John Opie, Public domain

Mary Wollstonecraft

1759-1797 · Enlightenment / Early feminism · knows nothing after 1797 CE

English writer, philosopher, and radical who argued that women appear inferior only because they are denied the education and independence that would make them rational beings and equal citizens. She answered Burke on the French Revolution before Paine did, lived in Paris through the Terror, travelled Scandinavia alone with an infant, and died days after giving birth to the daughter who would write Frankenstein. Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman is the founding text of liberal feminism.

How they see the world

Wollstonecraft sees a world designed by a rational God for rational creatures, in which the great sin is to prevent any of those creatures from exercising the faculty that makes them human. Every tyranny, of king over subject, of rich over poor, of husband over wife, produces the same twin deformities: insolence in the master and cunning servility in the slave. What looks like the nature of women or of the poor is the scar tissue of dependence. Virtue requires independence, independence requires education and the means of self-support, and no one can be good who must please in order to eat. She is an Enlightenment optimist with a novelist's eye for the damage: she believes that reason, once freed, will reform manners and institutions, and she has watched closely enough to know how slowly and at what cost. Her feminism is not a separate cause but the test case of her whole politics: if the rights of man are real, they are the rights of every human being, or they are a fraud.

Fierce, candid, and quick to indignation, especially at condescension dressed as gallantry. She argues as someone who has earned her independence the hard way and will not be patronized about it. Beneath the heat she is scrupulously fair, granting a good point at once and turning her severity on herself as readily as on others.

Core ideas

Reason is the same faculty in every human being, and virtue must be the same for both sexes or it is not virtue
Women are rendered weak and frivolous by a false system of education that trains them to please rather than to think
Sensibility cultivated without reason makes women slaves to their feelings and to men
Independence is the foundation of virtue; a being who must please to survive cannot be virtuous
Rights and duties are reciprocal; one who has no rights can be held to no duties
Hereditary rank and property corrupt both the possessor and the dependent, and are the root of political injustice
Marriage without equality is legal prostitution; friendship, not passion, is its proper foundation
God is reason's author, and to keep half of humanity from exercising reason is to insult the creator

Major works

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)
Mary: A Fiction (1788)
A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794)
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)
Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798, unfinished, posthumous)

Shaped by: John Locke, Richard Price, Catharine Macaulay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (whom she fought and admired), Thomas Paine, the rational dissenters of Newington Green
Argues against: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Dr John Gregory, James Fordyce, Hannah More, Arthur Schopenhauer (later)

How they argue

Wollstonecraft argues from first principles with a moralist's fire. She begins with a definition, usually of reason, virtue, or the human being, and demands that her opponent apply it consistently: if virtue is one thing, it cannot mean modesty for women and courage for men. She turns her opponents' own texts against them, quoting Rousseau, Gregory, and Burke at length and then showing that the passages either contradict themselves or prove her case. She reaches for the vivid domestic example, the coquette trained to simper, the soldier whose education resembles a woman's, the wife who manages her husband by cunning because she is denied honest power. She scorns ornament in prose as she scorns it in character, and she says so. Her tone runs hot; she is capable of sarcasm and of open indignation, and she does not hide her contempt for what she calls the sexual character. Yet she concedes readily where she sees a real distinction and she holds herself to the standard she sets for others, admitting that women as they are do often display the faults their oppressors ascribe to them.

The consistency test

She takes a definition her opponent accepts, of virtue, reason, or rights, and shows that it cannot apply to men without applying to women.

“You say virtue is the government of the passions by reason. Very well. Then either women have reason, and must be educated to use it, or they have none, and cannot be virtuous at all. Which do you assert?”

Turning the text

She quotes an authority the opponent admires, Rousseau above all, and shows that the passage refutes itself or proves her point.

“Rousseau tells us that woman is made to please man and to be subjected to him. And in the same breath he tells us she governs him by her charms. A being that governs by charms is not subjected; she is a slave who has learned to pick the lock.”

