Lecture
on Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman
By
Ian Johnston
[The following is the text of a lecture given, in
part, in Liberal Studies in September 1998. It was revised slightly on
September 12, 2000. References to Wollstonecraft are to the Norton
Critical Edition, edited by Carol Poston, Second Edition. This document is in
the public domain, released August 1998]
Introduction
Mary
Wollstonecraft's classic book The Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
the text under discussion this week, is, in a sense, a new form of publication
for us in Liberal Studies--a popular polemic, addressed to a wide audience on a
contemporary social issue. The author is concerned above all, not to put
forward a detailed philosophical position from first principles in order to
persuade a group of professional peers or eager students, but rather to appeal
to contemporary public opinion in order to achieve some practical reforms in
public policy and social thinking. Unlike most works of politics and morality
we have read so far, it adopts a much more public language and argumentative
style and relies upon the working assumptions of the audience to which it is
addressed.
We need
to bear this in mind, because in some ways this is an ambiguous document if we
fail to appreciate its immediate purposes. And even if we do take those into
account, there are still going to be some questions which we may not be able to
resolve.
What I
wish to address in this lecture is Wollstonecraft's purpose in the Vindication.
I take it that most of us have no difficulty in seeing her overall general
purpose: the title itself proclaims it. But we may want to consider at greater
length just how her argument sees the rights of women in modern society being
vindicated. I would like to suggest at least a couple of different
possibilities.
A Comment
on the Historical Context of the Work
Since we
are dealing here with a public polemic, it might be useful to mention at least
one vital contemporary fact which, it strikes me, shapes a good deal of
Wollstonecraft's style. This book first appeared in 1792, at a time when public
opinion and government action were profoundly different from the much more
liberal atmosphere of the previous three decades.
The
reason, of course, is the French Revolution.
And if you have no head for historical dates
and events, you should at least strive really hard to remember the date 1789,
the moment when the French Revolution
started. This is a crucial date for understanding the nature of politics,
religion, science, and social thinking for the next seventy-five years (at
least), because of the tremendous fear this event inspired throughout Europe.
It launched a massive counter-revolutionary sentiment which stifled reform
movements (which had been growing throughout the eighteenth century) and which
made reform opinion unwelcome in circles which had previously tolerated it and
dangerous to proclaim. It took two generations for public opinion to get over
the shock of the events which started in 1789 in Paris.
Why was
this? Had not the English had their revolution more than
one hundred years earlier and executed their king? Had they not a few years
later removed another king, forcing him to leave the country? Had not the
Americans had their revolution and turned themselves into a republic? Surely
the French Revolution
was just one more example of such events?
That was
hardly the case. The earlier revolutions were firmly in the hands of the business
class, the gentry, and the issue was representation in government, an equitable
system of taxation, a redistribution of power from the old order to the new money.
Although there had been violence and some death (especially in the English
Civil War), none of these events had represented a popular uprising of the
lowest classes against all authority, mass executions of people just because
they were perceived as members of the old aristocracy and priesthood, a violent
reordering of society. What is remarkable about the American and English
revolutions is that, once they were done, life went on much as before, except
for the significant power shift in the corridors of government (which was, of
course, a decisive change). At no point in either of those events did anyone
have to confront the realities of an urban mob bent on having its own way
against a repressive regime.
With the French Revolution,
things were very different. This event presented the spectacle of something
new: the mob turning its pent up violent hostility against king, noble,
landowner, churchman and brutally overthrowing all the old ways. In all the
increasingly large European cities, people could see all around them the
potential for this to happen, radical opinion eagerly awaited it, but fear
quickly overcame virtually all sympathy for long overdue reforms. In all forms
of life, repression quickly became the order of the day, and those who linked
themselves to ideas perceived to be arising from revolutionary France were
immediately social pariahs. In 1789 it might be all very well for Wordsworth to
proclaim "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" or for William Blake
to put on a red hat and dance in the streets to celebrate the revolution. Once
the reign of terror began, the earlier optimism was swallowed up in enormous
anxiety. The government even sent out a spy to check
up on Wordsworth (the report of the spy evidently revealed that he was
genuinely puzzled by the young poet's behaviour, for the report to the
government mentioned that Wordsworth wandered all over the place in the country
accompanied by a woman who he claimed was his sister).
The
difference between the earlier revolutions and the French Revolution
manifested itself in the different leadership. Cromwell and George Washington
were eminently admirable characters, with a stake in modern society (not that
they were generally liked by everyone, of course). They both demonstrated that
there was a very clear line to their revolutionary ideas, and that line put the
potentially revolutionary classes as far away from effective power as possible.
