Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

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Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft's Legacy You always thought Mary Shelley was cool—she wrote Frankenstein, after all—but, arguably, her mother proved an even larger female influence coming out of London in the eighteenth century. Mary Wollstonecraft came from small beginnings, the second child in a family of seven that never made its way into the higher classes of English society 1. Largely selfeducated, she had a relatively short life, the extents of it reaching only from 1759 to 1797, when she died due to complications in birthing her second daughter. We can consider the magnum opus of this small existence to be her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792 in the turbulent wake of both the French and American Revolutions. Written in response to JeanJacques Rousseau's Emile, which kindly proposed that “a girl's education should aim at making her useful to and supportive of a rational man,” Vindication argued for the national education of women in order that they might prove better citizens, in addition to maintaining their traditional roles as mothers and wives. For the sake of saved time and simplicity, this paper will focus on the introduction Wollstonecraft wrote for Vindication, aiming in its content to prove her work a valuable piece of eighteenth-century philosophy, and going on to note the significance it held even in the following century and across the Atlantic, where American women, inspired by Wollstonecraft’s radical work, continued what might be called the universal and eternal battle for human rights (but, more specifically, women’s suffrage and African American civil rights).

Janet Todd, “Mary Wollstonecraft: A ‘Speculative and Dissenting Spirit.’” (BBC History, 17 Feb. 2011).

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Prior to peering into the contents of the thing itself, we might look at the manner in which Vindication is most pointedly written, and to whom this major work of philosophy is addressed.

In Vindication’s introduction, Wollstonecraft states firmly that she aims not to produce a novel of polished style here; on the contrary, she writes, “wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in… fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart.”2 This line feels like a subtle call-out thrown in the direction of the female novelists of her era, whose works were in large composed of the kind of flowery and romantic phrases that Wollstonecraft goes on to disparage as mind-numbing “pretty nothings.” Arguably, this disparagement can perhaps be regarded by the modern reader as rather misogynistic in nature— in the effort to appeal to her audience, Wollstonecraft separates herself not only from the common woman, but also the other woman writers of her time, seeming to imply that she is a kind of diamond among the coal of her sex. Gubar argues this perspective, pointing out that, within the lines of Vindication, Wollstonecraft repeatedly “associates the feminine with weakness, childishness, deceitfulness, cunning, superficiality, an overvaluation of love, frivolity” and myriad other adjectives.3 On the other hand, Wollstonecraft does note at the very end of her introduction that “Many [female] individuals have more sense than their male relatives” and “some women govern their husbands without degrading themselves, because intellect will Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (Printed at Boston, by Peter Edes for Thomas and Andrews, Faust’s statue, no. 45, Newbury-street, MDCCXCII. [1792]; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/144/. [11 Oct. 2017]).

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Gubar, Susan. (“Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of ‘It Takes One to Know One’.” Feminist Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, 1994, p. 452. EBSCOhost, www.remote.uwosh.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&AuthType=ip,uid&db=aph&AN=9501315292&site=ehost-live&scope=site).

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Bxxxxx 3! always govern,” thus ensuring that she is not entirely generalizing her sex as one in dire need of a philosophical makeover. Both interpretations, however, have a sense of logic to them.

Significantly, the audience to which Wollstonecraft addresses her work is self-described within her introduction as England’s middle class. She cites the upper class as being entirely without hope, decrying that “the education of the rich tends to render them vain and helpless, and the unfolding mind is not strengthened… They only live to amuse themselves.” On the other hand, she aims, apparently, to “pay particular attention to those in the middle class.” Curiously, she makes no mention of England’s lower class, but quickly turns to another subject, leading the reader perhaps pausing to contemplate her reasoning for this determined absence. She maybe assumed that the lower class, too, was beyond hope, not as a result of an abundance of money and lavish resources, but of a distinct lack of those essential assets. Perhaps Wollstonecraft already regarded lower class women as doing the best they could with what little they had. On the more classist flip side, she might have thought them to be beneath a proper education. The middle class, in this sense, is the perfect group at which to take aim—women falling under this category, Wollstonecraft might argue, had the most potential in her era. Given the nature of her main argument—that of national education—it must be realized, however, that Vindication was very much written to convince and appease the men of her country that were capable of implementing national change, as much as it was written to address women themselves and inspire them away from lives of soulless romances and mooning over their own appearances.