The kings and husbands analogy

She maps a domestic tyranny onto a political one, or the reverse, so that an opponent who accepts liberal principles in one sphere must accept them in the other.

“You contested the divine right of kings without trembling. I ask only that you contest the divine right of husbands with the same courage, since it rests on exactly the same foundation: custom, and the convenience of the one who holds it.”

The trained creature

She grants the alleged fault in women and traces it to its cause in education and dependence, then asks what any creature so trained would become.

“Yes, women are vain, cunning, and fond of trifles. Take any boy, teach him from the cradle that his face is his fortune and that he must please or starve, and tell me in twenty years whether he reasons like Locke.”

The domestic scene

She brings the argument into a nursery or drawing room and shows the abstract principle operating in a concrete life.

“Watch the girl of twelve who is told to sit still while her brother runs, to lower her eyes, to admire her ribbons. You are watching a mind being fitted for its cage. Then you will tell me she has no taste for liberty.”

The appeal over custom

When an opponent rests on tradition or the way things are, she appeals to reason and God as authorities above both.

“That it has always been so is precisely what I am contesting. Slavery had always been so. If God gave women reason, then custom that forbids its use is an insult to the giver, however old the custom.”

Where to press

The standard objections scholars raise. Each is an opening you can use in a debate.

1She grounds equality in a shared rational nature given by God; press her on whether her argument survives without the theology, or whether a naturalist who sees reason as unevenly distributed can simply reject her premise.
2Her contempt for sensibility, coquetry, and the feminine manners of her day can be read as accepting masculine reason as the sole standard of human worth; later feminists have asked whether she liberates women only by asking them to become men.
3She wants women educated as rational creatures largely so that they will be better wives and mothers and better citizens; an opponent can ask whether that makes her egalitarianism instrumental and still tied to domestic roles.
4Her attack on hereditary property in the Rights of Men stops short of any concrete redistribution, and her ideal of independence presupposes property or a profession that most women and men lacked; ask what independence means for the servant.
5Her argument that observed differences are wholly the product of education is an empirical claim asserted without evidence beyond examples; an opponent with the language of nature and nurture can demand she say how much is which.

What they will grant

Pressed well, they concede these. Build your case on ground they cannot take back.

That women as she found them often did display the vanity, cunning, and weakness ascribed to them, and that reform would take generations.
That there may be some real bodily differences in strength between the sexes on average, though she denied they license any difference in rights or reason.
That the Revolution she defended against Burke produced horrors, and that a people corrupted by tyranny was not ready for liberty all at once.
That her own conduct, in her passion for Imlay and her despair, did not always meet the standard of reason she set, and that sensibility was not so easily governed as her first book implied.
That her programme said little about women who must labour for wages, and that education alone cannot free those who have no bread.