As educated men with experience in business
and as landowners and public representatives, their priorities were widely
shared. They made no effort to hide their orthodox Christian sympathies or
their love of property. But who were the leaders of the French Revolution?
Nobodies who appeared out of the blue to harangue the mob and urge on the
executions. Who was Napoleon Bonaparte? An unknown person from an obscure
family in Corsica, bent on shaping the map of Europe to fit his vision. He was
an upstart, a nobody, and his example was not one to encourage.
As the
Revolution transformed itself into the Napoleonic Wars, this fear intensified.
The great danger of France was not so much that under Napoleon's genius she
might extend her Empire (although that was certainly possible) but that under
her influence republican ideas might catch hold among the increasingly restless
and numerous agricultural and urban poor. Hence the domestic suppression of
French ideas, which had been such a stimulus to intellectual life throughout
the second half of the eighteenth century, became commonplace in politics, in
science, in religion, in social thought, in reform agitation. During the
Napoleonic Wars, the English governments kept more soldiers stationed at home
and in Ireland than they sent to serve with Wellington in the campaigns against
Napoleon. And the task of those soldiers who stayed at home
was evident--to keep the lid on any local agitation among the workers.
It is
important to remember that from 1789 on, for about the next fifty years, Europe
was petrified by a repetition of the French Revolution.
And that fear was very real. For the revolutionary impulse inspired reformers
and gave them often an added militancy. And the conditions in the cities during
the accelerating Industrial Revolution continued to get worse. If the French
could overthrow those responsible for such oppression, why cannot we do it? The
measures might be severe against union organizing, cries for political reforms,
promoting evolutionary science--but the example was there, and the desire did
not go away.
A Brief
Digression
While
we're on the subject of dates,
it is useful to mention three others. The first is 1815--the date of the
Congress of Vienna, which marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the
apparent end of the French revolutionary threat. The old order was restored,
along with the French monarchy, many of Napoleon's changes were repealed, and
even the Spanish Inquisition was brought back. The great experiment with
republican government, which had turned into an imperial government under an
Emperor, seemed to have failed. In fact, of course, there was no turning back.
The Congress of Vienna simply put a lid on pressures that continued to build
up.
That
brings me to the date 1832, the year in which the events in Middlemarch
take place. That date marks the passage of the Great Reform Bill in England,
when, for the first time
in two generations, the ruling classes reluctantly but peacefully surrendered a
great deal of their power to control the government. By this time the need to
reform parliament had become so urgent in the face of rising civil unrest that
the House of Lords, under the prompting of the Duke of Wellington, finally
conceded that certain measures were inevitable if civil war was to be avoided. And
from 1832 on the various reform measures taken helped to ease the social
pressures and the fears of an uprising from below.
The final
date to remember is 1848, the year of the publication of the Communist
Manifesto, the year of revolutions, when in city after city in Europe there
were spontaneous uprisings of the working people against the old order. Most of
these revolutions failed badly, but eventually they persuaded the authorities
to admit more and more people to the electoral process, to education, and to
professional classes and to ease up the hostility to free
association among working people.
Remember
throughout many of these years Darwin is developing his explosive theory of
Natural Selection. He is clearly aware of its revolutionary implications, and
it is not stretching things to surmise that one reason he delayed publishing it
for almost twenty years had to do with the social situation he perceived all
around him. He would probably have waited even longer, had he not been forced
into going public when another scientist, Wallace, revealed that he had
independently come up with the same theory. By 1859, however, the date of the
publication of the Origin of Species, the political and social situation
was considerably less tense than it had been for almost seventy years.]
Wollstonecraft
and Rousseau
What has
all this to do with Wollstonecraft's work? Well, I want to suggest that some of
the features we notice in this text are a direct result of the social and
political climate of the age. She comes from a very reform-minded, even
radical, tradition, inheriting willingly the legacy of the philosophes and the
Enlightenment, and is keen to push an agenda that had become mainstream in
intellectual circles in the 1760's (the husband she married later, after the Vindication,
was a celebrated rational reformer, William Godwin). But she's aware that the
cultural climate has changed, and one cannot conduct a successful public
argument in 1792 in the same language one could use in, say, 1785.
One
obvious way to appreciate what had happened is to recognize the transformation
in the reputation of Jean Jacques Rousseau. In the 1760's Rousseau had visited
England, had been wined and dined by many eminent people, including cabinet
ministers, had stayed at some very lavish country estates, and had even been
offered an annual pension of one hundred pounds per year by the English king.
In the 1790's Rousseau, now dead, had become the devil incarnate, the moving
spirit of godless republicanism, responsible for the horrific things going on
in France. To associate oneself with Rousseau, therefore, is to put oneself
beyond the pale in England, to invite instant condemnation. And heartily to
thump Rousseau and call him names and damn his ideas is almost essential for a
public hearing if one is going to explore things which his works discuss.
