MIRPUR UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (MUST), MIRPUR

DEPARMENT OF ENGLISH
 Feminism

Lecture [09] : Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Farooq Ahmed
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
 Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
• Mother to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein
• Thought to be One of the first feminists
• Self educated/educated at home
• Studied the Bible, Shakespeare, ancient philosophers
• A governess, ran a school for girls, translator and reviewer for a journal (The
Analytical Review).
• A writer
• Works: Children’s books, travelogue, novel (Mary, A Fiction), history of the
French Revolution
• Violent father.
• Two suicide attempts
 Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman
• Full Title: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on
Political and Moral Subjects
• Wollstonecraft first defended the rights of men in response to Burke’s
pamphlet on the French Revolution, then turned to the rights of women a
couple of years later.
• A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
• It is one of the key texts of modern feminist thought.
• The work argues for the empowerment of women in education, politics,
society, and marriage.
• Reason must be supreme and must govern our natural instincts and
passions/emotions…The Age of Enlightenment
• The goal of education should be the formation of a strong character able to
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman
• Criticized French philosopher Rousseau who said, the point of female
education is to make them pleasing to their husbands. Rousseau’s
patriarchy
• Against a Scottish moralist, Dr. Gregory. Girls should be taught to love
pretty dresses and dolls
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, basically the first feminist
philosophical work, was published in 1792
• Dictionary definition of feminism: a belief that men and women
should have equal rights and opportunities.
• Some people—even today—have the idea that feminism is some sort
of cult that calls for women to have all the power and men to be
subservient. And Mary Wollstonecraft, the author who penned A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, would be horrified at that
suggestion. She was after equality.
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman
• Not to be like men but equal
• Men have greater physical strength
• Both men and women have determined roles to play in society
• Not that women should act just like men
• To explain how men and women are totally equal beings.
• Wollstonecraft was pitting herself against super closed-minded thinkers who
were under the impression that women and men were almost two different
animals. Men were freethinkers that could rule and change the world and
women were pretty objects that could bear children.
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman
• Wollstonecraft called for education reform that would give girls and
boys free and equal education.
• Women should be able to enter the world of medicine and politics
• Women's interest in dressing up and looking pretty is primarily a case
of nurture, rather than nature
• Women should speak their minds without worrying about being
perceived as "masculine" or other undesirable traits
 Importance

• Generally received well

• Biographer Emily W. Sunstein called it "perhaps the most
original book of [Wollstonecraft's] century".
• Wollstonecraft's work had significant impact on advocates
for women's rights in the nineteenth century, particularly the
1848 Seneca Falls Convention which produced
the Declaration of Sentiments laying out the aims of the
suffragette movement in the United States.
 Importance

1. As a mother. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is all about how

being a mother would be easier (and better for the child) if a
woman was educated in the same way that a man was, and
encouraged to work in the same way a man was. That way, the
mother could continue to financially support her kids in case her
husband does not. She could also contribute to her child's
education.
2. The ever-present nature vs. nurture debate. i.e., Boys just like
trucks and girls just like dollys… or is it just that we give boys trucks
and give girls dollys? Wollstonecraft totally brings this up back in
1792, way before this debate became big.
 Importance

3. Public education. Children have access to free primary education.. Mary

Wollstonecraft outlines an awesome and very much before-her-time argument
for public education.
4. Women to have careers. Wollstonecraft was all for women getting out of
the house and into the science laboratory or political office. Apart from just
being fair, Wollstonecraft's line of thinking went on to save lives.

