, religion still provided the most compelling paradigm. For Wollstonecraft, what was at stake in heterosexual love was not just what a woman was permitted to feel, but who she was able to be: what kind of feminine self is inscribed in the erotic bond, and how does this love bear on the infinitely higher attachments of which every soul is capable? The answer the Rights of Woman gives is unequivocal: “[I]f [women] be moral beings, let them have a chance to become intelligent; and let love to man be only a part of that glowing flame of universal love, which, after encircling humanity, mounts in graceful incense to God” (VRW 5:136).
For Wollstonecraft, loving God is the basis of a rightly ordered moral personality. Unlike the Rational Dissenters of her circle who, anxious to avoid “enthusiasm,” generally confined their devotional sentiments to the judiciously appreciative, for Wollstonecraft to know God is to adore Him – and this not only because His perfections inspire adoration but because the epistemic impulse toward Him is essentially erotic in character. The love Wollstonecraft had for her Maker, according to Mary Hays, was a “delicious sentiment,” a “sublime enthusiasm” fueled by a “fervent imagination, shaping itself to ideal excellence, and panting after good unalloyed.”26 It was this passionate idealizing attachment that, for Wollstonecraft, was the emotional basis of ethical self-identity. “The mind of man is formed to admire perfection,” she wrote to her sister Everina in 1784, “and perhaps our longing after it and the pleasure we take in observing a shadow of it is a faint line of that Image that was first stamped on the soul.”27 This amatory yearning after the Good is love’s fullest expression, since “He who formed the human soul, only can fill it, and the chief happiness of an immortal being must arise from the same source as its existence” (CF 1:206). Yet this pious ardor, while infinitely superior to human love, should not – as in so many brands of Christian theology – be treated as the antithesis of earthly love, but rather as its product and proper fulfillment. Love of others, including physical love, is the emotional ground from which transcendent love arises.
Earthly love leads to heavenly, and prepares us for a more exalted state; if it does not change its nature, and destroy itself, by trampling on the virtue, that constitutes its essence, and allies us to the Deity.
(CF 1:206)
This theme – human love as the progenitor of divine love – first appeared in Wollstonecraft’s writings in the late 1780s, and persisted, with some modifications, until her death.28 An unpublished allegory drafted in 1787, The Cave of Fancy, rehearsed the argument which was then more fully dramatized a year later in Mary, A Fiction. Caught up in an adulterous passion for a dying romantic genius, the fictive Mary defends her feelings by insisting (quoting Milton) that “earthly love is the scale by which to heavenly we may ascend”; on the death of her lover she turns her heart wholly toward her Maker with the consoling reflection that true happiness is to be had only in His presence (M 1:46, chapters. 25–31). Eros may begin its upward flight with the human affections, but its ultimate route must be heavenward.
Scattered references throughout her writings signal Wollstonecraft’s awareness of the platonic roots of this ideal. If women are merely to be loved for their “animal perfection,” she rebuked Burke in 1790, then “Plato and Milton were grossly mistaken in asserting that human love led to heavenly”; but if one accepts the platonic view that love of the divine is “only an exaltation of [earthly] affection” then women too must be loved for their rational virtues rather than their physical attributes (VRM 5:46). The feminist twist was new, but the general argument had its source in what James Turner has described as the “Christianisation of the Platonic Eros” to be found in Augustine and many varieties of post-Augustinian theology, leading up to Milton.29 “Thy affections are the steps; thy will the way;” Augustine had written, “by loving thou mountest, by neglect thou descendest.”30 Desires that ascend toward God are to be radically distinguished from those that descend toward earthly things, yet both are designated as eros – the love which links humanity to the divine. Those moralists who would disdain earthly affections, Christian platonists therefore argued, are in fact apostates, denying their connection to God. “They . . . who complain of the delusions of passion,” Wollstonecraft wrote, “do not recollect that they are exclaiming against a strong proof of the immortality of the soul” (VRW 5:143).
The most immediate sources for this platonic element in Wollstonecraft’s thought were obviously Milton, whom she quoted endlessly and whose ambiguous views on women she worried at throughout the Rights of Woman, but also, and even more equivocally, Rousseau, for whom Plato’s had been the “true philosophy of lovers”31 and whose platonic-romantic heroine, the saintly Julie of his 1761 novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, set a fashion for ideal love across late 18th century Europe. Wollstonecraft’s quarrel with Rousseau’s depiction of women in Emile – an argument framing much of the Rights of Woman – is sometimes assumed to imply her wholesale repudiation of his ideas. In fact the sharpness of her critique is not the anger of an entrenched opponent but that of a disappointed disciple, lambasting her favourite mentor for substituting prejudice for truth. Rousseau’s views on women, as Wollstonecraft pointed out, were in fact notoriously contradictory. While the female protagonist of Emile, Sophie, is a patriarch’s dream of feminine decorum and submission, Julie of La Nouvelle Héloïse is very much the Wollstonecraftian woman: strong-willed, morally authoritative, and engaged in a “perfect union of souls” with her lover, St. Preux, that ultimately draws them both closer to God.32 Julie’s shadow falls long over Wollstonecraft’s divinized love philosophy. “An imagination of this vigorous cast,” Wollstonecraft writes of Rousseau’s novel, “. . . can depict love with celestial charms, and dote on the grand ideal object – it can imagine a degree of mutual affection that shall refine the soul, and not expire when it has served as a ‘scale to heavenly’, and, like devotion, make it absorb every meaner affection and desire . . .” (VRW 5:143).
