A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

"Yes. She writes what I think is an extraordinary work. It’s written in about two weeks. At first, it’s anonymous. The second edition bears her name. It’s a mix of all kinds of things but attacking Burke is her starting point. She attacks him for being disrespectful to a well-respected minister. The most surprising thing happens in that text: because of Burke’s critique of the appropriation of Church property, she latches onto property. She focuses on marriage and how society’s obsession with property and its accumulation distorts the relationship between parents and children, and between men and women. I haven’t read all the responses to Burke. But those that I have read, including that of Catherine Macaulay, more or less stick to the point. They will say that those in the National Assembly are not nobodies, they’re decent people or they will attack the ancien regime . They do what you would expect. They don’t start talking about marriage and all the other things Wollstonecraft does. One of the things that Burke argues is that the Church needs property to be independent because it needs to be in a position to remind the rich and powerful of their duty. It’s a kind of variant on what will be Marx’s view. It’s not the opiate of the poor, it’s the rod against the rich because who else is going to tell them what their duties are? Then she says, ‘but how could this be?’ When you think of the relationship between the aristocracy and the clergy on the Grand Tour—where a young man is taken by a clergyman into Europe— look at the actual power dynamics, because the clergyman is beholden to the boy’s family for his living. She’s amazing. One shouldn’t compare her to Rousseau , I don’t think. Although Rousseau writes a lot and relatively quickly, it was in completely different circumstances. Yes, he had a tumultuous life, his life was not easy. But compared to Rousseau she is the precariat in the 18th century. That’s number one. She’s a polemicist mostly. She’s not a theoretician in her Vindications, although there is the making of a philosopher in them and her other works, which is what I tried to bring out in my own work on her. Had she lived longer, she probably would have developed more of what we take to be a political or philosophical theory. We know this because of the notes that were meant for a second volume of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman . She doesn’t really talk about rights in The Vindication of the Rights of Woman , but she says she will in a subsequent volume. But what is now referred to as Hints in editions of her works doesn’t talk about rights either. It’s about the sublime, the beautiful, the imagination, she mentions Kant. In all likelihood, she would have developed as a philosopher and as an epistemologist. She would have written, possibly, works that are more like Burke’s essay on the sublime and the beautiful or Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments , or David Hume’s essays. In terms of her ability to see contradictions in other people’s arguments and rhetorical skills, as a pamphlet dashed out in a very short time, she is quite exceptional. Burke was a seasoned politician. He had studied law. We’re talking about a relatively young woman, more or less self-educated, versus a statesman who has had a formal education. It’s not comparing like with like. I don’t agree with that view of Burke. And Wollstonecraft did not sound modern at all to many in the 20th century. In the 70s and well into the 90s, one often had to defend her, one had to apologize for the fact that she mentions motherhood and family. Relatively few people mentioned what she said about slavery then, partly because very few people talked about slavery, so her abolitionism would go more or less unnoticed. The focus on The Vindication of the Rights of Woman made her sound very dated, because of what she says about modesty and early marriages. Now, because of our increasing awareness of slavery past and present, because we don’t think that motherhood or working in the home is nothing, we see her in a different light. Likewise, arguments from Burke are much more contemporary, partly because of our concerns about the environment. The world we inherit is one we don’t have the authority to destroy. It’s not ours to wreck, we inherit it to maintain us and it, and we have to bequeath it if anything improved but certainly not damaged. The other way in which Burke has become much more appreciated is that we understand that civil society is a very complex phenomenon which most of us don’t even begin to understand. You can’t just change government and think that somehow or other everything is going to be wonderful. All our exporting democracy without understanding the societies in which we tried to impose it, without allowing the groundwork to be laid, has made Burke much more understandable. All I’m trying to say is that how authors such as Wollstonecraft and Burke are viewed very much depends on the nature of the times in which they are being considered, on the current intellectual agenda. In some ways Mary Wollstonecraft is more of the moment now than she was or would have appeared to be, certainly in the 60s. In some ways the readings now of Wollstonecraft are more sympathetic than they’ve ever been. Sen’s reading of Wollstonecraft is Sen’s reading of Wollstonecraft. He certainly has contributed, because of his fame, to making her more relevant and giving a broader understanding of her arguments about human rights. He very much underscores her anti-slavery campaign. That is most welcome. Depending on which work of hers one considers, I’m not sure she comes across as that much of an advocate of human