******There's still a long way to go before

women's rights are vindicated.
 Reception and influence
• The publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was met with
largely favorable reviews, and it became a bestseller.
• In later years, however, the work drew condemnation.
• Perhaps the radical changes that Wollstonecraft proposed would be a long
time coming.
• However, her work had significant influence on the women’s rights
movements in Great Britain and the United States. American women’s
rights advocates—notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.
Anthony, Margaret Fuller—were especially inspired by A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman.
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman
• It is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy.
• Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists
of the eighteenth century who did not believe women should receive
a rational education.
• She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate
with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to
the nation because they educate its children and because they
could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives.
• Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to
be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human
beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men.
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman
• Wollstonecraft was prompted to write the Rights of Woman after
reading Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord's 1791 report to the
French National Assembly, which stated that women should only receive
domestic education. From her reaction to this specific event, she launched
a broad attack against double standards, indicting men for encouraging
women to indulge in excessive emotion. Wollstonecraft hurried to complete
the work in direct response to ongoing events; she intended to write a
more thoughtful second volume but died before completing it.
• While Wollstonecraft does call for equality between the sexes in particular
areas of life, especially morality, she does not explicitly state that men and
women are equal. Her ambiguous statements regarding the equality of the
sexes have made it difficult to classify Wollstonecraft as a modern feminist;
the word itself did not emerge until decades after her death.
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman
• Rational education
• Women should be educated in a rational manner to give them the
opportunity to contribute to society. In the eighteenth century, it was
often assumed by educational philosophers and conduct book writers,
who wrote what one might think of as early self-help books, that women
were incapable of rational or abstract thought.
• Women, it was believed, were too susceptible to sensibility and too
fragile to be able to think clearly.
• Wollstonecraft, along with other female reformers such as Catharine
Macaulay and Hester Chapone, maintained that women were indeed
capable of rational thought and deserved to be educated.
• She argued this point in her own conduct book, Thoughts on the
Education of Daughters (1787), in her children's book, Original Stories
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman
• Stating in her preface that "my main argument is built on this simple
principle, that if [woman] be not prepared by education to become the
companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue; for
truth must be common to all“.
• Wollstonecraft contends that society will degenerate without educated
women, particularly because mothers are the primary educators of young
children.
• She attributes the problem of uneducated women to men and "a false
system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by
men who [consider] females rather as women than human creatures".
• Women are capable of rationality; it only appears that they are not,
because men have refused to educate them and encouraged them to be
frivolous.
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman
• Wollstonecraft attacks conduct book writers such as James Fordyce and John Gregory
as well as educational philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau who argue that a
woman does not need a rational education.
• Rousseau argues in Emile [1762] that women should be educated for the pleasure of
men; Wollstonecraft, infuriated by this argument, attacks not only it but also Rousseau
himself.
• Wollstonecraft writes, "taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the
mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its
prison", implying that without this damaging ideology, which encourages young
women to focus their attention on beauty and outward accomplishments, they could
achieve much more.
• Wives could be the rational "companions" of their husbands and even pursue careers
should they so choose: "women might certainly study the art of healing, and be
physicians as well as nurses. And midwifery, decency seems to allot to them ... they
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman
• For Wollstonecraft, "the most perfect education" is "an exercise of the
understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the
heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attach such habits of
virtue as will render it independent”.
• In addition to her broad philosophical arguments, Wollstonecraft lays out a
specific plan for national education to counter Talleyrand's. In Chapter 12,
"On National Education", she proposes that children be sent to free day
schools as well as given some education at home "to inspire a love of home
and domestic pleasures". She also maintains that schooling should be co-
educational, contending that men and women, whose marriages are "the
cement of society", should be "educated after the same model”.
 Feminism
• It is debatable to what extent the Rights of Woman is
a feminist text; because the definitions of feminist vary;
