Wollstonecraft has been labelled by several scholars as one of the founders of modern feminism. Resembling other progressive figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era, Wollstonecraft supported both political and social freedom in her polemic prose, calling for greater social justice and individual autonomy. She additionally emphasized the natural rights and reason of men and women as the foundation of personal liberty. An accomplished essayist and novelist, Wollstonecraft was influenced by such Enlightenment figures as Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but unlike most thinkers of the period, she extended the radical doctrine of the rights of man to include the rights of women. In support of Wollstonecraft's own claim that she was "the first of a new genus" of female advocates, many academics now consider her controversial manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) the first modern feminist tract.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Born in London on April 27, 1759, Wollstonecraft was the daughter of a would-be gentleman farmer and his wife—her father having abandoned the prosperous family trade of weaving in order to pursue farming. The Wollstonecraft family relocated frequently during Mary's childhood, living at various times in London, Yorkshire, and Wales, but nowhere did Edward John Wollstonecraft succeed in his chosen career. The domestic life of the Wollstonecrafts progressively worsened as Mary's father succumbed to alcoholism. Wollstonecraft was frequently a witness to her father's physical abuse of her mother, who meekly suffered her husband's violence. Wollstonecraft also failed to receive emotional support from her mother, who openly preferred and indulged Mary's brother, Edward. Resolved to become independent, Wollstonecraft left home against her parents' wishes in 1778 to accept the position of paid companion to a widow in Bath. She was obliged to return to her family in London two years later to care for her dying mother, but upon the latter's death, she immediately left again, this time living with the family of her close friend Frances ("Fanny") Blood. Wollstonecraft remained with Fanny Blood and her parents for several years, contributing with her needlework to the family's meager income. In 1783 Wollstonecraft's sister Eliza suffered a mental breakdown following the birth of a daughter. Believing that her brother-in-law was the cause of his wife's distress, Wollstonecraft arranged to remove Eliza from his house and later obtained a legal separation. Having undertaken responsibility for her sister, and faced with the necessity of earning a living, Wollstonecraft opened a school at Newington Green, near London, with Fanny Blood, Eliza, and her other sister, Everina. The enterprise was a success, but the partnership dissolved in 1785 when Blood married a longtime suitor and traveled with him to Portugal. Some months later, Wollstonecraft also journeyed to Portugal in order to visit her pregnant and ailing friend but arrived only to witness Fanny's death in childbirth. Upon her return to England, Wollstonecraft was forced to close the school due to financial difficulties. Soon afterward she wrote her first essay, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (1787), and made the acquaintance of the liberalminded publisher Joseph Johnson, who agreed to issue it. However, conscious of a pressing need for money, Wollstonecraft left England for Ireland, where she took a post as a governess to Lord Kingsborough's children. During her employment in Ireland, she wrote her first novel Mary, A Fiction (1788). In 1787 Wollstonecraft was dismissed from her duties by Lady Kingsborough and subsequently settled in London, determined to support herself by writing. Johnson became her mentor in this new venture, introducing her to London's literary and political worlds and charging her to...

SOURCE: Wollstonecraft, Mary. "Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, and Left Without a Fortune." In Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Vol. 4, edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, pp. 25-7. New York: New York University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, from her 1787 publication Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, Wollstonecraft discusses the plight of single women without an independent fortune. Too many young women, Wollstonecraft argues, receive only a token education and are therefore left unable to provide for themselves.

I have hitherto only spoken of those females, who will have a provision made for them by their parents. But many who have been well, or at least fashionably educated, are left without a fortune, and if they are not entirely devoid of delicacy, they must frequently remain single.

Few are the modes of earning a subsistence, and those very humiliating. Perhaps to be an humble companion to some rich old cousin, or what is still/worse, to live with strangers, who are so intolerably tyrannical, that none of their own relations can bear to live with them, though they should even expect a fortune in reversion. It is impossible to enumerate the many hours of anguish such a person must spend. Above the servants, yet considered by them as a spy, and ever reminded of her inferiority when in conversation with the superiors. If she cannot condescend to mean flattery, she has not a chance of being a favorite; and should any of the visitors take notice of her, and she for a moment forget her subordinate state, she is sure to be reminded of it./

Painfully sensible of unkindness, she is alive to every thing, and many sarcasms reach her, which were perhaps directed another way. She is alone, shut out from equality and confidence, and the concealed anxiety impairs her constitution; for she must wear a cheerful face, or be dismissed. The being dependant on the caprice of a fellow-creature, though certainly very necessary in this state of discipline, is yet a very bitter corrective, which we would fain shrink from.

A teacher at a school is only a kind of upper servant, who has more work than the menial ones./

A governess to young ladies is equally disagreeable. It is ten to one if they meet with a reasonable mother; and if she is not so, she will be continually finding fault to prove she is not ignorant, and be displeased if her pupils do not improve, but angry if the proper methods are taken to make them do so. The children treat them with disrespect, and often with insolence. In the mean time life glides away, and the spirits with it; 'and when youth and genial years are flown,' they have nothing to subsist on; or, perhaps, on some extraordinary occasion, some small allowance may be made for them, which is thought a great charity./

The few trades which are left, are now gradually falling into the hands of the men, and certainly they are not very respectable.

It is hard for a person who has a relish for polished society, to herd with the vulgar, or to condescend to mix with her former equals when she is considered in a different light. What unwelcome heart-breaking knowledge is then poured in on her! I mean a view of the selfishness and depravity of the world; for every other acquirement is a source of pleasure, though they may occasion temporary inconveniences. How cutting is the contempt / she meets with!—A young mind looks round for love and friendship; but love and friendship fly from poverty: expect them not if you are poor! The mind must then sink into meanness, and accommodate itself to its new state, or dare to be unhappy. Yet I think no reflecting person would give up the experience and improvement they have gained, to have avoided the misfortunes; on the contrary, they are thankfully ranked amongst the choicest blessings of life, when we are not under their immediate pressure.

How earnestly does a mind full of sensibility look for disinterested friendship, / and long to meet with good unalloyed. When fortune smiles they hug the dear delusion; but dream not that it is one. The painted cloud disappears suddenly, the scene is changed, and what an aching void is left in the heart! a void which only religion can fill up—and how few seek this internal comfort!

A woman, who has beauty without sentiment, is in great danger of being seduced; and if she has any, cannot guard herself from painful mortifications. It is very disagreeable to keep up a continual reserve with men she has been formerly familiar with; yet / if she places confidence, it is ten to one but she is deceived. Few men seriously think of marrying an inferior; and if they have honor enough not to take advantage of the artless tenderness of a woman who loves, and thinks not of the difference of rank, they do not undeceive her until she has anticipated happiness, which, contrasted with her dependant situation, appears delightful. The disappointment is severe; and the heart receives a wound which does not easily admit of a compleat cure, as the good that is missed is not valued according to its real worth: for fancy drew the picture, and grief delights to create food to feed on./

If what I have written should be read by parents, who are now going on in thoughtless extravagance, and anxious only that their daughters may be genteelly educated, let them consider to what sorrows they expose them; for I have not over-coloured the picture.

Though I warn parents to guard against leaving their daughters to encounter so much misery; yet if a young woman falls into it, she ought not to be discontented. Good must ultimately arise from every thing, to those who look beyond this infancy of their being; and here the comfort of a good conscience is our only stable support. The main business of our lives is to / learn to be virtuous; and He who is training us up for immortal bliss, knows best what trials will contribute to make us so; and our resignation and improvement will render us respectable to ourselves, and to that Being, whose approbation is of more value than life itself. It is true, tribulation produces anguish, and we would fain avoid the bitter cup, though convinced its effects would be the most salutary. The Almighty is then the kind parent, who chastens and educates, and indulges us not when it would tend to our hurt. He is compassion itself, and never wounds but to heal, when the ends of correction are answered.

SOURCE: Kelly, Gary. "(Female) Philosophy in the Bedroom: Mary Wollstonecraft and Female Sexuality." Women's Writing 4, no. 2 (1997): 143-54.

In the following essay, Kelly examines Wollstonecraft's personal life as well as her writings and argues that Wollstonecraft was a forerunner in reimagining women's sexuality outside of traditional marriage structures. In doing so, Kelly also defends Wollstonecraft from criticism of her relationships with men and her seemingly extreme behavior.