It should
be clear from a look at the footnotes in the Norton edition or even from the
frequency with which his name appears that Wollstonecraft owes an enormous debt
to her reading of Rousseau. Her moral position, to the extent that it has an
intellectual grounding, is so similar to his that it would not be wrong to call
them intellectual soul mates. They have one great disagreement, of course. But
in making her case, Wollstonecraft is not basically breaking with Rousseau's
central moral position; she is simply demanding that it be extended to women.
In all other respects--in her extreme endorsement of independence over all
other possible values of life, in her insistence that moral autonomy is the
measure of one's humanity, in her passionate faith in education as a means of
achieving such autonomy, and in many of her practical suggestions (e.g., the importance
of exercise)--she is picking up explicitly from Rousseau.
Nevertheless,
she goes out of her way to attack Rousseau in many places, particularly for
something that is, in a sense, not really germane to her main argument, namely,
for his impiety, for that section of Emile called "The Confession
of the Savoyard Priest" (which scandalized Europe and got Rousseau into
great difficulties). My own impression is that doing this is one way of proving
her bona fides with her readership--she has to show
that Rousseau is a dreadful person, even while she is, in fact, continuing the
intellectual tradition he best represents. That, at least, is something I sense
in the book.
And this
raises for me an interesting question: How radical is Wollstonecraft's polemic?
Is she, as she often seems to assert, just being reasonable and asking politely
and in a reassuring tone for adjustments to existing society in order to make
things more equitable, what amounts in modern terms to the "Let's have a
level playing field" argument? Or is she, by contrast, putting on the
table a much more radical agenda than we might at first think? Just how
Rousseauian is Wollstonecraft? I want to offer today two different
interpretations of this book. And these correspond to two different feminist
traditions--or, rather, two different parts of the feminist tradition--which
she is seen, quite correctly, as launching in modern times.
The
Problem Restated
Both
Rousseau's and Wollstonecraft's concern with the education of women stems from
a new and increasingly problematic social phenomenon--the emergence of the
middle-class daughter, often well educated and intelligent but with no clear
value in society except as a marriage commodity. Unlike women of earlier ages
(or the poorer classes) she had no real work to do, and the only meaningful
role society could offer her was marriage to a middle-class man so that she
could become a brood mare, producing, as the saying has it "an heir and a
spare." The only alternative Wollstonecraft describes is that, if
she does not marry, she becomes an unwelcome lodger in her brother's family, a
constant source of trouble for her sister-in-law.
This was
a new problem because, in general, in earlier ages, the women in society,
except in the very upper ranks, had a clear economic function. Even if there
was a great disproportion in the treatment of men and women, women did have
recognized social roles and therefore a social value. In a predominantly
agricultural economy the farm wife and mother is essential (similarly in the
small family home business).
As Marx might put it, she had work to do, and therefore she had an identity;
even if in many social matters she clearly ranked below the males of the
household, no one questioned her value. The new middle-class daughters had many
things that their ancestors might have envied--some education (they could read
and write), often a good deal of leisure, a beckoning and tempting social
world, many material benefits, and increased freedom--but they often lacked
what their ancestors had possessed, some meaningful occupation which conferred
upon them a sense of value.
And there
is another problem taken up by Rousseau, allied to this one, a problem which
grows directly out of Rousseau's obsession with freedom. One of his major
concerns is to think through a way in which human beings can act as fully free
individuals and yet also exist in a functioning society. This raises all sorts
of questions, some of which I am sure you have already discussed in connection
with the Social Contract. In his book Emile, to which
Wollstonecraft is responding directly, Rousseau confronts a troubling question
(one that has resurfaced as an urgent social issue in the last fifteen years):
If a sense of freedom is the essential to the moral quality of the independent
citizen, then how are we to preserve marriage? Why would any free
man bother to stick around long enough to help raise the children and look
after his wife if he didn't have to, since those are both large demands on
one's free
individuality--especially to his psychological freedom, his sense of being
wholly independent (something at the centre of Rousseau's political thought).
Rousseau's
answer in Emile (in Chapter V, the education of Sophy, that part of
Rousseau's text to which Wollstonecraft is most immediately responding) is to
make the wife responsible for keeping the man at home.
She is to maintain in him a sense of his freedom and yet at the same time use
all sorts of feminine charms and intelligent deceptions to make sure that he
wants to stay at home,
still free
(because no sense of a loss of liberty registers if he is doing what he freely
wants to do) but also fulfilling his parental duty. The wife's job, simply put,
is to deceive the man into staying at home
by sustaining for him the illusion of his freedom, by serving his need for such
a psychological state.
