Mary Wollstonecraft: radical and visionary
Today she is known as the founder of modern feminism whose philosophies on education, sexual relationships, work and family eventually influenced gender politics around the world. However, in her day Mary Wollstonecraft was considered an unconventional rebel whose character and ideals were ultimately pilloried by the public and the press only months after her death.
It’s easy to see how the girl Mary Wollstonecraft, daughter of a drunken, abusive, debt-ridden father, grew into the woman she was to become. She had an unstable early life. Constantly fearful of her father’s violence, the teenager from Spitalfields in London would often stand guard at the bedrooms of her mother and younger sisters when her father was in a bad temper. Finally, at nineteen she left home to make her own way in the world, taking a position as a lady’s companion in Bath.
John Opie’s portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft was painted while she was pregnant with her daughter, Mary.
Mary’s employer was an irascible old woman and the strong-willed females clashed. She returned to London and opened a school in Newington Green for the daughters of merchants. Even in her early 20s, Mary could see that the reason society considered women lesser or second class was because of their lack of education. She grew to believe that the withholding of education was the greatest tool of female repression in the vast male arsenal. If girl children were educated in the same manner as boy children, the entire society would be flipped on its head. And, in her eyes at least, English society was long overdue for a shakeup.
“I am … going to be the first of a new genus – I tremble at the attempt …”
Unfortunately, the school failed. Most of the middle class in the area didn’t share Mary’s radical views and saw no value in the education their daughters. Nevertheless, her experiences as a teacher inspired her to publish the pamphlet, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in 1787.
“Her experience in teaching was to have a profound and guiding influence on her political thinking.”
In it, Mary outlines an entire program for the education of girls on the same terms as boys, even going as far to suggest women were entitled to equal representation in parliament and should be viewed as equal citizens by the law. These were radical views for a woman to express at a time in England when females did not possess a separate legal identity to their father or husband. In other words, a husband was legally entitled to claim his wife’s property and earnings. Even the children of the marriage belonged to him. What’s more, a husband had the legal right to inflict a ‘reasonable’ amount corporal punishment on his wife. Who determined what ‘reasonable was? A judge … that is, if a woman was brave enough to seek help from the authorities.
“… judicious books enlarge the mind and improve the heart …”
Once the school closed, Mary took on various roles as governess outside of London and beyond, but then returned to the capital in 1788 and found work with the radical publisher Joseph Johnson as a proofreader, translator, writer and, eventually, an advisor. It was at this time she was given the freedom to pen her seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 and she quickly became feted by intellectuals and the chattering classes. Mary called for a revolution of gender in the United Kingdom.
“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures.”
During the winter of the same year, Mary took her ideas across the channel to a nation that was undergoing its own upheaval – France – to see for herself what revolution really looked like. In Paris her ideas were met with immense positivity and she was invited by the National Convention to a play a role in designing the new society. However, just a few months after her arrival in Paris, the revolution took a brutal turn and Mary’s optimism faded. The execution of King Louis XVI sparked a period of bloody violence that Mary found immensely disturbing. On one occasion, as she crossed the Place de la Concorde where the public beheadings were taking place, she slipped in a pool of blood that had dripped from the guillotine. The regime’s barbarism horrified her. The initial hopefulness of the revolution had dissolved and so too had Mary’s great hope for change.
“It is time to effect a revolution in female manners. Time to restore to them their lost dignity. Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it and there will be an end to blind obedience.”
However, it was in Paris that Mary experienced romantic love for the first time in her 34 years. She fell in love with an American trader and adventurer, Gilbert Imlay. Defying convention, Mary moved into Imlay’s apartment in St Germain and soon fell pregnant. Tragically, she was abandoned by her lover and she returned to England in 1794 pregnant and alone. Within months she had become depressed (an illness from which she suffered her entire life) and leapt from Putney Bridge one night. Boatmen, who witnessed her jump, saved her. She recovered and gave birth to a girl she named Frances, later known as Fanny.
Three years later she found her intellectual equivalent, a man who shared her views on education and gender, the philosopher and writer, William Godwin. They were married in 1797 when Mary found herself pregnant for a second time. Despite their unconventional beliefs, the couple wanted legitimacy for the child. Mary gave birth to another girl, Mary on August 30; however, the new mother tragically died from a postpartum infection just eleven days later. The baby that would eventually become one of the greatest authors of her generation, Mary Shelley, never knew her remarkable mother.
“I cannot easily prevail on myself to doubt, that the more fully we are presented with the picture and story of such persons as the subject of the following narrative, the more generally shall we feel in ourselves an attachment to their fate and a sympathy in their excellencies.”
Unfortunately, in his overwhelming grief, just months later, Godwin, wrote and published his wife’s biography. Although he had hoped for the work to be an outlet for his intense love for his wife, the volume shocked readers with its portrayal of Wollstonecraft. In it he revealed her suicide attempts, love affairs and illegitimate children. The public turned against Mary Wollstonecraft and her ideas were discredited. The publication destroyed her reputation as well as any chance her ideas and writing were to be taken seriously. It took another 50 years for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to be republished and another 50 years after that before women could own to sharing Wollstonecraft’s outrageous dreams of equality.