At a certain point in Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), the relentless pedagogical exercises in the Sadean grammar of sexuality are suspended by, or perhaps culminate in, the reading of a revolutionary polemical tract. Despite the apparently revolutionary sexual and textual articulations in Sade's novel, the pupils are female, the instructors male, and the novel could be claimed to reproduce a gender hierarchy inherent in the courtly ancien régime. This was just what Mary Wollstonecraft claimed about an earlier proposal for ostensibly revolutionary pedagogy. In her polemical tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she attacked Talleyrand's scheme for national education in France because it assigned a subordinate place to women and thus ran the risk of reproducing the ancien régime's subordination of women, thereby wrecking the revolutionary project itself. As Sade and Wollstonecraft both recognised, however, female sexuality, its construction and emancipation, was central in both courtly and revolutionary regimes. In this essay I will describe Wollstonecraft's articulation of that issue, partly in her writings, but also in her personal life, and the key terms I use are those in my essay's title.

By Mary Wollstonecraft I mean an archive and an agent. The archive is a set of texts ranging from manuscript letters and documents, through published works and the testimony of others about Mary Wollstonecraft, to the initials M. W. marked on the stays worn by an unidentified female, later recognised as Wollstonecraft's daughter Frances, at the time the latter committed suicide (Wardle, p. 335). These texts have material form, however, as works wrought by an agent addressing others in a socially and historically specific discursive situation, and, though that situation cannot be fully or finally known to us, it is not ours.

By female here I mean not just the usual modern sense of those persons so classified according to the discourse of biology. Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries such as Mary Hays would use the term to include what we would now consider the feminine, that is, subjective, cultural, and social practices learned as part of a historically and socially particular "language" of gender, as distinct from sex. The sense of "female" used here is, then, based on what is often referred to as "social constructionism" (Berger & Luckmann).

By philosophy I mean the term as used in Wollstonecraft's day, that is, a certain politicised intellectual critique of unreason, principally the court system of the ancien régime, with the "prejudice" and "custom" that sustained it and the "ignorance" and "superstition" that enabled it to perdure. Philosophy as such was gendered masculine in Wollstonecraft's day and, in the opinion of many people, females, like children and the common people, were excluded by nature or education from mastery of analytical and theoretical discourses. Accordingly, these social groups were widely considered to be naturally or all too easily the dupes of "prejudices" and "custom", "ignorance" and "superstition". Thus these groups were seen as both characteristic of unmodernised society and culture and reproducers of it. Not surprisingly, then, many in Wollstonecraft's day would have considered the phrase "female philosopher" to be an oxymoron.

These conventional attitudes were precisely what Wollstonecraft and other feminists of her time challenged, pointing out that if women, like children and plebeians, were excluded from philosophy as analytical discourse and from philosophy's revolutionary programme, they would hinder or even prevent the realisation of that programme. For Wollstonecraft, female philosophy meant not just access to philosophy for women or a distinct and desirable supplement to philosophy as conventionally and historically practised by men. To them, female philosophy was an urgently necessary reformation of male philosophy by "feminine" elements, in order to effect philosophy's potential for revolutionary transformation. Inevitably, revolutionised philosophy would have to enter the bedroom because the sexualisation of women to the exclusion of other attributes was, in the view of a broad range of late eighteenth-century writers, the cause of the courtisation and thus the degradation of women—their exclusion from the broad middle-class revolutionary project.

More particularly, feminists such as Wollstonecraft understood philosophy in practical terms to be the analytical method and discursive practice required by men in order to be successful in the professions (Wollstonecraft, 1792, ch. 2). To call for women, especially of the middle classes (Wollstonecraft's declared subject and audience), to become female philosophers was to call for the professionalisation of women of those classes. Wollstonecraft argues that, if women of the middle classes are not professionalised, or given appropriate knowledge, intellectual training (which she calls "reason"), and moral self-discipline ("virtue"), they will remain the subjects of undisciplined desire ("custom", "prejudice", "superstition", etc.) and thus liable to courtisation, as they had been for centuries. Such women could only impede and would probably wreck the middle-class revolution that was in train in Wollstonecraft's day, not only in France but, in various ways and to varying degrees, throughout the Western world.

By sexuality I mean subjective and somatic practices that are designated erotic and amorous by a particular society and culture. Such practices have long been represented as "natural" to or inherent in individuals in ways that are extra-social and extra-cultural, arising from deep, perhaps prelinguistic or extra-linguistic structures in subjectivity, or from "human nature". In this sense, sexuality seems authentic. A contrastingly different representation of sexuality is as performance (Butler), and therefore as no more authentic than any other kind of practice. In general, post-modernism questions any attribute as "naturally" or essentially human, and this questioning would include sexuality. Another strong approach to sexuality has been through psychoanalytic theory. Here my interest, however, is in sexuality as socially constructed, historically and socially specific, and yet a form of personal agency. Thus sexuality pertains to gender rather than to biological sex. The question of the conjunction of the sexuality of deep psychological structures and that which is socially constructed and historically particular remains unresolved here.

In addition, by defining sexuality as I do, I am not presenting sexuality as a form of discipline or policing, a compulsory regime scripted by society and merely enacted or performed by individuals (Foucault). I am more interested here in sexuality as being like a language, or rather sociolect and idiolect, one that individuals learn and employ for particular personal and social aims or reasons. Here I am using Roy Harris's model of language as a social practice. Thus I am not considering sexuality as a psychic, biological, or physiological imperative but rather as a psychic, biological, and physiological potential realised in culture and society, or a historically particular culture and society. Inasmuch as society and culture are political, or inevitably differentiated by relations of power, sexuality is also always political. As Cora Kaplan has pointed out, this relationship is central for feminist criticism, and Wollstonecraft and her writings form an exemplary case of it (Kaplan, pp. 32-54, 121-125, 155-160).

Similarly, by the bedroom I mean not a particular chamber but the politically, socially, and culturally designated and sanctioned scene for such practice of sexuality, though of course any place, indoors or out, could and can serve as a temporary site for it. More particularly, I mean the bedroom as boudoir, a private if not secret domestic space historically assigned to women as a site for conducting their private, including sexual, relationships. It is, of course, interesting in itself that this particular sense of "bedroom" is covered in English by a word appropriated from French, the language of Sade, and the sense used by Sade, suggesting that what transpires in the "boudoir" may not have been considered to be fully or properly "English" or "British". It is additionally interesting that a "boudoir" was originally a private room into which a woman could retire in order to sulk (bouder), presumably as a result of some rebuff or neglect in the public social sphere. Later the term came to mean a room in which a woman could receive her intimate acquaintances, and this is the sense that was appropriated into English, though "boudoir" retains the sense of a scene of sexual practice.

This leaves the words in and and—though small, they are important for articulating an argument. By female philosophy in the bedroom I mean a complex relationship. Philosophy and the bedroom could be distinct if not opposing discursive sites and practices. Philosophy and the bedroom could also be seen in hierarchical relationship, with philosophy able to account for the bedroom, but not the other way around. Here philosophy masters the bedroom, or even forestalls it. Yet the bedroom could be seen as the site of a practice more "authentic", more practical, more "real" than philosophy. In this view the bedroom is not just a place where philosophers (too) can be off duty, can be themselves, but the bedroom triumphs over philosophy by exposing its impractical, abstract, dehumanising character. All of these possible relationships were current in Wollstonecraft's day, seen in Wollstonecraft's texts and those of her fellow English Jacobins and their French contemporaries such as Laclos and Sade.

For example, the bedroom could be the recreation and refuge of the man—less often the woman—weary of the practice of philosophy as contestation and critique, as in Sade. Philosophy could also extend its critique to the bedroom, analysing sexual practices as necessary products or symptoms of one kind of political regime or another, as in Sade and Wollstonecraft. Here philosophy could also imagine the bedroom and sexuality otherwise, as a site among others for avant-garde or revolutionary political practice. The bedroom could also be the site of philosophy's failure, its lapse into courtly sexuality, thus exposing avant-garde, revolutionary philosophy's impracticality or hypocrisy, as in the Anti-Jacobin counter-revolutionary critique of Wollstonecraft. It was particularly in the aftermath of the Jacobin Terror, during the early Directory period of the Revolution, that sexuality of a particular kind came to seem intrinsic to the Revolution and, in the eyes of many in Britain, to reveal the Revolution's "true" character as at once a broad programme of license and transgression, including sexual, and a return of decadent courtliness. It was during the Directory period of the mid-1790s that the Revolution became associated, for many British observers, with excess of all kinds, including sexual excess. Wollstonecraft's public reputation was to be ruined by this association.