Thus,
Rousseau devotes some time to outlining how society is to educate Sophy to make
the nuclear family functional. That means, above all, taking care of things, so
that the husband will remain a loving parent and a good citizen, without ever
sensing that his freedom is being restricted. Rousseau has a view of marriage
apparently quite traditional in many respects, but he does not defend that
arrangement traditionally (e.g., by scripture or by appeals to the
interdependence of all society along traditional lines). Rather, Sophy's
education must serve and her value must come from her ability to create and
sustain the family as an independent, loving social unit, something that will
be able to resist the dependency on the market place
and on others and which will keep the husband happy and at home.
Emile's independence paradoxically is going to depend upon Sophy (though he
must never be aware of that).
It is
important to stress that, although Rousseau's vision of the married couple may
seem superficially rather like the traditional arrangements, with the man the
head of the household and the wife subservient to him, his defense of this
arrangement is not traditional. He bases his argument on the overwhelming
importance of independence and moral autonomy, on the need to protect oneself
from the market place
and from other people, and upon his scientific understanding of the difference
between the sexes.
It's also
important to stress that Rousseau is throughout his social and political
writings very pessimistic. Emile is a thought experiment. The chances
for ever implementing such a scheme on a widespread scale are for him very
problematic, just as the chances for reorganizing society so that it is made up
of Emiles and Sophies are very slim. In his more optimistic moments, he thinks
that in one or two places where conditions are just right (where, for example,
there is a small, homogeneous population of people living off the land or the
sea, some reforms along the lines he suggests might be practical--as perhaps
they might be in Corsica). But he is under no illusions that the changes his
thought experiment involves might serve as a practical measure in, say, France.
This
point does not negate the importance of Rousseau. By now we should be familiar
with the fact that works like Emile are important, not primarily because
they offer something we can easily follow in our daily lives (although
sometimes they do that), but rather because they frame the debate over
important issues. As I mentioned in an earlier lecture on Rousseau's Second
Discourse, they classify the problem, provide the vocabulary, and define
the issues that must be addressed. Just as no serious thinker after Plato can
afford to take the matter of virtue casually but must address that head on,
particularly in its relationship to knowledge, or just as after Marx no serious
thinker can consider social issues in detail without acknowledging the concept
of class and class antagonism, so after Rousseau, no serious thinker can
address the question of sexual equality without considering sexuality and its
relationship to independence and the family.
Wollstonecraft
as a Liberal Apologist
One of
the first things one recognizes in reading Wollstonecraft is that she has a
powerful reaction against Rousseau's program for the education of women. That,
in fact, is one of the strongest energizing features of the argument.
Wollstonecraft's strong reaction to Rousseau's program--her attempt to define
herself as Rousseau's antagonist--might be interpreted and, in fact, often is
interpreted as defining what was to become the orthodox mainstream feminist
tradition. Such an interpretation, in summary, might go something like this:
Society
is basically on the right track: Hobbes and especially Locke have told us how
we should organize ourselves. Our shared faith in moral autonomy, obligation to
the law in a spirit of rational self-interest, independence, and the importance
of education as a means to liberate people, all this is correct. While we are
far from arriving at equality, we have the means at our disposal to promote
that goal. We simply have to foster those means properly. If we do that society
will progress to an improved future.
Thus,
advancing the highest goals of society does not require a radical restructuring
of things through some revolutionary upheaval. The key procedure must be
increasing access to those means for improvement. This applies to middle-class
women, from whose education society can really benefit materially. If they
continue to be excluded, society will suffer; it will not progress. Women must
have the same rights for three main reasons: first, under present arrangements
women are denied the chance to develop as moral human beings and are reduced to
vain fools, frustrated old maids, or incompetent mothers; second, it is
illogical to deny women the same educational opportunities as men if reason and
virtue are the same in both sexes, and, third, society will benefit in all
sorts of ways if women are given the same rights as men.
Hence the
major pitch of her appeal for the rights of women might be seen, to put it simply,
as a call to extend to women the same educational opportunities as those
extended to men. We don't need to alter the institutional arrangements of
society; we simply need to admit women to some of them. If we do that, then we
will take care of some of the problems we face, and we shall help our society
improve.