different scholars have come to different conclusions.
• The words feminist and feminism were not coined until the
1890s, and there was no feminist movement to speak of
during Wollstonecraft's lifetime.
• Rights of Woman is often considered the source or
original, "the ur-document of modern liberal feminism".
 Feminism
• In the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft does not make the claim for
gender equality using the same arguments or the same language that late
nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminists later would.
• For instance, rather than unequivocally stating that men and women are
equal, Wollstonecraft contends that men and women are equal in the eyes
of God, which means that they are both subject to the same moral law.
• For Wollstonecraft, men and women are equal in the most important
areas of life. While such an idea may not seem revolutionary to twenty-
first-century readers, its implications were revolutionary during the
eighteenth century. For example, it implied that both men and women –
not just women – should be modest and respect the sanctity of marriage.
• Wollstonecraft's argument exposed the sexual double standard of the late
eighteenth century and demanded that men adhere to the same virtues
demanded of women.
 Feminism
• However, Wollstonecraft's arguments for equality stand in contrast to her
statements respecting the superiority of masculine strength and valour.
• Wollstonecraft states:
Let it not be concluded, that I wish to invert the order of things; I have
already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to
be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue. I speak
collectively of the whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to
conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact,
how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I
reason consequentially, as strenuously maintain that they have the same
simple direction, as that there is a God.
 Feminism
• Wollstonecraft calls on men, rather than women, to initiate the social
and political changes she outlines in the Rights of Woman. Because
women are uneducated, they cannot alter their own situation – men
must come to their aid. Wollstonecraft writes at the end of her
chapter "Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural
Distinctions Established in Society":
• Wollstonecraft's last novel, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798),
the fictionalized sequel to the Rights of Woman, is usually considered
her most radical feminist work
 Continued
• Sensibility
• One of Wollstonecraft's most scathing criticisms in the Rights of Woman is against false and
excessive sensibility, particularly in women. She argues that women who succumb to sensibility
are "blown about by every momentary gust of feeling"; because these women are "the prey of
their senses", they cannot think rationally. Not only do they do harm to themselves but they
also do harm to all of civilization: these are not women who can refine civilization – these are
women who will destroy it. But reason and feeling are not independent for Wollstonecraft;
rather, she believes that they should inform each other. For Wollstonecraft the passions
underpin all reason. This was a theme that she would return to throughout her career, but
particularly in her novels Mary: A Fiction (1788) and Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman. For the
eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, reason is dominated by the passions. He
held that passions rather than reason govern human behavior, famously proclaiming in A
Treatise of Human Nature that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions".
• As part of her argument that women should not be overly influenced by their feelings and
emotions, Wollstonecraft emphasizes that they should not be constrained by or made slaves to
their bodies or their sexual feelings. This particular argument has led many modern feminists
to suggest that Wollstonecraft intentionally avoids granting women any sexual desire.
 Summary
• In this powerful treatise, she argued, with both passion and wit,
that the education women received was designed to make them
merely glittering ornaments in the lives of men—an undignified
way to spend one’s life
• and not conducive to developing critical thinking skills.
• According to Wollstonecraft, this inadequate education impeded
women’s intellectual development,
• trapped them in limited societal roles,
• and led to them living constrained, unhappy lives.
 Summary
• As an Enlightenment thinker, Wollstonecraft had faith in reason, individualism,
self-determination, and the natural rights doctrine, and she thought that women
and men were the same intellectually and spiritually. She was angered by how
women were educated to believe that the most important thing they could be
was beautiful and that the most important thing they could do was marry and
serve their husbands. Men, on the other hand, were educated to think and create
in their chosen professions, with marriage and family being lesser considerations.
• She called marriage a “legal prostitution,” since it was only by marriage that
women could acquire a secure economic future for themselves and their children,
as their inadequate education prepared them for nothing other than being wives.
Wollstonecraft’s anger at the unjust treatment of women can be felt in many
sections of the work, as in her description of the role women were expected to
play in men’s lives: women, she wrote, were “created to be the toy of man, his
rattle, and it must jingle in his ears, whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be
amused.”
 Summary
• With rights come duties, Wollstonecraft argued, but if women’s
natural rights were not respected, society could not expect them
to fulfill duties in a way that was complementary to living a
virtuous life.
• Instead of education bent on bestowing “charm” and
“refinement,” girls should receive an education in critical thinking