For those, like Wollstonecraft, who had determined to apply philosophy even to sexuality, however, philosophy had to be applied in the bedroom or the Revolutionary project would fail, would lapse back into the vitiated and vitiating gender relations of the ancien régime. Furthermore, the principles of revolutionary philosophy required enactment of this critique in the philosopher's own sexual practice in the bedroom and its surrounding domestic space and culture. That the personal is political and vice versa was a common understanding in the age of Mary Wollstonecraft, as an examination of the "paper war" over the Revolution amply illustrates. Though this commonplace was pursued with particular energy in the Revolution debate, it did not originate in revolutionary culture. It was partly a residue of court culture under the ancien régime and partly a recreation of the culture of Sensibility that was designed to oppose and supersede court culture.

Court government had long been represented by its (largely middle-class and puritan) critics and opponents as a system of intertwined political and sexual intrigue, of favourites and mistresses manipulating the top of a patronage system that in turn controlled the social, economic, cultural, and political life of the country and largely determined social and domestic relations and personal characters of individuals. This was the system that Wollstonecraft attacked in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and elsewhere as the cause of the courtisation of women, or their intellectual and moral trivialisation for erotic subordination. It was the system that Wollstonecraft thought the first wave of Revolutionaries had unthinkingly subsumed in their state constitution by excluding women from the full process of state education. This exclusion, Wollstonecraft argued, denied women the civil consciousness and roles they must have if they were not to continue to be courtly coquettes undermining the Revolution at home, and subverting the public and political sphere for private and personal ends, as the court system forced them to do.

Before the Revolution, writers of Sensibility reformulated the relation of the personal and political as a comprehensive oppositional culture constructed in the interests and image of the self-idealised professional middle class (see Brissenden, Barker-Benfield). According to the politics of Sensibility, the illegitimate personality politics of court government were to be supplanted by a politics of merit, or the disciplined moral and intellectual subject that was the idealised image of the professional man of the time. The court system was routinely figured as a regime of the father, or interconnected systems of patronage, paternalism, and patriarchy. Thus Sensibility, as an oppositional culture, tended to figure its idealised self as female and feminine after a bourgeois rather than courtly model of woman. Sensibility was feminised in a historically and socially specific way, though in fact it was available to both men and women of the subaltern middle classes, addressing men in the first instance, and addressing men and women differently. It was this culture that enabled Wollstonecraft to theorise her own experience of sexuality as a mediation of gender and class difference within the revolutionary politics of the professional middle class in her time.

In order to explicate the and in "Wollstonecraft and female sexuality", I turn now to a narrative of Wollstonecraft's encounter with and attempt to revolutionise, as a female philosopher, female sexuality for the larger revolutionary project of philosophy.

Her early letters, written while a girl living with her family in Yorkshire, show her grappling uncertainly and ambivalently with the courtisation of women of her class (Wollstonecraft, 1979). Within her family and early circle of friends she experienced and observed the degrading and brutalising effect of the courtly code of gender relations filtered down into the margins of the gentry and middle classes in which she grew up. Her mother was beaten and possibly raped by a drunken, over-ambitious father. Wollstonecraft and her siblings were deprived of proper education and reasonable expectations in order to fund the social advancement of her oldest brother. Her sister Eliza married and was probably rushed into motherhood and thus driven into mental and marital breakdown. Her friend Frances Blood was kept dangling by the self-interested family of her fiancé and, once married, unwisely became pregnant and removed to Portugal, where she died after childbirth. Blood's sister Caroline became a prostitute and workhouse inmate. While living in Windsor as a lady's companion Wollstonecraft was amused and irritated at the flutter caused by the notoriously gallant Prince of Wales, a figure to whom she would return in The Wrongs of Woman. In Ireland, as governess in the family of the titled and wealthy Kingsboroughs, she rejected courtisation in the education of her young female charges and observed with amusement and contempt the coquetting manipulativeness of Lady Kingsborough.

It was at this point that the literature of Sensibility, with its basis in Enlightenment philosophy, spoke so forcibly to Wollstonecraft in her social no man's land as professional and intellectual woman, as it did to many other men and women in similar situations in Western societies of the time. The relevance of Sensibility for her was focused in Jean-Jacques Rousseau as self-feminised male and her model for self-reconstruction as female philosopher. Rousseau's writings made clear the conflict between the political and the personal, including sexuality and private life. By the late 1780s Wollstonecraft was increasingly critical of the subjection of women by the gentry property system, expressed in the English tradition of female conduct literature with its pessimistic and repressive view of female sexuality. Yet she also knew how easily women could be seduced by courtly ideology. At this point, then, both conventional marriage and unconventional sexual conduct would, it seemed to her, vitiate her project of self-construction as a "female philosopher", or avant-garde exemplar of female emancipation within the horizon of possibilities offered by late eighteenth-century society.

In the face of this impasse Wollstonecraft struggled to find an acceptable practice of sexuality. One way was through intense female friendship of the kind she had with Frances Blood. Such relationships could of course have an erotic dimension, as implied by conduct-books' anxiety about them. Blood's death put an end to this experiment in female sexuality, but the intensity of Wollstonecraft's feeling about it may be taken to indicate a lesbian or potentially lesbian relationship. Such homosocial intensity was and is not uncommon, was licensed to a degree by social convention at that time, and was indeed encouraged in the culture of Sensibility. Adopting lesbian sexuality and way of life was a possible though highly risky political gesture, and if Wollstonecraft did so she didn't make the relationship into such a gesture. Later, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she regards girls' boarding schools as morally dangerous in part because by their nature they encourage masturbation and lesbianism (Wollstonecraft, 1792, p. 164). In short, whatever personal satisfactions lesbianism may have offered, its political usefulness in Wollstonecraft's day, if openly avowed, was not what it may be today.

A different field for personal and political construction of female sexuality was offered by religious Dissent. As a marginalised urban and commercial middle-class community, Dissent defined itself largely by rejecting hegemonic culture, including courtly sexuality. At that time, such rejection was not necessarily repressively puritanical but could liberate men and women from the codes and roles of courtly sexuality. Partly for this reason intellectual women such as Wollstonecraft found Dissent a congenial environment in many ways. Furthermore, as an oppositional culture Dissent also embraced feminisation and facilitated useful and safe relationships of male-female intellectual equality or mentorship, such as that enjoyed by Wollstonecraft with several clergymen, including Richard Price (whom she would later defend in her Vindication of the Rights of Men). A more dangerous relationship of a similar kind involved George Ogle, one of Lady Kingsborough's circle, who turned out, in Wollstonecraft's view, to conceal courtly amorousness beneath Rousseauist feminisation.

Wollstonecraft's most important relationship with a feminised man, however, would be with her publisher. Joseph Johnson was a Dissenter, a bachelor, the leading publisher of the English Dissenting Enlightenment, and had close friendships with creative, feminised men such as William Roscoe and Henry Fuseli, who also became Wollstonecraft's friends. She not only earned a living thanks to Johnson, but, as a member Johnson's circle of progressive writers, intellectuals, and artists, she could ignore courtly femininity and sexuality to create an identity as a female philosopher, discussing subjects conventionally closed to women or barred from mixed company, such as science, politics, and sexuality itself. Like many men and women in her situation she welcomed the French Revolution, and even identified with it by becoming a "philosophical sloven", or adopting the style of dress, comportment, and domestic life affected by Parisian women who had thrown off courtly femininity and sexuality for an openly revolutionary counter-culture.

By this point she was reinventing her female sexuality in a relationship with the expatriate Swiss artist and critic Henry Fuseli. His presence in her intellectual and personal life facilitated her emergence as a public character, first with A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and then with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In the latter, Wollstonecraft consistently casts the expression of female sexuality in a negative light. For example, in chapter 4, significantly entitled, "Observations on the State of Degradation to which Woman is Reduced by Various Causes", she states:

Love, considered as an animal appetite, cannot long feed on itself without expiring. And this extinction in its own flame, may be termed the violent death of love. But the wife who has been thus rendered licentious, will probably endeavour to fill the void left by her husband's attentions …

Personal attachment is a very happy foundation for friendship; yet, when even two virtuous people marry, it would, perhaps, be happy if some circumstances checked their passion … In that case they would look beyond the present moment, and try to render the whole of life respectable, by forming a plan to regulate a friendship which only death ought to dissolve.