This is,
in some ways, a reassuring message, and Wollstonecraft makes it doubly
reassuring by telling us early on that she is not talking about the poor (who
are politically dangerous) or about the rich, who are beyond help. Her concern
is the middle-class. She repeatedly stresses that she is a firm Christian, and
to make the point clear she bashes Rousseau repeatedly for that part of his
writings which aroused the most concern, his apparent abandonment of
traditional Christianity, his refusal to appeal to scripture or traditional
doctrine, and (in places) his dangerous suggestions that public religion should
be a state concern--a manufactured civil religion different from the orthodox
beliefs. In addition, she is constantly telling her readers about the
importance of the family and of woman's primary role in rearing children. She
evidently wants us to perceive that her agenda is concerned above all to
strengthen that part of society where we feel particularly threatened by all
talk of novelty.
She
firmly endorses the notion of the public space in which people can compete--an
important liberal principle. She says, in effect, give women access to this
public space, and if we cannot hold our own, then let's concede that women are
not the same as men and change things accordingly. But let us first give women
a chance.
Further,
should experience prove that they [women] cannot attain the same degree
of strength of mind, perseverance, and fortitude, let their virtues be the same
in kind, though they may vainly struggle for the same degree;
and the superiority of man will be equally clear, if not clearer; and truth, as
it is a simple principle, which admits of no modification, would be common to
both. Nay, the order of society as it is at present regulated would not be
inverted, for woman would then only have the rank that reason assigned her, and
arts could not be practised to bring the balance even, much less to turn it.
(36)
This
quotation is worth lingering over for a moment. In it Wollstonecraft is
announcing her firm adherence to one of the most basic liberal premises:
competition in the public sphere. She is not challenging that fundamental
characteristic (derived from Hobbes, Locke, and Kant). This point separates her
firmly from Rousseau, for all her debts to him, because he, as we have seen, is
concerned to limit competition between human beings as a threat to one's self
esteem and an important source of evil in life. She even reassures her readers
that she is not out to secure the vote for women (although one might wonder
whether there's a secret purpose in her bringing the point up).
It might
be worth noting that this stance is still very much under scrutiny, especially
in the questions surrounding women's participation in the military.
The principles Wollstonecraft establishes won them admission into combat roles,
but the challenge she laid down about whether women could measure up or not is
still being taken up. In the Gulf War, the destroyer Acadia was one of
the first US Navy
vessels to deploy women. When it left for the war, the ship contained three
hundred and sixty women, about one quarter of the crew. By the time it
returned, ten percent of the female crew were pregnant (which led to the ship's
receiving the name The Love Boat). Then in October 1994 Kara Hultgreen, a Navy
combat aviator, crashed and died trying to land her F-14. The cause of the
crash has been determined to be pilot error, and the debate about the
suitability of women to measure up in the world previously confined to men has
revived (see the New Yorker, September 16, 1996, 72-73). The development
of technology has greatly lessened the most obvious gap between men and
women--physical strength--but in some areas the debate is still unresolved.
In this
aspect of her polemic, Wollstonecraft is establishing, as I have mentioned
above, the main guidelines for the future liberal feminist movement, which sees
access, education, and the changes in the laws necessary to achieve those the
key elements in the struggle for women's equality. Give us a level playing
field, and see if we can measure up. The practical program involves letting
women into the existing corridors (or some of them) occupied by men, but no
radical restructuring of social and political institutions.
To make
this case, she is exploiting the problem which Rousseau creates for himself by
arguing that women have to be able to deal with the marketplace and the social
pressures intelligently. If Sophy is to carry out all that Rousseau wants
her to do in maintaining Emile's sturdy sense of autonomy, she has to have a
shrewd understanding of the society in which they live; in other words, she has
to have an educated reasonable intelligence in order to carry out her main task
of sustaining the family. This, of course, is the major problem in Rousseau's
argument. If women are to have the more difficult role in society, if they are
going to have to understand men and society sufficiently well to protect the
family, and if they are going to have to be educated for these tasks, then the
various things Rousseau wants them to be taught simply do not seem adequate. To
deal with men in the way Rousseau demands, surely women require the chance to learn
what men learn.
Rousseau
anticipates this stance and argues against it, making the case that if women
seek to compete with men by defining themselves in terms of male virtues, then
they will foster a state of society in which they are even more than
before the servants of men. Men are better at being men than women are,
Rousseau claims. Wollstonecraft naturally rejects this possibility, but
Rousseau's point is still being made by those who think that a good deal of
mainstream liberal feminism, for all its impressive record of social and
political achievements, is demanding that women live by a standard foreign to
them, that they become like men rather than developing fully as women. Those
who, like Wollstonecraft, deny the classification of men and women as different
upon which this criticism rests, obviously deny that point.
I'm not
going into this interpretation of Wollstonecraft any further because I think
it's obvious enough. It might, however, be pertinent here to remark that this mainstream
liberal feminist position, as briefly sketched out above, has developed into a
major social force in the past century (at least) and that many of the most
important changes in the relations between the sexes have been introduced
largely by the efforts of women following such an agenda (often with an
acknowledged debt
to Wollstonecraft). Even today, in spite of the many different and contested
positions within the Feminist movement, this liberal view tends to predominate.