and reason. According to Wollstonecraft, this would allow them
to think rationally, to develop their own interests, and to be less
easily fooled into being the playthings of men.
• It would also enable girls to look after their souls, because with
reason they would be able to tell right from wrong instead of
having to depend on others to make those determinations.
 Summary
• An improved educational curriculum and for the government to establish a
national educational system that girls and boys would attend together. A
proper education would treat women as fully human—the equals of men
—and would equip them to be better wives, mothers, and citizens.
• Women’s sense of self-worth would come from learning and the
application of reason, not from their appearance. When women had
agency, and were therefore happier, society would improve.
• Wollstonecraft appealed for the equal treatment of women in other areas
besides education. She supported suffrage for women, writing “…for I
really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being
arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in
the deliberations of government.”
 Summary
• She also advocated for women to be allowed to train for and enter
numerous professions, including medicine, nursing, and business.
• Men, and society at large, would benefit from the full inclusion of women
in the public sphere.
• Not only would society have the benefits of women’s contributions, but,
since they would now be able to support themselves, women would be
able to marry out of true affection rather than for economic interest.
Marriage, she said, should be based neither on finances nor on
appearances but on friendship.
• Wollstonecraft’s work argued that the educational system of her time
deliberately trained women to be frivolous and incapable.
• She posited that an educational system that allowed girls the same
advantages as boys would result in women who would be not only
exceptional wives and mothers but also capable workers in many
professions.
• Other early feminists had made similar pleas for improved education for
women, but Wollstonecraft’s work was unique in suggesting that the
betterment of women’s status be effected through such political change as
the radical reform of national educational systems. Such change would
benefit all society.
 Text Extracts
• I attribute [these problems] to a false system of education,
gathered from the books written on this subject by men, who,
considering females rather as women than human creatures,
have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than
affectionate wives and rational mothers … the civilised women
of this present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious
to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition,
and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.
 Text Extracts
• '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 …’.
 Text Extracts
• That woman is naturally weak, or degraded by a concurrence of
circumstances, is, I think, clear. But this position I shall simply contrast
with a conclusion, which I have frequently heard fall from sensible men
in favour of an aristocracy: that the mass of mankind cannot be any
thing, or the obsequious slaves, who patiently allow themselves to be
driven forward, would feel their own consequence, and spurn their
chains. Men, they further observe, submit every where to oppression,
when they have only to lift up their heads to throw off the yoke; yet,
instead of asserting their birthright, they quietly lick the dust, and say, let
us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Women, I argue from analogy,
are degraded by the same propensity to enjoy the present moment; and,
at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to
struggle to attain.
 Text Extracts
• These may be termed utopian dreams. – Thanks to that Being who
impressed them on my soul, and gave me sufficient strength of mind to
dare to exert my own reason, till, becoming dependent only on him for
the support of my virtue, I view, with indignation, the mistaken notions
that enslave my sex.
• I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to
me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even
then the submission is to reason, and not to man. In fact, the conduct of
an accountable being must be regulated by the operations of its own
reason; or on what foundation rests the throne of God?
 Reaction
• The reaction to Vindication in Wollstonecraft’s lifetime was positive in her
own liberal intellectual dissenting circle, but otherwise very negative.
• Horace Walpole notably referred to her in one of his letters as a ‘hyena in
petticoats’.
• In 1798, after Wollstonecraft’s death, her husband William Godwin published
her memoirs which he had written as part of his grieving process. In these he
was open and truthful in his description not only of his own premarital
relationship with Mary, but also about her previous relationship with Gilbert
Imlay and the birth of their illegitimate child, Fanny Imlay. The scandal this
created meant that Wollstonecraft’s literary legacy was disregarded, and
when, many years later, Fanny Imlay committed suicide as a result of an
unhappy relationship, and Mary Godwin (Wollstonecraft’s daughter with
William Godwin) eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, society was quick to
blame Wollstonecraft’s feminist principles.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
 Gist
• Women thought of as inferior, dependent, fond of dresses and dolls,
unable to think for themselves
• Women are fully rational creatures and must receive an education equal to
men
• Women should no longer be subjugated to men
• Intellectual education is necessary
• Educated mothers will build a good home and add to a better society
• Women must live as intellectual and virtuous adults and not as children
• Education is the key
Any Question?
 Thank you!
Note:
Preparation of slides only will not be sufficient.