(Wollstonecraft, 1792, p. 73)

Here Wollstonecraft seems to repeat the commonplace warning of female conduct-books against expression of female sexual desire. The dim view of conjugal sexuality is also found in her letters of the late 1780s and early 1790s, and there is her own observation of the disorienting effect of sexual desire in her younger sister, Fanny Blood, and other women. Wollstonecraft's concern here, however, is that women be able to resist courtisation in marriage, given the prevalence of such pressures in society and culture at large. It is not so much female sexuality that she denies as its distortion by the dominant ideology and culture—a distortion that works to subordinate and oppress women.

Between the two Vindications Wollstonecraft also reflected on a new model, the "bluestocking" and notorious female philosopher of an earlier generation, Catharine Macaulay Graham. Macaulay Graham was a second generation bluestocking writer and intellectual who had transgressed the gendered boundary of discourse by writing full-scale and frankly political historiography—otherwise a masculine discourse. Macaulay Graham also breached conventional femininity by openly advocating classical republicanism. More seriously damaging was her decision, once widowed, to marry a man younger and from a lower social class, thereby advertising, in the eyes of many, that she was marrying for sexual pleasure. She was satirised accordingly. Significantly, Wollstonecraft decided to memorialise Macaulay Graham in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. While writing the book, she also abandoned her avant-garde Parisian and Revolutionary-style coarse attire and appearance and adopted a more "bluestocking" style of dress, conduct, and life.

This transformation has been interpreted as an attempt to please Fuseli and to formalise her relationship with him. Yet it is clear from her letters and actions that she had no intention of giving up her ideal of avant-garde revolutionary intellectual companionship or betraying the anti-courtly sexual politics she had advocated in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She did, finally, propose joining the Fuseli household as his intellectual partner, while Fuseli's wife Sophia, a former model who may have been illiterate, was to remain his sexual partner and housekeeper. Such an arrangement would obviously have been problematic, however, since it could too easily have been seen to subsume the interrelated class and gender differences of court culture; in any case the proposal was rejected.

By this time, Wollstonecraft must already have heard of the avant-garde conjugality being practised in Girondin Revolutionary coteries and expatriate British circles at Paris, including the salon of Marie Roland and the society around Johnson's partner, Thomas Christie. Here amorous and conjugal relationships were formed without marriage, which was rejected as an institution of gentry property and court government. Among women Wollstonecraft knew who were involved in such relationships were Helen Maria Williams, Marie Roland, and Thomas Christie's wife Rebecca. Wollstonecraft went to Paris to pursue both her writing career and the kind of relationship she had failed to achieve with Fuseli. She soon found with Gilbert Imlay a way to practise female philosophy in the bedroom.

What we know of this relationship, especially from Wollstonecraft's letters, suggests that it was intensely intimate yet open, allowed much independence to both partners, and was obstructed and thus probably intensified by the actual political and economic situation of France at the time. Under the Jacobin Terror, and with a state of war existing between Britain and France, Wollstonecraft as a British subject was in a dangerous position. She had herself registered as Imlay's wife with the American embassy, though they did not marry, and had to live outside Paris for some time; Imlay, as an American with commercial experience, could engage in business, especially blockade running, for the French government. To Wollstonecraft's irritation, this work seemed to require long absences from Wollstonecraft and their daughter, who was born in the spring of 1794. Wollstonecraft was also irritated by the Jacobin regime's negative attitude to female philosophers and politicians and their exhortations to women to stay at home to raise good citizens with literal and metaphorical "lait républicain".

Nevertheless, her letters, especially to Imlay, show a determined endeavour to practise her new-found revolutionary conjugality as both female and philosopher. In this endeavour, she strove over some period to keep her sexual needs and desires in balance and relationship with what she believed to be a reflective, "philosophical" self-awareness, and with an economy of mutuality and equality in desire as in all aspects of their relationship. Eventually, his loss of sexual feeling for her proved overwhelmingly disappointing in terms of her politics of sexuality and conjugality. Imlay became involved with another woman and the relationship with Wollstonecraft broke down, though whether Imlay's involvement with the other woman was the symptom or cause cannot be known. In fact, we have on record only one side of their relationship and the available evidence is open to conflicting interpretations. The letters show that Wollstonecraft tried to keep the relationship going and was prepared to overlook Imlay's infidelities up to a point. When this failed she threatened or attempted suicide, but then agreed to be his agent in recovering money he was using to purchase embargoed goods for the French government. On her return she found Imlay with a new partner and again attempted suicide. After some months she accepted that the relationship was over, though she remained fearful of being betrayed again.

The prevailing view has been that Wollstonecraft made a fool of herself over Imlay, that he was probably not worthy of her, and that as a feminist she ought to have been stronger and more decisive in dealing with him. My reading is that she saw in Imlay and her relationship with him the sexual, domestic, and conjugal realisation of her female philosophy and the personal basis for sustaining her public and political dissemination of that philosophy. That she may have been mistaken in the circumstances cannot be known and should not be to her discredit. Besides, during and from this personal and public-political crisis she produced, in An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), a feminisation of historiography and the Revolution in the style of Catharine Macaulay Graham, and, in Letters from Sweden (1796) and The Wrongs of Woman (1798), a textualisation of female philosophy both in the bedroom and at large in society of pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary Europe. In this text, as I have argued elsewhere (Kelly), she created, in the figure of the author-in-the-text, an exemplary avant-garde consciousness for a new revolutionary cadre at a moment when revolutionary hope seemed about to be extinguished. It is not coincidental that this avant-garde consciousness is represented repeatedly as a female philosopher in the bedroom, as a subjective yet embodied site of lost and remembered revolutionary sexuality and of post-Revolutionary reflection and self-reconstruction.

If Imlay turned out to be not enough of a philosopher to sustain a relationship with her, Wollstonecraft's next partner, William Godwin, was the most famous and infamous philosopher in Britain. Their relationship is well documented through their letters and notes and Godwin's journal. They intended from the outset to practise an avant-garde sexuality and conjugality called for and validated by their philosophy. As with Imlay, Wollstonecraft's relationship with Godwin was to be part of a revolutionary subculture implicitly criticising and proleptically replacing hegemonic relations between the sexes. Significantly, in their bedroom they alternated avant-garde philosophy and sexuality, giving up the latter for the former whenever Wollstonecraft might have become pregnant. Again, however, this relationship was hindered by repressive political and social values and also by financial pressures. Opposition to such personal-political subcultures was less obviously dangerous and more diffused than in Jacobin France, but Wollstonecraft and Godwin had to protect their livelihoods and their political usefulness in an atmosphere of increasing political repression, social surveillance, and moral policing, especially after Wollstonecraft became pregnant, against her wishes. Therefore they legalised their relationship, though this was in effect a public admission that Wollstonecraft had not been married to Imlay.

Her unexpected death from complications of childbirth was not, of course, the end of the story. Godwin chose to publish work she left unfinished at her death, with a candid memoir of her and what are evidently selections from her letters to Imlay and Johnson (he would have included letters to Fuseli but the latter refused access to them). These texts enabled counter-revolutionary journalists to pillory Wollstonecraft as an example of the commonplace Anti-Jacobin argument that reformers and revolutionaries were merely using a political programme to advance their ambitions and gratify their appetites, including sexual appetite. These journalists made common practice of discrediting reformist and revolutionary programmes by showing how their proponents betrayed their own principles, theories, and arguments. Feminism was but one reform cause of many successfully smeared and marginalised or suppressed in this way. In the intense ideological and armed struggle of the later 1790s and early 1800s there were many who believed the smear and many others who thought such means were justified for the end of national survival against resurgent Revolutionary France under Napoleon. The social, political, and economic crises of the post-war years, up to the reform movements of the 1830s, again deferred any useful opportunity to reinsert Wollstonecraft and her work into the public political sphere, though there were opportunities to do so, and it was attempted in early socialist circles (as Barbara Taylor has shown) and attempted obliquely or covertly in the work of Mary Shelley, Lady Caroline Lamb, and other women writers of the 1820s and 1830s.

