Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

Much more importantly, her next installment was her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the main ideas of which will be elaborated shortly. She had been highly unorthodox in exercising her own rights, as when she fell in love with a married man and visited the man's wife to suggest a menage a trois, which the wife declined. To get away from the scandal, she went to France and closely associated with the party closest to the views of Jefferson and Madison, the Girondins, who would ultimately be repressed by the Jacobins in 1793. She pretended to be married to an American merchant, Gilbert Imlay, with whom she lived. While she bore her first daughter, Fanny, by him in 1794, Imlay proved unfaithful, leading to her two suicid e attempts in 1795. The second, when back in England, was a dramatic leap off the Putney Bridge into the Thames.

Eventually it was known that she had never been married to Imlay when she married the near-anarchist and Rousseauean William Godwin, the author of Political Justice. While childbirth complications unfortunately caused her death in 1797, she gave birth to a second daughter, also named Mary, who would eventually marry the poet Percival Shelley and pen Frankenstein.

Her feminist contribution aside, Wollstonecraft was in many ways a typical Enlightenment intellectual, not unlike Voltaire. This included a deistic or natural religion outlook, which for her included belief in a providential God (who clearly remai ns the traditionally perfect father image) who would reward virtue in an afterlife. Although nominally Anglican, she did not attend church in the last decade of her life, and she complained that Anglican clerical offices were abused to provide luxurious livings to the sons of the upper classes. While the Anglican Church was too "Romish," she even more abhorred a more emotional offshoot from Anglicanism, "the fanatical spirit of Methodism," which distracted the lower classes from the needed economic and political reforms in England. Although it would be shaken when some Girondin friends were guillotined in France, Wollstonecraft had a rather positive view of human nature, like Rousseau, but she believed that God plans for some evils to encourage our dev elopment of reasoning powers in making improvements in our world.

Wollstonecraft complained that, like fortune tellers, quack healers, and the like, traditional religious leaders preyed upon the inadequate educations of women, concealing from them that they, like men, could have some very "serious purpose" in lif e, which would require maximal development of their creative potentials. Women are not put on earth merely "to procreate and rot," she says in her very memorable phrase.

The root premise of classical liberalism was "self-propriety." The Levellers as well as John Locke agreed that self-ownership of the body was shared only by God, and the whole point of self-propriety was better self-preservation. But women (like slaves or serfs) in many cultures had been regarded as the property of specific men. Hence they had an extra obstacle in attaining recognition of the autonomous personhood which could entitle them to their own bodies as the first requirement for enjoymen t of other rights enjoyed by men. Wollstonecraft must have been aware of this paradox.

For Wollstonecraft, natural rights are truly universal, and extend to women as well as to men, since women are not meant to be confined to a wholly private sphere of life. While men may cite their specific virtue of courage on the battlefield, Wol lstonecraft retorts that most wars are unnecessary. Besides, in peacetime professional soldiers spend their time trying to get promoted by pandering to those above them in the hierarchies. They dissipate the rest of their time in an inane life style ver y like that of idle, rich women: continual primping, flirtatious conversation, and the like.

While she, like William Godwin, otherwise admired much of Rousseau, she complains that because he himself lived with an unusually foolish woman, Therese, who could not be brought up to his level of intellect, Rousseau wanted to drag all women down to hers. In fact Therese was a semi-literate who could not tell time by looking at a clock. As Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd note, "As The Rights of Man responds to Burke's Reflections, so The Rights of Woman in great part responds to Rous seau's Emile..." Strangely ignoring the stronger model of woman, Julie, in Rousseau's espistolary novel, La Nouvelle Heloise, she attacks the ideal of womanhood, Julie, in Rousseau's Emile. Julie is all needlework and niceness, not someone to challenge any traditionally male province. While Rousseau claims that Sophie's development followed "nature," Wollstonecraft retorts that Sophie is "grossly unnatural," that too many men strive "to make women artificial," fit only for a seragl io. Rousseau's ideal of "sensibility" is attacked as if implying that women were to be educated only for feelings, for present pleasure and giving pleasure, not thinking, or for at most particular judgments, not the generality which Wollstonecraft thinks attaches to real knowledge. More than merely feeling, Wollstonecraft insists, women must be thinking and acting beings in the course of their lives.

Clearly Wollstonecraft was saying that much of the constraint on women arises from the social conventions regarding what they may or may not say, not from any public censorship. In part to remedy their social inequality, she vigorous ly argues that they should have all of the political rights enjoyed by men, including voting. If one cannot show that women lack reason, any exclusion must be called "tyranny." Indeed, the tyranny of exclusion from full political rights is one cause of the mental limitations of women which are falsely believed to be natural: