So much has been written about Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the great feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), that some times the woman gets lost in the myths about her and at other times it is difficult to write something new. Acclaimed as the "first feminist," a title to which Christine de Pizan has far superior claim, or as the first English feminist, to which Rachael Speght, Mary Astell, and dozens of other women have far superior claims, at other times it becomes difficult to understand why her work survived in the public consciousness while the writings of so many other women vanished into obscurity. The title, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, reminiscent both of her earlier work, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and Tom Paine's Rights of Man, a runaway bestseller of 1791-1792, along with her already-established reputation conferred almost instant celebrity-status on the work. Acclaimed by reformers, denounced by supporters of the status quo (Walpole referred to her as a "hyena in petticoats"), we are left with the question, why did her reputation endure beyond her death?

      Many of her ideas had been discussed for generations, had become common place, and were being discussed among groups of women, such as the English upper-class Bluestockings, or the women and men active in the American and French Revolutions. Wollstonecraft herself admits that she was strongly influenced by Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham's Letters on Education (1790) wherein Macaulay accepted the existence of differences between the sexes, but explained that these differences are not inherent in human biology, rather that they arose from differences in education and training, an argument that women and men had been making since Christine de Pizan hundreds of years earlier.

      Her feminist predecessors included Henricus Cornelius Agrippa author of Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex (1529); Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women (1600); Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1697) and Some Reflections on Marriage (1700); and Poulain de la Barre, The Equality of the Two Sexes (1673). Numerous other women had written about the need for women to be educated and to be gainfully employed while yet other women just lived the feminist lifestyle while denouncing other women who had pretensions to an education (sound familiar?).

      By the time she wrote her great feminist manifesto, she was already an established writer having written Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Mary: A Fiction (1788), various translations and articles (1788), and A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (1790), "not a reasoned analysis of Burke's denunciation of the plans for the new French government but a scathing rejection of his seeming acceptance of social injustice and support for the spirit of religion and the spirit of chivalry on which, he believed, European civilization had long been founded." (Rossi, p. 28)

      Well-known in radical circles, her English acquaintances included Thomas Paine, Mary Hays (Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women, 1797), Elizabeth Inchbald and Maelia Alderson Opie who reintroduced her to William Godwin in 1796. Feminist contemporaries she probably knew of included Judith Sargent Murray ("On the Equality of the Sexes"). Two of her contemporaries, whom she probably knew from her sojourn in Paris during the French Revolution, were actively championing the political rights of women: Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (which paralleled the Rights of Man) and Marie-Jean-Antonie-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, "Lettres d'un bourgeois de New Haven a un citoyen de Virginie" ("Letters from a Freeman of New Haven to a Citizen of Virginia on the Futility of Dividing the Legislative Power among Several Bodies," 1787), "Essai sur les assemblees provenciales" (1787), and "Essai sur admission des femmes as droit de cite" ("On Giving Women the Rights of Citizenship," 1790). She traveled to Paris in Dec 1792 and joined the Girondist faction, the same faction to which Condorcet belonged, but Robespierre's Montagnard party was in the ascendancy so she cut short her sojourn in Paris.

      So it is not surprising that Vindication of the Rights of Woman was both acclaimed and disclaimed when it was published. Wollstonecraft railed against the same issues that women had been railing against for centuries. She used logic and reason, by no means the first to do so, and accepted that the differences between the sexes were based on education and training, not on the inherent differences between the sexes. As women had been doing so for centuries, she claimed that men had created the rules to suit themselves.

      Her unique contribution to the debate on the woman question was that she questioned the right of men to make the rules, concluding that since men and women are both intellectual and moral beings, it is only men's power which enabled them to make the rules to suit themselves. She asserted women's right to define themselves and their world and man's appropriate relationship to women. Perhaps this idea can enlighten us as to the reason that Wollstonecraft's work was so hated and reviled: men feared that if Wollstonecraft's ideas were accepted, women would be empowered and men would become irrelevant. Wollstonecraft's feminist analysis of the economic basis of marriage concluded that women sell themselves and their services (including sexual services) as a livelihood, hardly a novel idea. But Wollstonecraft was the first person to describe marriage as legalized prostitution since both women and prostitutes sell their bodies for their livelihood. (Spender, p. 151)

      Rossi speculates that Wollstonecraft was honored in her own time while MaCaulay was forgotten because MaCaulay caused a scandal by marrying someone "beneath her," someone less educated, less wealthy, related to a quack medical doctor, and 26 years her junior. Wollstonecraft's reputation at the time was unassailable. Only after Godwin published his biography of Wollstonecraft after her death and admitted that her daughter Fanny, born in 1794, was illegitimate was Wollstonecraft's reputation tarnished and her work forgotten.

      But Dale Spender has another reason why Wollstonecraft's work was forgotten then resurrected. "It was not her recommendations for a system of national, equal, co-education, or even her arguments that an educated woman is a better wife and mother (and these were and still are good arguments which are useful on occasion), which a male-dominated society found so offensive. It was not her style -- personal or literary -- which posed a real threat, although both could be readily used against her. It was the fact that she disputed male authority, that she was unimpressed by the intellectual machinations of a male-dominated society, that she saw through male ruses and insisted on being visible, on presenting the evidence they so conveniently omitted, that constituted her offense. She demonstrated her intellectual competence: she denied the existence she had been allocated; she refused to conform to the image she was supposed to find natural, and even called into question the man-made definition of natural. She generated a great deal of knowledge which men sought to 'lose' as soon as possible -- and that is why she was personally attacked." (Spender, p. 153)

      So Wollstonecraft was forgotten then resurrected because she was an easy target to defeat. And by attacking the messenger, the message could be ignored. By labeling all feminists as amoral, the message could be ignored - an old story that our contemporaries forget at their peril. When the opposition starts attacking some one's reputation, look hard at the victim's message - it is probably right on target and the opposition knows it can't win by engaging in an intellectual argument. So they try to defeat their opponent through character assassination, outright lies, slander, distortion of the message, and half-truths. Buyer beware, beware of the message that the anti-feminists are trying to sell.

References

      Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, Harper Collins, 1992

      Alice S. Rossi, The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1988

Return to Women's History Month 2001 Table of Contents

e-mail sunshine@pinn.net