A politicised female sexuality such as Wollstonecraft enacted and represented in her work was diverted into and continued to be part of avant-garde and "bohemian" practice. Counter-revolutionary propaganda successfully disabled it, however, as an important element in transgressive and reformative practice in the public political sphere, except within socialist, feminist and other reform movements. In the meantime, Wollstonecraft's views about and practice of sexuality remained a problem. Answers to this problem, unfortunately, comprise a history of the sexual double standard and middle-class moralising. The counter-revolutionary condemnation formed after the appearance of Godwin's memorialising texts continued to have a strong influence, even with feminists. The commonest and longest-lived view has been that Wollstonecraft preached female independence but practised dependence, that she betrayed her feminist principles or at best could not live up to them, that her sexuality let her feminism down, that the female philosopher was defeated in the bedroom. Since the 1970s, when female sexuality became a central issue in feminist discourse, some commentators have also criticised Wollstonecraft's apparent denial of female sexuality in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

In re-presenting Mary Wollstonecraft as the (female) philosopher in the bedroom, I have aimed to re-place Wollstonecraft in her time in order to represent her as a philosopher with much to tell us about the discourse of sexuality and whatever comes into it, in any time and place. In doing so I have approached sexuality as socially and historically particular, and, like other social and cultural discourse, one way that human agents express and negotiate social difference and relations of power in particular circumstances. Like language as theorised by Roy Harris, sexuality may be treated as a field of creative communication within a particular horizon of possibility. In order to understand Wollstonecraft's exercise of such agency, and thus illuminate our own, it is necessary to understand her horizon of possibility, which was not ours. Such an approach may not produce Wollstonecraft as the female philosopher in the bedroom who is what Angela Carter calls the "Sadeian woman", and there are, of course, other ways of treating sexuality than that used here; each has its limits, as does this one. Certainly, readings of Wollstonecraft based on gender-only or transhistorical assumptions about sexuality often seem to produce her as victim, hypocrite, bourgeois liberal, or all of these. Historicising her and the discourse(s) of sexuality in her time perhaps produces a more interesting Wollstonecraft, for some of us; and, at the risk of indulging in celebratory criticism, such a reading also produces a Wollstonecraft who is admirable, exemplary, and instructive, even now.

References

Brissenden, R. F., Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sensibility from Richardson to Sade (London, 1974).

Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Berger, P. L. & Luckman, T., The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971).

Butler, J., Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Butler, M. (Ed.) Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Cobban, A. (Ed.) The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789-1800, second edition (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1960.

Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality, 3 volumes (London: Lane, 1979).

Harris, R., The Language Myth (London: Duckworth, 1981).

Kaplan, C., Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986).

Kelly, G., Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's, 1992).

Taylor, B., Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983).

Wardle, R. M., Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1951).

Wollstonecraft, M. (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, edited by Carol Poston, second edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988).

Wollstonecraft, M. (1976) Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, edited by Carole H. Poston (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).

Wollstonecraft, M. (1979) The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (essay) 1787

Mary, A Fiction (novel) 1788

Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (juvenilia) 1788

The Female Reader; or, Miscellaneous-Pieces, in Prose and Verse, Selected from the Best Writers, and Disposed Under Proper Heads; for the Improvement of Young Women [editor] (poetry and essays) 1789

A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France (essay) 1790

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (essay) 1792

An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (essays) 1794

Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (letters) 1796

* Posthumous Works of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 4 vols. (essays, letters, and prose) 1798

Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman: A Posthumous Fragment (unfinished novel) 1799

Godwin and Mary: Letters of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (letters) 1966

A Wollstonecraft Anthology (essays, letters, and prose) 1977

The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (letters) 1979

The Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. 7 vols. (essays, letters, and prose) 1989

* Includes Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman: a Posthumous Fragment.

SOURCE: Wollstonecraft, Mary. Introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. Reprint, pp. 6-10. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1996.
In the following introduction to the 1792 edition, Wollstonecraft delineates the purpose of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

After Considering the historic page, and viewing the living world with anxious solicitude, the most melancholy emotions of sorrowful indignation have depressed my spirits, and I have sighed when obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial. I have turned over various books written on the subject of education, and patiently observed the conduct of parents and the management of schools; but what has been the result?—a profound conviction that the neglected education of my fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore; and that women, in particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes, originating from one hasty conclusion. The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.—One cause of this barren blooming I attribute 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; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the 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.

In a treatise, therefore, on female rights and manners, the works which have been particularly written for their improvement must not be overlooked; especially when it is asserted, in direct terms, that the minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement; that the books of instruction, written by men of genius, have had the same tendency as more frivolous productions; and that, in the true style of Mahometanism, they are treated as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species, when improveable reason is allowed to be the dignified distinction which raises men above the brute creation, and puts a natural sceptre in a feeble hand.

Yet, because I am a woman, I would not lead my readers to suppose that I mean violently to agitate the contested question respecting the equality or inferiority of the sex; but as the subject lies in my way, and I cannot pass it over without subjecting the main tendency of my reasoning to misconstruction, I shall stop a moment to deliver, in a few words, my opinion.—In the government of the physical world it is observable that the female in point of strength is, in general, inferior to the male. This is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman. A degree of physical superiority cannot, therefore, be denied—and it is a noble prerogative! But not content with this natural preeminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society.

I am aware of an obvious inference:—from every quarter have I heard exclamations against masculine women; but where are they to be found? If by this appellation men mean to inveigh against their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming, I shall most cordially join in the cry; but if it be against the imitation of manly virtues, or, more properly speaking, the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raise females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind;—all those who view them with a philosophic eye must, I should think, wish with me, that they may every day grow more and more masculine.

This discussion naturally divides the subject. 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; and afterwards I shall more particularly point out their peculiar designation.

I wish also to steer clear of an error which many respectable writers have fallen into; for the instruction which has hitherto been addressed to women, has rather been applicable to ladies, if the little indirect advice, that is scattered through Sandford and Merton, be excepted; but, addressing my sex in a firmer tone, I pay particular attention to those in the middle class, because they appear to be in the most natural state. Perhaps the seeds of false refinement, immorality, and vanity, have ever been shed by the great. Weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner, undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society! As a class of mankind they have the strongest claim to pity; the education of the rich tends to render them vain and helpless, and the unfolding mind is not strengthened by the practice of those duties which dignify the human character.—They only live to amuse themselves, and by the same law which in nature invariably produces certain effects, they soon only afford barren amusement.

But as I purpose taking a separate view of the different ranks of society, and of the moral character of women, in each, this hint is, for the present, sufficient; and I have only alluded to the subject, because it appears to me to be the very essence of an introduction to give a cursory account of the contents of the work it introduces.

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to shew that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex; and that secondary views should be brought to this simple touchstone.

This is a rough sketch of my plan; and should I express my conviction with the energetic emotions that I feel whenever I think of the subject, the dictates of experience and reflection will be felt by some of my readers. Animated by this important object, I shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style;—I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart.—I shall be employed about things, not words!—and, anxious to render my sex more respectable members of society, I shall try to avoid that flowery diction which has slided from essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and conversation.

These pretty superlatives, dropping glibly from the tongue, vitiate the taste, and create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns away from simple unadorned truth; and a deluge of false sentiments and overstretched feelings, stifling the natural emotions of the heart, render the domestic pleasures inspid, that ought to sweeten the exercise of those severe duties, which educate a rational and immortal being for a nobler field of action.

The education of women has, of late, been more attended to than formerly; yet they are still reckoned a frivolous sex, and ridiculed or pitied by the writers who endeavour by satire or instruction to improve them. It is acknowledged that they spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of accomplishments; meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves,—the only way women can rise in the world,—by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act:—they dress; they paint, and nickname God's creatures.—Surely these weak beings are only fit for a seraglio!—Can they be expected to govern a family with judgment, or take care of the poor babes whom they bring into the world?

If then it can be fairly deduced from the present conduct of the sex, from the prevalent fondness for pleasure which takes place of ambition and those nobler passions that open and enlarge the soul; that the instruction which women have hitherto received has only tended, with the constitution of civil society, to render them insignificant objects of desire—mere propagators of fools!—if it can be proved that in aiming to accomplish them, without cultivating their understandings, they are taken out of their sphere of duties, and made ridiculous and useless when the short-lived bloom of beauty is over,¹ I presume that rational men will excuse me for endeavouring to persuade them to become more masculine and respectable.

Indeed the word masculine is only a bugbear: there is little reason to fear that women will acquire too much courage or fortitude; for their apparent inferiority with respect to bodily strength, must render them, in some degree, dependent on men in the various relations of life; but why should it be increased by prejudices that give a sex to virtue, and confound simple truths with sensual reveries?

