The Cult of Mary

Mary Wollstonecraft

Background

There are two areas to look at as far as background goes before we look at the life and writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. First, this seems like a good point to talk about patriarchy, what it is and where it came from. And then we want to remind ourselves that it is not a coincidence that Women’s Rights becomes a current issue during the Age of Reason and Revolution.

What is this thing we call Patriarchy? Has it always been with us? Is it nature or nurture? Can it really come to an end? And if patriarchy comes to an end, what will take its place? To understand patriarchy we need to go back to the beginning. And the problem is that we can’t! What do I mean by that? I mean that there is only about four or five thousand years of recorded history and what we call patriarchy has been around the whole time. So in some ways there is no way to get to the time before patriarchy existed. But in other ways we can do some educated speculation based on the work or archeologists and anthropologists.

It does seem that the earliest groups of people should great veneration of what we today would call a goddess tradition and that they may well have worshipped an earth mother figure. Almost all of the earliest figurines that we have found are of female characters, most often pregnant. And surely women were a great mystery for they were able to give birth and then to feed the baby from their own body. This still seems amazing today! Can you imagine what it was like back then when there was little of our medical knowledge and little if any understanding of the role of men in the pregnancy of women?

In addition we know that in a hunting and gathering society (which accounts for nearly all of human existence, for the last few thousand years are a blink of the eye), women provided the majority of the food. While the hunting of large animals was restricted to men due to their greater physical strength, the fact is that often men brought nothing home due to the scarcity of big game and the difficulty of the hunt. Most of the food was gathered from plants, bushes, and trees and much of the game was small animals and birds and fish caught by men and women. And I think this is a significant insight.

Because to make a long story short, patriarchy seems to have come along right about the same time as agriculture and as we know it took agriculture to begin what we refer to as civilization and written records. And what is a significant aspect of agricultural society that is so different from hunting and gathering cultures? I would suggest it is the division of labor. Heavy agriculture requires the use of heavy equipment like plows and oxen. And while pregnant women could work in hunting and gathering societies, she would put her unborn baby in danger if she took up heavy farm work.

So what I am suggesting is that the division of labor at this earlier time in history was to a woman’s advantage. But then as men and women settled into a division of labor, other divisions also occurred over time that eventually led to great inequality and injustice. But I think it is important to at least consider that it did not start out that way. Why? Because if it did not start out that way then it does not have to be a conspiracy of evil men who want to make slaves of women to use and abuse them. Then it does not have to be a nature thing, but a nurture thing. And if that is true then it can be changed.

So I am suggesting that what once started out as a mutually advantageous situation deteriorated over time into a rigid social as well as work division that eventually led to great problems that have only recently been studied and efforts made to change society into one where men and women can each find fulfillment and justice as well as companionship and harmony. And this brings me to my second point, which is why did this happen right at the beginning of the Age of Reason? For one thing, as soon as you start to talk about liberating people, educating people, freeing people it will not take long for anyone who is experiencing oppression to step up and claim their share of these new rights. And that is what is happening as we now look at the life of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

Mary Wollstonecraft was the founder of modern feminism-in her time the most famous woman in Europe and America. She was a teacher, governess, writer, wife, lover, mother, and traveler. She was an original! She advanced ideas on education, single motherhood, family responsibilities, domestic affections, friendships, and sexual relationships. She tested new ways a man and woman might come to know one another and live together. She was also a libertine and pushed the envelope in a number of ways that sometimes overshadowed her writings. Often her writings were disregarded because of her reputation, but even here she becomes a living reminder of the double standard that exists between men and women, especially when it comes to sexuality and independence. “I am going to be the first of a new [species],” Mary Wollstonecraft told her sister Everina, “the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on” (Quoted in Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 2). She was inconsistent and fallible. But rather than discredit her, these characteristics only make her more human and approachable.

Mary Wollstonecraft was not associated with any specific cause that modern feminism has taken up such as equal pay and opportunities. Rather she was concerned with the need to bring women fully into the human family so that humans could become who they were meant to be. It is interesting that she saw the suppression of women as bad not just for women, but for men as well. She wants both sexes to strive together to find a new way of being in the world. She is interested in what a partnership would look like compared to the standards of marriage in her day. She is interested in economic independence, and in the process she is often very hard on women as well as men.

What do we know of her life? We know quite a lot. Her short life was very full and very interesting. But because I want to focus on her ideas about women I will just give you a brief overview and encourage you to read more about her on your own. She grew up in a very abusive home. Her father was an alcoholic and batterer, and while she was beaten, it was her mother who took the greatest abuse. She grew up in a large family that moved around quite a bit as her father squandered the family fortune. Her mother, too, was harsh with her and demanded exact obedience. She grew up at a time when “Lord Kames, a Scottish judge whose view were popular, said that women, destined by nature to be obedient, ought to be disciplined early to bear wrongs without murmuring” (Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 6). “Memories of her father’s boozy bullying and her mother’s feeble submission haunted her all her life” (Barbara Taylor, Introduction in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. xii).

After this rather traumatic childhood, she worked a number of jobs and lived in various places including Ireland, London and Paris. She did the few things a woman could do to stay independent during the 1780’s including being a governess and teacher. In 1786 she was introduced to the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, who gave her employment as a translator and reviewer and who published all of her books” (Barbara Taylor, Introduction in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. xii). He would remain her friend through the ups and downs of her life and it was partially through him that she became associated with the radical intellectual crowd in London at that time. Johnson was the good father she never had. It was from these people that she received emotional and intellectual support. She wrote a number of books, including an autobiographical novel titled Mary: A Fiction.