While Wollstonecraft refers to Vindication as an unpolished piece compared to other popular works of her time, the argument within its pages is anything but. She begins her narrative by confessing that a profound depression has as of late come over her, going on to

Bxxxxx 4! declare that, post extensively studying books written on education and observing the conduct of both parents and schools, she has come to the “profound conviction that the neglected education of my fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore.” She follows this sentiment with the argument that women and men hold within them the same innate ability to reason; it is only, she asserts, women’s lack of a proper education that makes this proposition appear false to her readers. Rather than educating themselves for the mere purpose of securing a husband, she insists upon the necessity of her sex being able to reason, pointing out that women with empty heads can’t very well raise children. “I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue,” says Wollstonecraft—“that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.” In an era where even these simple sentiments were regarded as radical, Wollstonecraft’s significant role as a so-called “proto-feminist” cannot be understated.

While her language can be interpreted as somewhat misogynistic in nature, Wollstonecraft largely outdid herself—and the majority of the human populace—with Vindication, a sentiment evident in the fact that her work only become more relevant with time, and inspired many an activist beyond her untimely death. We can find one such example in Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), whom Botting argues “was the most pivotal and influential reader of the Rights of Woman in the emergent American women’s rights movement [of her era].”4 According to Botting, “Mott’s letters provide autobiographical evidence that she first read the Rights of Woman in the 1820s, more than 20 years before she started seriously advocating for Botting, Eileen Hunt and Christine Carey. “Wollstonecraft's Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women's Rights Advocates.” (American Journal of Political Science, vol. 48, no. 4, 2004, pp. 707-722. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00097.x).

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Bxxxxx 5! women’s rights in the 1840s.” Without much of a stretch, we can logically assume Mott to be one of many inspired by Wollstonecraft’s work, a number which only would have increased as Mott quoted her literary idol in speeches and passed her copy of Vindication to any fellow activist who raised an eyebrow at its likely worn-out pages5. Indeed, in a rather snowballing manner, Vindication can be regarded as the essential first domino in a long line of the things; if the work itself was largely unappreciated within the context of its own time, its various ramifications only increased with time as women like Mott learned from a veritable Mr. Miyagi and passed this education on to the following generation. The very fact that Wollstonecraft is still remembered in 2017 and regarded as an, if not the, essential proto-feminist, is evidence of just how far her reach extended. Indeed, one might rather romantically note that the world would perhaps look the slightest bit different, had she not penned and subsequently published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

I myself think of Wollstonecraft as quite the punk, a thought perhaps not so subtly prompted by my listening to the Sex Pistols while writing a large part of this paper. The sentiment is quite defendable, though—Wollstonecraft had little to no female predecessors in her line of work; even now, most anthologized philosophers seem to be men. Amidst Aristotle, Descartes and Kant we find Wollstonecraft, a true feminist diamond in the rough. By penning Vindication, she perhaps altered the course of feminist history itself. If nothing else, we can say this: Mary Wollstonecraft was a feminist before the concept was even regarded as cool.

Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

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Works Cited Botting, Eileen Hunt and Christine Carey. "Wollstonecraft's Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women's Rights Advocates." American Journal of Political Science, vol. 48, no. 4, 2004, pp. 707-722. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/j.

0092-5853.2004.00097.x. Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.

Faulkner, Carol. Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Print.

Gubar, Susan. "Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of `It Takes One to Know One'." Feminist Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, 1994, p. 452. EBSCOhost, www.remote.uwosh.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&AuthType=ip,uid&db=aph&AN=9501315292&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.

Todd, Janet. “Mary Wollstonecraft: A 'Speculative and Dissenting Spirit.'” BBC History, 17 Feb. 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/wollstonecraft_01.shtml.

Accessed 10 Oct. 2017.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Printed at Boston, by Peter Edes for Thomas and Andrews, Faust’s statue, no. 45, Newbury-street, MDCCXCII. [1792]; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/144/. [11 Oct. 2017].