Women are, in fact, so much degraded by mistaken notions of female excellence, that I do not mean to add a paradox when I assert, that this artificial weakness produces a propensity to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of strength, which leads them to play off those contemptible infantine airs that undermine esteem even whilst they excite desire. Let men become more chaste and modest, and if women do not grow wiser in the same ratio, it will be clear that they have weaker understandings. It seems scarcely necessary to say, that I now speak of the sex in general. Many individuals have more sense than their male relatives; and, as nothing preponderates where there is a constant struggle for an equilibrium, without it has naturally more gravity, some women govern their husbands without degrading themselves, because intellect will always govern.

Note

1. A lively writer, I cannot recollect his name, asks what business women turned of forty have to do in the world?

SOURCE: Gunther-Canada, Wendy. “A Voice From the Void.” In Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics, pp. 40-70. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001.

In the following excerpt, Gunther-Canada examines Wollstonecraft’s early work in order to better understand how Wollstonecraft developed her politics and her writing. Considering Wollstonecraft’s early letters, her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, and her first novel, Mary, A Fiction, Gunther-Canada suggests that Wollstonecraft’s focus on girls represented a new voice in the history of women.

Before I go on will you pause—and if after deliberating you will promise not to mention to anyone what you know of my designs (though you may think my requesting you to conceal them unreasonable) I will trust to your honor—and proceed. Mr. Johnson whose uncommon kindness, I believe, has saved me from despair, and vexations I shrink back from—and feared to encounter; assures me that if I exert my talents by writing I may support myself in a comfortable way. I am then going to become the first of a new genus.

—Mary Wollstonecraft to her sister Everina,

November 7, 1787

Mary Wollstonecraft mused that she would be the first of a new genus when she chose to live as an author. Yet in the autumn of 1787, it must have seemed highly unlikely that she would leave any mark at all upon posterity. The vast majority of the women of her generation were married and were the mothers of children. The facts of Wollstonecraft’s life were very different. At twenty-eight and unmarried she had already exhausted most forms of respectable employment for a middle-class woman of the late eighteenth century. She had earned her bread for over a decade as lady’s companion, seamstress, teacher, and governess. When Mary Wollstonecraft claimed the authority to write, and (more significant) to write about political rights, she broke with her personal past and created a wave in the history of political thought that had not been seen since Socrates discussed women’s capacity to be Guardians in the Republic. The political intent of her writing was nothing less than the complete subversion of the traditional philosophical plot in which she claimed women were born only to “propagate and rot.”¹

Wollstonecraft’s political theory, born of a feminist consciousness, has been largely ignored by mainstream political theorists, the descendants of the canonical tradition. Her work has been considered illegitimate because she refused to acknowledge the patriarchy of the canonized forefathers. As Carole Pateman has noted, the genesis of political theory is singularly masculine:

Only men—who can create political life—can take part in the original pact, yet the political fictions speak to women, too, through the language of the “individual.” A curious message is sent to women, who represent everything that the individual is not, but the message must continually be conveyed because the meaning of the individual and the social contract depend on women and the sexual contract. Women must acknowledge the political fiction and speak the language even as the terms of the original pact exclude them from the fraternal conversation.²

Historically, only men have had the generative capacity to bring political theory to life in dialogues, tracts, and treatises. Wollstonecraft’s criticism of the canonical tradition directly confronted the sexual politics of gender and generation and created a new form of feminist political analysis that made it possible to theorize women’s lives.

Yet a mere ten years after she proposed her brave plan to live as an author, in what was surely one of the tragic ironies of history, Mary Wollstonecraft died from complications of childbirth. Today she has been reborn in the works of many scholars who have used her writings to construct a political history for women. The name of the woman author whose own authority was constantly under attack has become a basis for legitimating the work of a new generation of feminist writers. She has been read as a humanist, who in arguing for women’s rights embraced the Enlightenment ideals of reason and self-government. She has also been read as a feminist, who recognized in her analysis of the situation of women the false universalism of Enlightenment humanism. However, while illuminating important aspects of Wollstonecraft’s feminist theory, these readings fail to examine the complex ways in which her writing focuses our attention on the sexual politics of authority.

To read Mary Wollstonecraft is to ask how a woman is authorized to write political theory. The history of political thought has often been represented as a conversation that invites everyone to take their place at the theoretical table. Feminist theorists, beginning with Wollstonecraft, argue that women have been excluded from the canonical conversation.³ Wollstonecraft’s writing, unauthorized by the canonical tradition, interrupts the fraternal conversation of political thought. Her work, from first page to last paragraph, represents a voice from the void. She invites to the theoretical table subjects that had not been represented within the writings of the fathers of the canon, foremost among them being the girl. The canon of political thought does not discuss female development or chart a developmental course for women as citizens. Mary Wollstonecraft gave voice to the girl and made her presence felt in the eighteenth-century debates about a woman’s place. In speaking of the girl in her early works, and in letting the girl speak throughout her writings, Wollstonecraft articulated what had not been said within the canonical conversation. Indeed, the girl gives voice to the conflicts of gender and generation unacknowledged within the history of political thought. More important, by focusing on the girl we are better able to understand the gender politics of the infantilization of women.

Wollstonecraft’s close attention to female development, from girlhood to womanhood, empowered her to attack the subject position of women within canonical political theory. Her critical focus on the girl enabled her to fully visualize women as autonomous subjects and responsible citizens. In her first published works, an educational text and a didactic novel, she began to develop the arguments that form the basis of her twin political tracts, the two vindications. In this manner Wollstonecraft’s early writings on the girl anticipated some of the most pressing concerns of contemporary feminist theorists, who from Carol Gilligan to Luce Irigaray have claimed that until we acknowledge the voice of the girl we will not be able to articulate a truly feminist theory.⁴

In this chapter I examine Mary Wollstonecraft’s earliest writings. We first encounter the girl in Wollstonecraft’s own adolescent letters, where we meet the feminist as a fourteen year old who dreamed of independence. In Wollstonecraft herself we may see an eighteenth-century predecessor of Gilligan’s “female resister.”⁵ This girl was also present in her early publications as she wrote of the duties of daughters and the conflicts of coming of age in a sexist society. Paradoxically, the appearance of the girl in Wollstonecraft’s writings has gone relatively unnoticed by many scholars who have dismissed these works as juvenilia. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters provides a thoughtful analysis of the effects of social prejudice on female education and economic dependence on women’s situation. Mary, a Fiction displays a new approach to female friendship and marriage. Original Stories offers an original look at the relationship between adults and children. Read alone, these works may seem unremarkable; but if we read them together and place them within their historical context we become aware of how the voice of the girl in Wollstonecraft’s writing matured into a distinctive feminist language with which to speak of self. I believe it is here in these early writings that we find an outline of Mary Wollstonecraft’s most famous arguments, and it is also here that she found the inspiration and the authority to articulate a theory of women’s rights.

The Voice of the Girl

According to my promise I sit down to write to you.

—Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Arden, May 1773

Remarkably, we have a great deal of evidence about Mary Wollstonecraft’s own girlhood. Even more fortuitous is the fact that the majority of this information comes from Wollstonecraft herself. Her biographer Ralph Wardle collected and edited her personal letters, which begin with correspondence to a childhood friend at the age of fourteen. Wollstonecraft frequently returned to her own youth in her writing and it is here that we first hear the voice of the girl. Her earliest correspondence, with a clergyman’s daughter named Jane Arden, reveals a girl’s struggle to find the time to read and write. These letters, filled with poetry, country gossip, and demands for a quick and affectionate response, usually ended with her mother’s call or the cries of her younger siblings. “I have a hundred things to add, but can’t get time for Mama is calling me, so shall reserve them for another letter.”⁶

The young Mary was concerned that her letters to the older and better-educated Jane would reveal her grammatical errors as well as her personal faults. “I have glanced over this letter and find it so ill written that I fear you cannot make out one line of this last page, but—you know, my dear, I have not the advantage of a Master as you have, and it is with great difficulty to get my brother to mend my pens.” Stuck in what she termed a “dilemma,” without “one pen that will make a stroke,” she signed her name.⁷ Ned, the oldest son, had both books and pens as he was destined for a career at the bar. Mary, the oldest daughter, was destined for marriage and she expended her energy in the tug-of-war of caring for their younger sisters and brothers. These constant battles pitted self-improvement against familial obligations and taught lessons that took a toll on her spirit as well as on her handwriting.