While in Paris (where she observed and wrote about the French revolution) she had a love affair and child with an American, Gilbert Imlay and tried twice to commit suicide over her despair at the betrayal in this relationship. She married the father of Mary Shelley, the philosopher William Godwin, but died in 1797, a few days after Mary Shelley was born.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“The civilized women of the present century, with few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect” (Quoted in the introduction, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. xv). Wollstonecraft, is referring, of course, to the fact that woman of her class were given little education or training except in how to attract a man and make a decent marriage. In the process, all of a woman’s potential had been ignored for so many years of upbringing that it was Wollstonecraft’s charge that women had forgotten what they were capable of and at times seemed to enjoy the severe limits that were out on their lives. She found it unbelievable that some women seemed to actually enjoy talking about nothing but petty gossip and fashion. And while she blames men for this situation, she also blames women. “As an exploration of the feminine, the Vindication is in fact an expose, a startlingly harsh condemnation of the degeneracy of modern womankind which has as its central target women’s sexuality” (Quoted in the introduction, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. xx). In other words, women were to be only seen as ornaments to the men around them. They were not to be friends and companions, and you could not have intellectual conversations with them not only because they were uneducated, but also because the women themselves had lost their interest in such things because of a lack of exposure and from the way both men and women frowned upon it. Wollstonecraft wrote that women were essentially sexual slaves and that the sooner sex was taken out of the equation, the sooner men and women could move into friendships that were based on intellect and respect. And to facilitate this both men and women needed to change and the best way to do this was to educate men and women in a new way, namely together, and for women to receive the same intellectual training as men.

Wollstonecraft also wrote that women should receive much more physical training and that much of the so-called “feminine weakness” was due to a lack of exercise and sunshine rather than to women’s inherent “delicate nature” as it was thought then. Wollstonecraft was not advocating that there should be no differences between men and women, but that what differences there were, were exaggerated by keeping women “innocent” by keeping them ignorant and promoting silliness and shallowness. “Women’s lives, she argues, have been defined by the erotic; the ‘sexual distinction’ is constructed around sexual desire itself. Lust and love have deformed and depraved women to the point where human integrity is sacrificed. The language in which she describes this is startlingly brutal Women are made ‘systematically voluptuous’ in order to become ‘contentedly the slaves of casual lust … standing dishes to which every glutton may have access’” (Quoted in the introduction, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. xx-xxi). Mary was responding to the fact that everything about a woman had been reduced to her being a sexual object. Where many writers’ of the day insisted that reducing women to simply their sexual use for men was simply an acknowledgment concerning the nature of things, but Wollstonecraft insisted that it was a product of habit, nurture rather than nature.

Wollstonecraft insisted that she had “a profound conviction that the neglected education of my fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore…strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty” (Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 1). She opposes the fact that women are thought of as female rather than as human. “How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes!” (Quoted in the introduction, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 21).

“It is time to effect a revolution in female manners-time to restore them their lost dignity- and make them, as a part of the human species, labor by reforming themselves to reform the world” (Quoted in the introduction, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 49). And this revolution would be brought about by giving women the same opportunity to develop their minds as men have. In this sense, it is interesting that Wollstonecraft also sees many men going without this training and as a result they can’t think either and so just fall into the customs of the time. For Wollstonecraft, the ability to think about things, the great Enlightenment hope was the key to bringing about the fulfillment of men and women. Both needed to be liberated by the freedom to reason things out and think critically about the traditions that are handed down about everything, but especially regarding the division of the sexes in so many areas.

Much of her book, Vindication, is given to quoting and then refuting the common ideas about women in the books of her time. Reading them is really appalling and reminds one of reading other time period literature about how medicine should be practiced, or how people of other races were viewed, etc. it is embarrassing! Did we really think that way? Do we still?

Summary

Mary Wollstonecraft is not going to be able to relate to many modern feminists, although she will have much in common with them. But we misjudge her if we take her out of her own time period and ask her to deal directly with our modern problems. But she is, nevertheless, a real pioneer and noble example of a woman who thought deeply about the issues facing her, about the injustice she had to deal with, and who then tried to find creative solutions to these problems.

She urged people to free themselves from the past prejudices and think in a new and fresh way about how both men and women could reach their potential only by helping and cooperating with each other. She would caution us against some modern extremes that would make all men pigs and all women sexual objects. She would ask us to look into our hearts and our minds and ask ourselves what it means to be first a human being and only then what it means to be a female human being or a male human being.

She would ask us to look at the socialization of boys and girls as well as their education, to see if it is always proper that boys wear blue and girls pink. Should girls play with dolls and boys with trucks? She would ask us to look at gender roles and see what is natural and true and what is socialized and therefore habit.

And she would really want us to look at marriages and ask ourselves what they are for and how a relationship can be nurturing to both the female and the male. This would include looking at our parenting and reflecting on the models we are providing to young people about what it means to be in a relationship and whether that relationship is healthy or not. Finally, it seems clear to me from reading her Vindication that she would not want to replace patriarchy with matriarchy, but would look for a way to bring the two together into what Hegel would call a new synthesis where the marriage of female and male qualities would lead to new integral and balanced human qualities.