When society said she existed for men’s pleasure only, she said no thanks and started feminism
Mary Wollstonecraft started out as a writer, became a renegade during the French Revolution, and pioneered women’s rights
“I am going to be the first of a new genus … I am not born to tread in the beaten track,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to her sister in 1787. The 28-year-old had just moved back to London, where she was born. Her family — four brothers, two sisters, and her father (her mother died when she was 22) — led separate lives outside the city, and she preferred it this way. She yearned for independence and was returning to her hometown to begin a new job as a writer.
“The first of a new genus” didn’t turn out to be entirely true, as Wollstonecraft would become part of a small classification of women who made a living writing; but as time would tell, she would eventually stand for “a new genus” and become a heroine of feminism, equality and justice.
Wollstonecraft’s literary job in London was orchestrated by Joseph Johnson, a prominent liberal bookseller and publisher whose roster of propagandists included Thomas Paine, William Godwin (Wollstonecraft’s future husband), Joseph Priestley, and William Blake. Wollstonecraft and Godwin would go on to have a daughter, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.To be rubbing elbows with this esteemed company of revolutionary thinkers was one thing, but to join them in the “philosophical call to arms of 1789” — at the start of the French Revolution — was a profound pursuit that secured her place in history. Wollstonecraft’s progressive viewpoints and writing during this time shifted her status, as Barbara Taylor, author of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, puts it, “from literary lady to radical philosophe, an intellectual insurgent of the kind that so frightened and enraged political conservatives.”
Johnson recruited Wollstonecraft in an official capacity to write for his politically charged Analytical Review and compile translations, one of the more mundane tasks of becoming an author. In 1788, he published her first novel and her first children’s book, but it wasn’t until a year later, when the French Revolution broke out, that Wollstonecraft sent waves through the changing tides.
As France sought to overthrow its monarchy, intellects from both sides of the social debate proclaimed their stance. Edmund Burke, a leading conservative, wrote a famous attack on revolutionary principles, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in 1790. Shortly thereafter, Wollstonecraft became the first of many, including Thomas Paine and his Rights of Man, to contest the pamphlet with A Vindication of the Rights of Men. This bold challenge to Burke’s monarchist beliefs was her proverbial general admittance into the male-dominated world of politics. But it took a different book — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman — to really distinguish herself.
Written as a follow-up to Rights of Men in 1792, Rights of Woman is a critical evaluation of 18th-century life from Wollstonecraft’s perspective and a public appeal for fairer female representation in society. It opens with:
After considering the historic page, and viewing the living world with anxious solicitude, the most melancholy emotions of sorrowful indignation have depressed my spirits, and I have sighed when obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial.
Wollstonecraft then turns her full attention to women: “Civilized women are … so weakened by false refinement, that … their condition is much below what it would be were they left in a state nearer to nature.”
That civilization has reduced womanhood to sub-primitive standards is a grim assessment, but one on which she builds arguments in favor of her female contemporaries, and “loudly demands JUSTICE for one half of the human race.”
Her book puts women on the same level as men from the start: “I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties …” This was a natural, if not clever, way to introduce the rest of her principles, given that Enlightenment thinkers of the time (Wollstonecraft among them) were interested in uncovering a society based on reason.
But how fair and sensible could she be? This was, after all, the 1790s — a time when philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that women were to please men and be dependent on their male counterparts. And womanliness in political life was denounced. Working men deserved greater political power, according to prominent propagandist James Burgh, to protect “their lives, their personal liberty, their little property … and the chastity of their wives and daughters.”
So Wollstonecraft was careful in her radical imaginings: “I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves,” she wrote. Still, she broached ideas that others had not. Her book championed women’s freedom through bold calls to action: a better female education system, an improved cultural image, equal rights to men’s, and political liberties, as in this passage:
Contending for the rights of woman, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue…
Coeducational schools in particular, she reasoned, would help extinguish differences between boys and girls. Although Wollstonecraft didn’t think education was the magic solution to remedying gender disparities. “Till society be differently constituted,” she wrote, “much cannot be expected from education.”
A more just government not only would provide better schooling, but it would also allow women to become excellent wives and mothers (an argument directed at men) and, therefore, more capable workers and active citizens (the cause for women).
Like the woman she was when she started out as a writer, the renegade she would become in Paris during the French Revolution, and the radical she would remain throughout her life, Wollstonecraft wholeheartedly wanted her female contemporaries to be the same: independent, educated, and free participants in society.
What began as a “wild wish … to see the distinction of sex confounded” sparked the first wave of feminism — the suffrage movement — decades after Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797, and exists today as a symbol of women’s freedom.
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