Even at this young age Mary Wollstonecraft dreamed of independence. But her daydreams reveal a very practical account of the necessary exchange of money for liberty, an exchange in which eighteenth-century English women, considered by law as property themselves, were at a decided disadvantage. In a subsequent letter the fourteen-year-old girl details the settlement of a “great fortune” of three hundred pounds on the Miss N_____s, noting that “a woman of any oeconomy may live very genteelly on 150 pounds a year.” These wild speculations aside, the letter concludes, “I am afraid you cannot read this as all the children are plaguing me.”⁸ Just a few years later, beset by financial problems as she struggled to support herself and her sisters without a legacy, Wollstonecraft wrote another letter in which she figured that three young women working at embroidery and watercolor landscapes could manage to scrape by on their collective earnings of a pound a week.⁹

However, at fourteen Mary’s desire for a singular friendship, rather than the endless needs of child care, put an end to this first and formative correspondence. Jane Arden, the daughter of a preacher and self-styled philosopher, had a wider circle of acquaintances than Mary, daughter of a father whose dissipated ways would soon cost him the title of both gentleman and farmer. Even in a country town like Beverly in the northern county of Yorkshire, everyone had their place in the social hierarchy. On a visit to the Ardens, Mary believed herself to be displaced by a new arrival. She quickly picked up her pen. “Before I begin I beg pardon for the freedom of my style.—If I did not love you I would not write so;—I have a heart that scorns disguise, and a countenance which will not dissemble: I have formed romantic notions of friendship.”¹⁰

Indeed, in this letter the young Wollstonecraft drew a vivid portrait of herself in ink that flowed with jealousy and was blotted by an awareness of hurt pride. “I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first place or none.—I own your behavior is more according to the opinions of the world, but I would break from such narrow bounds.” In the great chain of being, even a child at play must know her place. But in girlhood Wollstonecraft refused to play by the rules of the social game. She argued that she had been intentionally snubbed by Mrs. Arden. “When I have been at your house with Miss J_____the greatest respect has been paid to her; every thing handed to her first;—in short, as if she were a superior being.—Your Mama too behaved with more politeness to her.”¹¹ Wollstonecraft’s words speak to a self-consciousness of position as well as her knowledge of the social conventions that afforded the newcomer primacy of place. This awareness of women’s situation and class position was a theme that would distinguish her writing throughout her career. Wollstonecraft’s desire “to have first place or none” would lead her repeatedly to break the “narrow bounds” of the world of opinion.

Six years later, at the age of twenty, Mary Wollstonecraft resumed her correspondence with her girlhood friend Jane Arden. Neither woman had married and each of them had left their families to make their own way in the world. She wrote, “I often recollect with pleasure the many agreeable days we spent together when we eagerly told every girlish secret of our hearts—Those were peaceful days; your’s since that period may have been as tranquil, but mine have been far from otherwise.”¹² In these letters Wollstonecraft, now employed as a companion to an elderly woman in Bath, tried to bring their friendship up to date, giving an account of herself to Arden who was living in Norfolk as a governess. Her letters from Bath are a sad corrective for anyone who has read Jane Austen’s fiction. Under different circumstances a young lady in this spa town would have enjoyed many entertaining diversions, but Wollstonecraft as a working woman had little experience of these pleasures, even though for two years she had lived within walking distance of the Pump Room, the Promenade, and the Assembly Rooms. She wrote to Arden, “Bath is remarkably full at present, and nothing is going forward but Balls and plays without end or number.—I seldom go into public;—I have been but twice to the rooms.” The social season in full swing, Wollstonecraft sat on the sidelines while the choreography of marriage twirled ceaselessly around her.

I am quite a piece of still life, not but that I am a friend to mirth and cheerfulness; but I would move in a small circle;—I am fond of domestic pleasures and have not spirit sufficient to bustle about. . . . There is no prospect of my quitting this place in a hurry, necessity not choice ties me to it (not but that I receive the greatest civility from this family)—yet, I am detained here only by prudential motives, if I was to follow the bent of my inclination, I shod [sic] haste away. You will not wonder at this,—when you consider that I am among Strangers, far from all my former connections:—The more I see of the world, the more anxious I am to preserve my old friends, for I am now slower than ever in forming friendships;—I would wish to cherish a universal love to all mankind, but the principal part of my heart must be occupied by those who have for years had a place there.

Her half-hearted assertions to the contrary, she concluded, “I wish I could write any thing that would entertain you, but I mix so little with the world, that I am at a loss for news.”¹³

To the sympathetic reader Mary Wollstonecraft seems to have lost her sense of self. Certainly there is something new about these letters. It is her concern about boundaries; her adult world suddenly appears to be so much smaller than the Yorkshire countryside of her childhood. Perhaps in the quiet, monotonous hours of her enforced seclusion she began to develop her theory that men’s superior ability to reason as well as their physical strength were not the products of nature but of the social conventions that allowed men the freedom to interact with the world. Wollstonecraft was drawn inward to explore a mental landscape that may have been familiar to many women in her situation. “My wishes and expectations are very moderate.—I don’t know which is the worst—to think too little or too much.—’tis a difficulty to draw the line, and keep clear of melancholy and thoughtlessness.”¹⁴ What had happened to the young girl whose knowledge of her own heart enabled her to so powerfully speak her mind?

Wollstonecraft’s letters demonstrate that her resignation to her predicament gradually turned to resentment, and ultimately to resistance. It seems she was painfully aware of how her marginalized position as a woman in service placed her at the edge of social life and restricted her participation in the wider world:

To say the truth, I am very indifferent to the opinion of the world in general;—I wish to retire as much from it as possible,—I am particularly sick of genteel life, as it is called;—the unmeaning civilities that I see every day practiced don’t agree with my temper;—I long for a little sincerity, and look forward with pleasure to the time when I shall lay aside all restraint. . . . This is the gayest of all gay places; nothing but dress and amusements are going forward;—I am only a spectator—I have lost all my relish for them:—early in life, before misfortune had broken my spirits, I had not the power of partaking of them, and now I am both from habit and inclination averse to them.

At this point in her life the weight of dependence and the isolation of a life in service had broken the spirit of the girl who had “formed romantic notions of friendship” and who wanted “first place or none.”

I beseech you; struggle with any obstacles rather than go into a state of dependence:—I speak feelingly.—I have felt the weight, and would have you by all means avoid it. . . . Your employment tho a troublesome one, is very necessary, and you have the opportunity of doing much good, by instilling good principles into the young and ignorant, and at the close of life you’ll have the pleasure to think that you have not lived in vain, and, believe me, this reflection is worth a life of care.¹⁵

If we look closely at this correspondence, we find Mary Wollstonecraft writing about the extravagance of the court of George III at Windsor, composing her letter on top of a chest of drawers that she used as her desk. The author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman sometimes appears within these letters only to vanish into the page, the strength of her argument diluted like the watered-down ink she used to save a few pence. “I have put so much water in my ink, I am afraid you will not be able to read my faint characters, and besides my candle gives such a dreadful light.”¹⁶ Short on time, candles, and money she yearned to be her own mistress. It was in a letter from this period that Wollstonecraft learned of the Arden sisters’ plan to live together, earning their keep by running that peculiar eighteenth-century institution, the dame school.

Soon after, Wollstonecraft determined to follow a similar course and set up a household with Fanny Blood, a young woman who had been her constant friend since their introduction by the Reverend Clare five years earlier when the Wollstonecraft family lived in Hoxton outside of London.

I know this resolution may appear a little extraordinary, but in forming it I follow the dictates of reason as well as the bent of my inclination; for tho’ I am willing to do what good I can in my generation, yet on many accounts I am averse to any matrimonial tie . . . To my great satisfaction, I found Miss Blood in better health than I expected from accounts I had of her.—She received me as she ever has done in the most friendly manner, and we passed a comfortable week together, which knew no other alloy than what arose from the thoughts of parting so soon.—The next time we meet, it will be for a longer continuance, and to that period I look, as to the most important one of my life: this connection must give the color to my future days, for I have now given up every expectation and dependence that wod [sic] interfere with my determination of spending my time with her.¹⁷

Thus, we find evidence of one of the keynotes of Wollstonecraft’s feminism as she repeatedly claimed in these early letters that she would never marry. The force of her aversion to an institution she would later liken to prostitution, slavery, and imprisonment was displayed in an angry letter to Jane in acknowledgment of the marriage of Arden’s sister. Just four weeks after the wedding, Wollstonecraft was not sure that her well wishes would still be appropriate:

I was just going to desire you to wish her joy (to use the common phrase) but I am afraid my good wishes might be unseasonable, as I find by the date of your letter that the honey moon, and the next moon too must be almost over—The joy, and all that, [here she has crossed out “sort of thing” but it is still legible to the reader] is certainly over by this time, and all the raptures have subsided, and the dear hurry of visiting and figuring away as a bride, and all the rest of the delights of matrimony are past and gone and have left no traces behind them except disgust:—I hope I am mistaken, but this is the fate of most married pairs.¹⁸

She followed this outburst by misquoting Ecclesiastes as the wisdom of Solomon and ended the letter by reiterating her own commitment to live free or die: “‘there is nothing new under the sun’ for which reason I will not marry, for I dont want to be tied to this nasty world, and old maids are of so little consequence—that ‘let them live or die, nobody will laugh or cry.’”