In the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft holds up Julie as an example of a “modest” woman, meaning one who, while in this case not technically chaste (Julie and St. Preux make love twice) is pure in heart and mind (VRW 5:196). Modesty in women – a topic to which Wollstonecraft devotes an entire chapter – is not, contrary to conventional opinion, a narrowly feminine virtue but rather the moral condition proper to all of God’s human creation (VRW 5:196). The modest woman, like the modest man, is dignified, reserved, self-respecting, and sexually continent – the last, however, not for reasons of “worldly prudence” or public reputation but because she knows her body is a “Temple of the living God” (VRW 5:199). In addition to this, the modest woman is also – as Wollstonecraft carefully demonstrates over the course of the Rights of Woman – a natural feminist: resolute of mind, fiercely independent (even in relation to male relatives), and possessed of “the dignity of a rational will that only bows to God” (VRW 5:104). As an ideal of emancipated womanhood, this may seem a long way from recent feminist ambitions. But if we bypass it in favor of a more familiar, secularized version of Wollstonecraft’s project, we lose both the historic woman and her principal mission: to liberate women from masculine tyranny not in order that they should become free-floating agents, stripped of all obligatory ties, but in order to bind them more closely to their God.
1. Ann Snitow, “A Gender Diary”, Feminism and History, ed. Joan Wallach Scott, (Oxford University Press, 1996), 529.
2. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman; first published 1798 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 215.
3. This emphasis on Wollstonecraft’s piety in Memoirs does not seem to have registered with many readers, including one who claimed that Godwin’s book gave “a striking view of a Woman of fine talents . . . sinking a victim to the strength of her Passions & feelings because destitute of the support of Religious principles” (James Woodrow, quoted in Gary Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790–1827 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993], 27.)
4. Letter to William Godwin, 4 July 1797. Letters, 404.
5. A note found in Godwin’s papers after his death, written sometime in 1787, contained the following: “Religion is among the most beautiful and most natural of all things; that religion which ‘sees God in clouds and hears Him in the wind’, which endows every object of sense with a living soul, which finds in the system of nature whatever is holy, mysterious, and venerable, and inspires the bosom with sentiments of awe and veneration” (quoted in Charles Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries [1876], 1:28). The similarity to the views he attributed to Wollstonecraft is obvious.
6. Mary Hays, “Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Annual Necrology, 1797/8 (1800), 416.
7. Ibid., 416.
8. Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
9. Quoted in Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: Male and Female in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1984), 30–1.
10. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949 (English ed., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 633. De Beauvoir’s discussion of the egalitarian implications of Christianity for women is in many respects very reminiscent of Wollstonecraft’s, although her perspective is that of an analytical unbeliever: “A sincere faith is a great help to the little girl in avoiding an inferiority complex: she is neither male nor female, but God’s creature” (633).
11. Mary Astell, “Some Reflections Upon Marriage,” first published in 1700; 1706 edn. reprinted in Bridget Hill, The First English Feminist (Aldershot: Gower Publishing, 1986), 84.
12. A Methodist woman preacher quoted in L. F. Church, More About the Early Methodist People (London, 1949), 168.
13. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (London, 1799), 1:7.
14. John Brown, DD, On the Female Character and Education (London, 1765), 12, 10.
15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, 1765 (English edn. London: Penguin, 1991), 377–8.
16. Dr. John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (London, 1823), 159–60.
17. James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, 1765 (London, 1766), 2:163.
18. Letter to Everina Wollstonecraft, January 1784, Letters, 87.
19. Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946), 7.
20. Rousseau, Emile, 286.
21. Richard Price, Review of The Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals, 1756 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 180.
22. Ibid., 181.
23. Ibid., 113.
24. Cora Kaplan, “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism,” Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), 41.
25. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (University of Chicago Press, 1984).
26. Hays, “Wollstonecraft,” 416.
27. Letter to Everina Wollstonecraft, January 1784, Letters, 87.
28. For a fuller account of the evolution of this idea over the course of Wollstonecraft’s intellectual career, see my Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination.
29. James G. Turner, One Flesh: Paradisial Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 32.
30. Quoted in Turner, One Flesh, 32. For an influential discussion of the relationship between divine and earthly love in Christian theology, see Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (London, SPCK, 1982), and for the significance of Christian Platonism in the formation of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy see John K. Sheriff, The Good-Natured Man: the Evolution of a Moral Ideal, 1660–1880 (Tuuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982).
31. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761; translated as Eloisa, or a Series of Original Letters (London, 1767), 2:14.
32. Ibid., 34.