freedom. She can be. But, given her context, the 18th century, given her hopes for women and men, she appears to be most concerned with duties. If you expect women—or indeed anyone—to perform certain duties, they must know these duties in the first place, recognize them, and have the means to perform them. That was vital to her argument. You don’t sell to an 18th century audience—or indeed to any audience—what they’re not predisposed to adopt. So you don’t start by arguing for freedom. It’s a mixture of things. On the one hand, it’s a critique of a number of famous pedagogical works for women. This includes a critique of Rousseau’s Emile and the way in which he conceives of Sophie, Emile’s eventual spouse’s, education so completely differently from that of Emile. Emile is meant to learn in a way that is free from conventions, from dogma. He’s meant to receive as unmediated a knowledge of the world as possible, so that he can be as independent a being as possible, while Sophie learns from her mother, taking on accepted beliefs in a non-critical manner. There is also the argument about inconsistency that I’ve mentioned, which is that women are expected to be good wives, mothers, and neighbors, and are educated to be everything except that. They live in a world in which appearance is everything. They live to appear, which means that not only will they be undutiful as wives, mothers and so on, but on top of that it guarantees unhappiness because however good looking they may be, age catches up with women, and they end up competing with their daughters as they did with other women in their youth. They have no inner resources. They live a miserable life plus, because they have nothing to talk about, it makes for unhappy companionship. She also argues that women should never be in a position of dependence and never have to marry for financial reasons. “She’s a very honest intellectual” The long and short of it is that women should be given education and training such that should they not want to marry, they can support themselves and were they to marry and have children, they can be good mothers and wives, as well as neighbors. It’s framed within a Christian approach to life, a view that one’s duties to society as well as to one’s immediate kin are unquestionable. As I said earlier, what she does is show the contradictions within our society. This is a very important part of the way in which she seeks to convince her audience that we have a society which has self-contradictory beliefs. Given that we expect the performance of duties, we have to ensure that there is the right alignment but, in order for this to really happen, we need to revise our notions of the purpose of life. This is where the Christian element comes in, because where in the Bible does it say that you’re meant to spend your life in front of a mirror and go out to balls? On one level The Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a repetitive, simplistic work. On the other it’s a very radical work. One is the boring thing—not that it would not require a great deal of change in the society—she just wants education for women. At another level, what she’s asking is for us to revise our entire notion of, ‘what is a woman? What is a man? What is beautiful, what is sublime? What is the purpose of life?’ Then there are bits thrown in. She very much wants boys and girls to be educated together. She wants early marriages because it’s a way of controlling sexuality, I suppose, and keeping a lid on lasciviousness. It’s a bit of mixed bag. Oh, yes. It’s by Janet Todd . Claire Tomalin also wrote a biography of her in the 70s , which is beautifully written as everything that Claire Tomalin writes is. I would also recommend that. But Janet Todd’s was published around 20 years ago and is more detailed. She managed to reconstruct some of the life at Bath, for example, and more on Ireland. So I would recommend Janet Todd’s, but if one wishes a shorter and excellent one, Tomalin’s. Her family started off in a much more comfortable position than they ended. Her father squandered the money he had inherited. He was not a good man, let alone a good father, and he certainly wasn’t a good husband, indeed he was violent and Wollstonecraft speaks of trying to protect her mother from his blows. It was downward mobility. There were a number of relationships to either people she lived with, that they lodged with, or even when she’s a governess to the Kingsboroughs, that contributes to her education. Lady Kingsborough takes her to concerts; they include her in their circle. She learns a great deal also by reviewing for the Analytical Review and that way has access to books. She’s largely self-taught, though there are individuals in her youth who will teach her some Latin, for example, or some Plato . She knows her Bible and her Shakespeare and Milton very well. She has the kind of knowledge of somebody who has not received a formal education and wants to show that she’s one of them. She’s certainly far better educated than most young men who would have gone to Eton, or Oxford or Cambridge, which were complete backwaters then. She does, she marries a few months before Mary Godwin—who becomes Mary Shelley —is born. She marries William Godwin. She was not married to the father of her first child, Gilbert Imlay. She passed as his wife in Paris during her time there because it was very dangerous to be English, and being the wife of an American gave a degree of protection. But he was a scoundrel and left her for another woman. She tried desperately to re-seduce him through her letters from Scandinavia, where she went to locate a ship carrying bullion in which he had a share. The captain of the ship had absconded, and the ship disappeared."