Wollstonecraft
as a Radical Socialist
When I
read this book I see readily enough the liberal position being staked out, but
I often wonder to what extent there's a much more radical purpose at work here.
That is, to what extent is Wollstonecraft's agenda a reasonable sounding Trojan
Horse containing within in something much more potentially revolutionary than
questions of access, education, and minor political reforms?
Let me
clarify this point by indicating first what is not particularly revolutionary
about what Wollstonecraft says, although it might sound quite aggressive. Early
in the essay,
Wollstonecraft introduces what has become by the late eighteenth century almost
a political and moral cliché, namely that human beings have natural rights and
that those states which deny human beings natural rights "daily insult
common sense." There is nothing particularly alarming or revolutionary
about such language, any more than
there is in her occasional attacks on the aristocracy. By the late eighteenth
century, a good deal of the English upper class had become something of a joke,
and taking large swipes at them in a pointed style is fair enough, no cause for
major problems. Similarly, her attacks on the consumer market place
for its corruption of people's manners, especially young women's, are, by this
time, commonplace. Notice, for example, the following:
Thus, as
wars, agriculture, commerce, and literature, expand the mind, despots are
compelled, to make covert corruption hold fast the power which was formerly
snatched by open force. And this baneful lurking gangrene is most quickly
spread by luxury and superstition, the sure dregs of ambition. The indolent
puppet of a court first becomes a luxurious monster, or fastidious sensualist,
and then makes the contagion which his unnatural state spread, the instrument
of tyranny. It is the pestiferous purple--which renders the progress of
civilization a curse, and warps the understanding, till men of sensibility
doubt whether the expansion of intellect produces a greater portion of
happiness or misery. . . (18-19)
This is
good fustian rhetoric attacking the aristocracy, but there's nothing
particularly revolutionary about it in the 1790's. By this time, as I say, the
hostility to and criticism of the nobility and the court were widespread. The
madness of George III had just served to confirm what many leading people
already believed.
The
radical potential of what Wollstonecraft is proposing comes from something
else: from the frequent indications she gives that her real concern might not
be simply providing some more opportunities for middle-class women but rather
something much bigger--extending her concepts of liberty and virtue much
further than orthodox liberalism of the time would normally permit.
as sound
politics diffuse liberty, mankind, including woman, will become more wise and
virtuous. (38)
but the
nature of reason must be the same in all, if it be an emanation of divinity,
the tie that connects the creature with the Creator. (53)
Remarks
like this create in this work a subdued but clear theme that the progress of
society requires the virtue of all the citizens. Since liberty is the
essential precondition of such virtue, this work puts a certain pressure on the
reader to recognize that there's a lot more a stake in this position than the
middle-class women whom Wollstonecraft identifies as her sole concern. And the
liberty of the poor, now that is something with much more radical implications.
. . . the
very constitution of civil governments has put almost insuperable obstacles in
the way to prevent the cultivation of the female understanding--yet virtue can
be built on no other foundation! (54)
If the
progress of society depends upon virtue in the citizens, and if the present
constitution of civil society is an almost insuperable obstacle, then the
implication here appears very clear: the present state of civil society must be
changed, if we are to progress. The logic of her argument invites us to ask the
politically explosive question: Well, if we start granting middle-class
women some measures of equality with middle-class men, then why stop
there? What about poor women, poor men? Such questions are the
prolegomenon to much more fundamental changes than Wollstonecraft is, in other
places, prepared directly to admit.
Moreover,
it's one thing to talk calmly about educating middle-class women differently,
but to raise the issue of educating the poor (as she does on p. 62) is to bring
into the argument something very different, something much more immediately
threatening. In the same way, those occasions when she directs her attention to
the pernicious effects of property, especially the laws of inheriting property,
remind us that underlying the reassuring liberal agenda reverberates a much
more radical potential:
But, till
hereditary possessions are spread abroad, how can we expect men to be proud of
virtue? And, till they are, women will govern them by the most direct means,
neglecting their dull domestic duties to catch the pleasure that sits lightly
on the wing of time. (64)
it is the
multitude, with moderate abilities, who call for instruction, and catch the
colour of the atmosphere they breathe. This respectable concourse, I contend,
men and women, should not have their sensations heightened in the hot-bed of
luxurious indolence, at the expense of their understanding; for, unless there
be a ballast of understanding, they will never become either virtuous or free:
an aristocracy, founded on property, or sterling talents, will every sweep
before it, the alternately timid, and ferocious, slaves of feeling. (69)
Once
Wollstonecraft begins to focus on the problems created by private property and
the laws controlling the inheritance of property, she is moving
far beyond the liberal agenda I discussed earlier. For such strong hints
introduce the notion that the real problem is not just a matter of access, an
issue we can address with some adjustments to a social and political structure
which is basically sound, but rather something built into the very nature of
present society, something right at the heart of the liberal faith--private
property--and the rights of someone who has profited greatly from the
competition for wealth to hoard and pass on his success. Her agenda, in other
words, might amount to a significant rethinking of economic justice (along the
lines that Rousseau establishes in the Second Discourse).