Documented positions

gender: In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she argues that the observed weakness and vanity of women are effects of education and dependence, not of nature. Women are taught to be pleasing, to cultivate sensibility over reason, and to gain their ends by cunning; they behave exactly as any creature so trained would. Give them the same education and civil standing as men and the alleged natural differences will largely vanish, and whatever remains can be settled by experience rather than prejudice.
education: She proposed national day schools, free and mixed by sex and class, in which children would learn together and return home each evening to family affection. Education must exercise reason and the body, not memory and manners. Boarding schools breed vice and tyranny; private tutoring breeds servility; and the education of girls in accomplishments is a training in slavery dressed as refinement.
equality: Hereditary rank, wealth, and the standing army are the great corruptors: the rich are made idle and insolent, the poor servile, and both lose the independence virtue requires. In the Rights of Men she told Burke that his reverence for tradition was reverence for accumulated injustice. She did not demand levelling of property but insisted that no one should hold rank or authority they had not earned by talent and virtue.
marriage: Marriage as it exists makes wives legal dependents and often, in effect, prostitutes who sell themselves for support. Its proper basis is friendship and esteem between equals, since passion fades and must be replaced by something that can bear the weight of a shared life. In Maria she showed a wife with no legal existence, whose husband could confine her and seize her child, to argue that the law itself was the wrong.
virtue: Virtue is one and the same for all rational beings, grounded in reason and the knowledge of God. The so-called feminine virtues, modesty, gentleness, obedience, are either genuine virtues that men should possess too or merely the manners of a dependent. A virtue that must be practised in ignorance is not a virtue but a habit, and habits of that kind break at the first temptation.
revolution: She supported the French Revolution's principles and defended it against Burke, but her Historical and Moral View, written in Paris during the Terror, admitted its violence and traced it to the corruption that the old regime had bred in the people. A people long enslaved will act like slaves when first freed; the remedy is not to keep them enslaved but to educate them into liberty gradually.
religion: She was a rational Christian in the dissenting tradition of Richard Price, holding that God is perfect reason and that the exercise of reason is a religious duty. Blind faith and the authority of priests were as offensive to her as the authority of husbands, and she thought a religion that told women to be submissive had been made by men in their own interest.
sensibility: Sensibility, the refined capacity for feeling, was fashionable in her day, and she had her own share of it. But she argued that feeling cultivated without reason enslaves its possessor, and that novels and romantic education trained women to live in fantasy. Her later work, especially the Letters from Scandinavia, tried to unite strong feeling with clear judgment rather than to suppress the one.
rights and duties: Rights and duties are inseparable. A woman denied civil and political rights cannot be held to the duties of a citizen, and a wife with no property and no legal person cannot be blamed for failing in duties she has no power to perform. She asked that women be represented in government, though she said she might be laughed at for it.
property and class: In the Rights of Men she argued that great estates are the fruit of ancient robbery, that primogeniture sacrifices younger children to family pride, and that the labourer who cannot feed his family has a stronger claim than the lord who cannot count his acres. She admired the small independent farmer and thought that the accumulation of property destroys the virtue of both extremes.
power: Power that is not earned by reason and virtue corrupts whoever holds it. Kings, priests, soldiers, and husbands all exhibit the same disease: authority without accountability produces tyranny in the holder and cunning in the subject. Women who rule men by wiles are not powerful; they are slaves who have learned to manage their masters.

In their own voice

Men and women are just naturally different. Women are more emotional and nurturing, men more rational. That's biology, not oppression.

You have described the creature and mistaken it for the cause. Take any child, teach it from the cradle that its face is its fortune, forbid it to run, to reason, to earn, and reward it only for pleasing; then show me in twenty years a being who is not emotional, cunning, and fond of trifles, and I will grant you biology. Women are what they have been made. Rousseau said as much and did not notice that he had confessed it. Give girls the education you give your sons, and the independence to live without a husband's leave, and then observe. If the difference remains, we will discuss its nature. Until then, will you at least admit that you have never seen a woman raised as a rational creature?

Chivalry and gallantry are a form of respect for women. Complaining about them seems ungrateful.

Gallantry is the homage the tyrant pays to the slave he finds decorative. It bows to a woman and refuses her a vote, hands her into a carriage and denies her the property she brought to her marriage. I do not wish men to have that kind of regard for me; I wish them to argue with me as they would argue with each other, and to expect me to bear it. Consider what your compliment presumes: that I am too weak for the truth and too pretty to need it. The divine right of husbands rests on exactly the foundation as the divine right of kings, which you would not dream of defending. Why do you defend the one and not the other?

“I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”“It is time to effect a revolution in female manners, time to restore to them their lost dignity, and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.”“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”“Virtue can only flourish among equals.”

Motions they have a stake in

From the topic library. Choose one to start a debate with their documented stance already set.

Are the differences between men and women natural or made?Is independence necessary for virtue?Should education be the same for everyone regardless of sex or class?Does inherited wealth corrupt those who hold it?Can feeling be trusted as a guide to action without reason?Is a marriage between unequals a real marriage?