Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft

The Enlightenment had a thrilling new idea, and a glaring blind spot. It declared that all human beings are by nature free, equal, and rational, that no one is born to rule another, that rights belong to every person simply as a reasoning creature, and on that idea it built revolutions in America and France. And then, almost without noticing, it left out half the human race. The grand declarations of the rights of man meant, in practice, the rights of men. Into that contradiction stepped Mary Wollstonecraft, and she did something devastatingly simple: she took the Enlightenment at its word. If rights flow from reason, she argued, and if women reason, then women have rights, and there is no escaping the conclusion without abandoning the principle. She was not asking for a special favor or proposing a new doctrine; she was holding the revolution to its own logic, demanding that the men who had just overthrown kings in the name of human equality finish the sentence they had started. Her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written in a white heat in 1792, is the founding text of modern feminism, but it is also something larger: the first great demonstration of a move that would liberate group after group in the centuries to follow, the move of catching a society in the gap between its proclaimed principles and its actual practice, and refusing to let it look away.

Not born inferior, made inferior. Wollstonecraft had to clear away one objection first, and in doing so she struck on one of the most important ideas in all of social thought. Women, her opponents said, are simply naturally inferior, weaker in body and mind, frivolous, emotional, incapable of serious reason, and the evidence is everywhere, just look at them. Wollstonecraft turned the argument inside out. Of course women appear weak and frivolous, she said, because we have spent their whole lives making them so. Deny a girl any real education; fill her head with nothing but how to charm and to please; tell her from infancy that her only value is her beauty and her only goal a husband; forbid her any serious occupation, any property, any independence, any real exercise of her mind, and then, when she turns out shallow and dependent, point to her as proof that women are shallow and dependent by nature. The supposed inferiority of women, she saw, is not the cause of their subjection but its product; the cage is mistaken for the bird. This is a thought of enormous and lasting power, and it reaches far beyond women. It is the master-insight of every later movement against every kind of oppression: that when you crush a group of people and then cite their crushed condition as the reason they deserve to be crushed, you are running a swindle, treating the effect of injustice as its justification. Wollstonecraft taught the world to see how domination disguises itself as nature, and once you have learned to see it, you cannot unsee it.

The trap of being adored. Wollstonecraft had a particularly sharp eye for the gentlest-looking form of the cage, the one that arrives disguised as worship. The men of her age loved to adore women, to set them on a pedestal, to pen swooning tributes to female beauty and delicacy and grace, and to call this reverence. She drove the point home in her reply to Edmund Burke, who had wept in print over the beautiful, doomed queen of France while overlooking the suffering of ordinary people; that chivalric swoon, Wollstonecraft saw, was not respect but its opposite. To adore a woman for her loveliness and charm is to value her exactly as one values an ornament or a flower, for her pleasing surface, not her mind; the pedestal is just another kind of pen, prettier than the rest and easier to mistake for honor. A woman who is petted and praised and protected, but never taken seriously, never trusted with responsibility or independence or the respect owed to a rational equal, is not honored; she is infantilized. Real respect, Wollstonecraft insisted, treats a person as a moral and rational agent, capable of virtue and duty and serious thought, and that is exactly what the worshippers of female charm carefully withheld. It is one of her most enduring perceptions, because the trap she named, the substitution of adoration for equality, the gilded compliment that keeps a person small, is very much still with us.

Beating Rousseau with Rousseau. It is one of the small dramas of the book that her sharpest fire is aimed at a man she half-admired, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau had championed natural human equality, denounced the artificial corruptions of society, and written a beautiful book on raising a child according to its nature, and Wollstonecraft loved much of it. But when Rousseau came to the education of girls, he collapsed completely. His ideal woman, Sophie, exists entirely for the man: she is to be educated not to think but to please, to be charming and modest and dependent, to make herself agreeable, her reason developed only enough to flatter his. Wollstonecraft was incandescent, and her strategy was merciless: she beat Rousseau with Rousseau. Your own principles, she told him in effect, condemn you. You said all human beings are naturally free and equal; you said the soul should develop according to its nature rather than be deformed to serve someone else's convenience, and now you propose to do to half of humanity exactly the deforming you spent your life denouncing. Sophie is your own great betrayal of your own great idea. It is a model of how to argue with a thinker you respect: not by rejecting them, but by holding them to the best of themselves and showing where they flinched from their own conclusions. Every later feminist reckoning with the male philosophical canon learned the move from her.

The cure is an education. If the disease is a manufactured inferiority, the cure is obvious: give women a real education. This was Wollstonecraft's central practical demand, and it was radical. She wanted girls taught alongside boys, the same serious curriculum, the same exercise of body and mind, an end to the finishing-school factory that turned out pretty, useless ornaments. A nation of free citizens, she argued, cannot be raised by uneducated, dependent women; you cannot have rational sons without rational mothers, and you cannot have a just society that keeps half its members in deliberate childishness. And she carried the demand into the most intimate institution of all. The marriage of her day, she pointed out, was a kind of legal slavery: under the law a wife surrendered her property, her earnings, even her own person to her husband, and simply vanished as a legal being. Against this she set a different ideal, marriage as friendship, a union of two equals founded on mutual respect and shared reason rather than on one person's beauty and the other's power. Love built on dependence and flattery, she warned, curdles; only love between equals, who esteem each other's minds, can last. It was a vision of the relations between women and men so far ahead of its moment that we are, in many places, still trying to catch up to it.

The question with no honest answer. The room reads Wollstonecraft in her own vigorous English, no translation needed, cited by work and chapter. There is a bitter irony in her story that proves her own point. Not long after she finished the Vindication, her husband published a candid and loving memoir that revealed how unconventionally she had lived, a love affair, a child outside marriage, a life that broke the rules. The reaction was savage: her enemies used the facts of her private life to discredit her arguments, as though a woman who had loved imprudently could not possibly be right about justice, and for the better part of a century her great book was buried under the scandal of her name. It was exactly the maneuver she had anatomized, reducing a woman to her body and her reputation and refusing to meet her mind. But the argument was too strong to stay buried. The suffragists rediscovered her; Mill rebuilt her case a lifetime later; Virginia Woolf wrote that her ideas had become so much a part of the air that we forget she first had to breathe them into it; Simone de Beauvoir would carry her central insight, that woman is made and not born, into the twentieth century. Her younger daughter grew up reading her books and wrote Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft asked a question so simple that two centuries of resistance have not been able to make it go away: if you believe in human equality, on what possible ground do you stop at men? No one has ever given an honest answer.