What
these remarks do to challenge the liberal orthodoxy she seems in much of her
polemic to defend, as Elissa Guralnick points out, is to indicate that the
private and the public realm are not quite so easily separated as the liberal
likes to maintain. To improve society we thus might have to do a great deal more than
just attend to access to the public realm: we might also have to address
seriously the sanctity of certain private matters, like property and
inheritance.
It might
be useful to suggest here that one's attitude to private property and the
individual's rights to acquire it, keep it, and pass it on will help to define
one's political position. And if you move across that line which says that
private property will, in some ways, be drastically curtailed, and especially
that the right to inherit wealth will be taken away, then you have moved beyond
the main liberal position (in which private property is the keystone) to
something much more disturbing.
[Parenthetically,
we might note that in Canada we permit private property of all sorts and the transmission
of property from parents to children. But we do tax
it heavily and use the money
to support all the citizens]
I don't
think this strain in Wollstonecraft is in any way dominant, so I don't object
to the notion that her reaction to Rousseau can be characterized, on the whole,
as setting a liberal agenda for the issue of woman's rights. Still, with an eye
on Marx coming up in our reading, I do think it is worth calling attention to
the fact that she is no uncritical fan of the liberal principles and that the
logic of her position would seem to imply moving
into areas where the issue is not just a level playing field but rather the
thorny and revolutionary demands about who owns the field and the goal posts
and the ball and who is allowed to play on the various teams.
And I
would not put it beyond the realm of possibility that Wollstonecraft is a
radical wolf in the guise of a liberal sheep. She is certainly more than
sufficiently intelligent to realize that there is no way she can put her radical
agenda directly on the table and secure a public hearing for her
concerns. So she might well be, in effect, smuggling a Rousseauian pill
into an argument that sounds on the face of it much more immediately
reassuring.
Wollstonecraft's
Attitude to Sexuality
As I
mentioned above, Rousseau's book, to which Wollstonecraft is responding, seeks
to think through a way in which the modern middle-class marriage might be
maintained in a culture of freedom. In giving this responsibility to the woman
and insisting that she be educated properly for the responsibility, Rousseau is
clearly of the view that a suitable emotional and sexual life must be
maintained if the family is to function properly. Sexuality and the various
emotional states that go along with it are essential for this to occur.
Rousseau
sees clearly that if Emile is to be a happy, independent citizen and head of a
household, he must have an active, satisfying sexual life. Any problems
there, and he is going to be psychologically upset and probably socially
disruptive (i.e., unfaithful). So a really important part of Sophy's
education (a part of Rousseau's text most offensive to many modern feminists)
concerns the need for her to be educated to please her husband sexually, if
necessary subordinating her own needs (sexual and otherwise) to Emile's (her
satisfaction comes from preserving the family). It's easy to find much of
what Rousseau says here disagreeable, but it's important to remember the
premise from which he starts: the absolute need to keep the family intact,
without alienating Emile.
Wollstonecraft's
exploration of sexuality is more equivocal. Given her insistence that women
must have a chance through education to develop their rational virtue, it is
not surprising that she does not have much time for Rousseau's talk of special
coquettish tricks, flirtation, and charming deceptions as important for Sophy.
For Wollstonecraft, as for many modern liberal feminists in that tradition,
this is quite unacceptable. How then does she feel women and men should deal
with one of the single
most important non-rational elements of human life, sexual passion? Where, in
an educational system and a life ruled by reason, virtue, and equality, does
sexual passion belong? How do questions about equality and independence
mesh with sexual relationships between married couples, and how will that
affect the family?
Wollstonecraft's
short answer is clear enough: sexual passion doesn't belong as a major
priority. Sexual passion is unreliable, and love (in the passionate sense of
the term) will not last; therefore, these should not take their place as the
important priorities of life. In her definition of what matters most in the
middle-class woman's life there is a repeated and explicit denial of the
importance of sexuality. Rational friendship between equals makes the only
sustainable basis for a marriage, simply because, with very very rare exceptions,
romantic passion cannot be sustained for very long. Thus, training women
only to serve men's passions in pleasing ways is not going to serve them well
in marriage, because there's nothing they can do about the impermanence of
those feelings.
Why does Wollstonecraft
treat sexual passion in this way? Well, a couple of answers suggest
themselves. The first (which I mention here only to dismiss it) may be
rooted in her personality. We know enough about her life to recognize
that she was capable of strong sexual passion but that she never experienced a
passionate relationship which lasted a long time (although some of those
experiences happened after the writing of the Vindication). In
this respect, one of the opening sentences (at the end of the first paragraph
of the dedication) in the Vindication always strikes me as particularly
revealing:
Independence
I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every
virtue--and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I
were to live on a barren heath.
That very
powerful metaphor might well indicate someone with a personality simply
unwilling or unable to make the sorts of compromises that the interdependency
of lasting passion requires. If she means what she says here about
independence being the very highest priority, then it's easy to see why she can
be so suspicious of sexual passions and why it's better to be
"barren" than dependent.
However,
as I say, I'm going to dismiss that reason, since I have a natural antipathy to
interpretations which rely heavily upon psychological speculation about the
writer. For the treatment of sexuality in Wollstonecraft's argument is,
in a sense, a logical outcome of the position she has staked out for herself.
At the
risk of going on about this matter, I'd like to explore it a little further,
mainly because we are still in the midst of this argument. Basically, the
issue centres on the key question: "To what extent is independence
compatible with lasting sexual relationships, of the sort which sustain
marriages and married families?"
Rousseau's
answer is that sexuality is essential in sustaining the family, but that it
must be carried out without threatening the man's (Emile's) sense of
independence and freedom. That is Sophy's main task. Rousseau
sacrifices the independence of the woman (Sophy) in order to preserve sexuality
in marriage with no loss of independence in the man. He does that, he
says, because unless Sophy can carry out that task, Emile has no reason to stay
in his marriage. He will preserve his independence by leaving.
Wollstonecraft
will have none of that. So she is compelled to sacrifice sexual passion
as the necessary basis for lasting marriage. In her analysis, the best
basis for lasting marriage is rational friendship between equals. The
most repetitive point she makes in her essay
is that the present education of women focuses far too much on attempts to
please and tease men (i.e., to stimulate them sexually), which, as far as she
is concerned, is no good basis either for the development of a morally
responsible personality in men or women or for a lasting marriage.
One might, therefore, want to
ask about the adequacy of her treatment of sexuality. After
all, the irrationality of sexual life and desire is one of the most disruptive
forces in human experience for anyone who seeks to insist that life must be
organized with a clear sense of rational morality. Traditionally, sexual
passion had been kept in control with powerful rituals, social and religious,
and all sorts of legal, social, and financial fences around a married couple.
These traditions had clearly depended upon recognizing that men and women are
different biologically, socially, morally, and economically and that sexuality
is personally and socially disruptive.
By
abandoning traditional rituals in favour of principles based on reason in the
interests of justice, equality, and social progress, Wollstonecraft, like those
who follow in her tradition, leave the question open: What then happens to the
irrational desires of sexual passion and family love? Is that something that
can be properly fostered and controlled in a climate of such rational equality?
More briefly put, can people be educated to cope with their sexual lives
rationally?
This
debate between Rousseau and Wollstonecraft is still very much alive in modern
arguments about about feminism. Should we, like Rousseau, base our understanding
of gender questions on the basic assumption of difference and insist that
women, because they are not like men and because they have a special social
role to play, especially in marriage and family life, should be educated and
treated differently from men--with a special emphasis on their lives as wives
and mothers; or should we, with Wollstonecraft, base our understanding of
gender questions on similarity and insist that men and women should, in all the
most important social and personal roles, think of themselves as equal? And how
does our decision on this thorny point affect or make room
for a significant sexual and family life? Or should we push the logic of
Wollstonecraft's argument even further and insist, with Marx, that we resolve
such problems by eliminating the family as the basic unit of society? It
might be worth asking whether the elimination of the middle-class family based
on marriage is or is not a logical outcome of Wollstonecraft's position (and
whether she is clearly aware of that, for all her protestations about the
sanctity of married life).
The
present fierce arguments between and within various men's and women's groups
indicate that the question is not yet off the table. These arguments manifest
themselves, among other things, in modern concerns about the rising frequency
of divorce
and of men abandoning their families, of declining sperm counts in men, of
super-moms, of teenage pregnancies, of the need for men to be in control of the
family, and so on, all of which remind us that two hundred years after
Wollstonecraft's important contribution this great debate, the conversations
continue with no loss of urgency.
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