Here, Wollstonecraft, a self-styled old maid who had survived the social disaster of having a younger sister marry before she herself made the trip to the altar, made a resolution of much consequence: “It is a happy thing to be a mere blank, and to be able to pursue one’s own whims, where they lead, without having a husband and half a hundred children at hand to teaze and controul a poor woman who wishes to be free.”¹⁹ Better indeed to be a blank than to follow the scripted lines of womanhood filling the role of biblical helpmate and domestic drudge. Better still for a woman to avoid the perils of the marriage plot entirely by supporting herself. Mary Wollstonecraft knew well that few couples lived happily ever after. As her parents’ daughter she had witnessed firsthand the death and destruction that often sealed the marriage contract. Her younger sister Eliza Wollstonecraft Bishop had suffered postpartum depression after giving birth to her first child. Mary, called to care for her sister, watched as she sobbed uncontrollably and ranted about the abuse she received at the hands of her husband. In time Mary became convinced that Eliza was sinking into madness and that she would never recover as long as she remained within her husband’s house. So she helped her sister run for her life, leaving behind her infant daughter, to seek refuge in a boardinghouse while Meredith Bishop scoured London for his fugitive wife. In this desperate situation it was up to Mary to devise a new story for herself and her sister.

The harsh realities of poverty and legal limbo that Mary confronted as she and Eliza began to plot a different chapter in their lives would become the basis of the realism that marks her books. Mary and Eliza enlisted the aid of their younger sister, Everina, and the help of Fanny Blood to open a dame school. First in Islington and later at Newington Green, the four women worked to teach their students and earn a living. Just as their independence seemed secure, however, Fanny Blood announced that she would marry and follow her husband, Hugh Skeys, to Portugal. Once again the marriage plot seemed to twist the life out of a young woman, as Fanny, already weakened by consumption, sickened under the weight of her first pregnancy. Mary borrowed money from her Newington Green neighbor, the widow of the preacher James Burgh, to travel to Lisbon and attend her friend during her confinement. She arrived at Fanny’s bedside only to see her die and to help Hugh Skeys bury his wife and infant son.

Burdened and embittered by her experiences of marriage and childbearing, Mary Wollstonecraft would rework these events over and over again in her didactic novels and polemical tracts. Maybe then it is not surprising that her words to Jane Arden resonated with a hard-won wisdom. It is here that she began to write her own “book of woman” as she asserted her birthright to a better life. “Some may follow St. Paul’s advice ‘in doing well,’ but I, like a true born Englishwoman, will endeavour to do better.”²⁰ In the following years, what had begun as a dream of negative liberty, freedom from the familial obligations of gender and the womanly duty of generation, was transformed with age and experience into a dream of positive liberty, freedom to become a new type of being. But what would that new being be? Wollstonecraft was determined not to marry or bear children. Her determination was the product of her own experience of the darker side of the marriage plot. Regardless of the risks, she asserted her independence as a freeborn Englishwoman. Freed from the constraints of gender and generation that were the lot of many of her sisters in England, she resolved to become the “first of a new genus.” She continues, “I tremble at the attempt yet if I fail—I only suffer—and should I succeed my dear Girls will ever in sickness have a home— and a refuge where for a few months in the year, they may forget the cares that disturb the rest.”²¹ Mary Wollstonecraft had decided to create herself anew as a woman author.

Verbalizing The Void

In the following pages I have endeavoured to point out some important things with respect to female education. It is true, many treatises have been already written; yet it occurred to me, that much still remained to be said.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the

Education of Daughters

What could a young woman with little formal instruction of her own add to the eighteenth-century discourse on education? Mary Wollstonecraft brought her observations of the relationship between the inferior education of the girl and the limited opportunities available to the woman. In her first published work she analyzed her own situation and reflected on the position of women within late-eighteenth-century English society. Her resolve to live free of the marriage bond and the ties of motherhood had required her to earn her own subsistence. She had made a meager living by trying her hand at the various forms of respectable employment available to a woman of the middling classes. Wollstonecraft believed that her experience as a working woman, combined with the lessons she had learned as a schoolmistress in the dissenting community of Newington Green, gave her the authority to enter the debate about female education.

Wollstonecraft knew Thoughts on the Education of Daughters would be compared to other popular tracts such as Dr. Gregory’s Father’s Legacy to Daughters and Dr. Fordyce’s Sermons for Young Ladies. She would deal with the inadequacies of these texts later in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. But for now she prefaced her book with the statement that, from her perspective as a woman and a daughter, there appeared “much that still needed to be said.” Her audience consisted of parents like her own who had not given much thought to the education of their female children. Wollstonecraft’s formal education had consisted of nothing more than a few years in the village school when her family lived in Beverly in Yorkshire. From an early age she believed that this education had not prepared her for the struggles of life. To supplement her knowledge of the world and support herself in the trials she faced, Wollstonecraft had engaged in a program of reading and self-improvement. She hoped her book would reach an audience of female readers similarly employed in a program of self-help, so that they might find comfort and counsel in her words. Emboldened by her project Wollstonecraft refused in her preface to apologize for her efforts, as was the literary custom of many of her contemporaries who, as Mary Poovey has noted, made a rhetorical ritual of begging the public’s pardon for daring to put their ideas on paper. “I will not swell these sheets by writing apologies for my attempt.” Instead she claimed that her writing would not be in vain if it might “prove useful to one fellow-creature, and beguile any hours, which sorrow has made heavy.”²²

Wollstonecraft’s first published work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, displays her search for an authoritative voice with which to address her audience. There is a tension within this text; conventional advice for modifying girls’ behavior similar to that found within other eighteenth-century conduct books often mingles on the same page with radical calls for girlhood freedom. For example, she wrote, “I must own, I am quite charmed when I see a sweet young creature, shrinking as it were from observation, and listening rather than talking.” But in the following paragraph she indicated a contradictory desire for the girl to actively engage in the pleasurable pursuit of ideas. “Above all, try to teach them to combine their ideas. It is of more use than can be conceived, for a child to learn to compare things that are similar in some respects, and different in others. I wish them to be taught to think — thinking, indeed, is a severe exercise, and exercise of either mind or body will not at first be entered on, but with a view to pleasure” (11; my emphasis).

A few pages later the shrinking girl has lost her charm. The author who claimed that there was still much to be said on the subject of female education disregarded the customary edict that children are better seen and not heard. She argued, “Children should be permitted to enter into conversation; but it requires great discernment to find out such subjects as will gradually improve them.” She suggests that stories about animals are a proper object of children’s attention, providing lessons that “form the temper and cultivate the good dispositions of the heart.” She recommends a series of books for children including Dorothy Kilner’s The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children. Her own contribution to this literature, Original Stories From Real Life, contains a number of tales that teach children to treat animals humanely (10). Later, in the preface to Original Stories, she protested she would have had no reason to write her book if parents would just talk with their children.

Her wish that the girl be taught to think materialized in her argument that girls be given the cognitive tools to develop independent thought. “It may be observed, that I recommend the mind’s being put into a proper train, and then left to itself” (21). Throughout her letters of this period, she made frequent mention of the idea that a mind of genius would educate itself. Perhaps this maxim brought resolution to her conflicted thoughts about the inadequacy of her own education. She argued that freedom of expression and action were necessary for independent thinking.

Fixed rules cannot be given, it must depend on the nature and strength of the understanding; and those who observe it can best tell what kind of cultivation will improve it. The mind is not, cannot be created by the teacher, though it may be cultivated, and its real powers found out. . . . I would have everyone try to form an opinion of an author themselves, though modesty may restrain them from mentioning it. Many are so anxious to have the reputation of taste, that they praise authors whose merit is indisputable. I am sick of hearing of the sublimity of Milton, the elegance and harmony of Pope, and the original untaught genius of Shakespeare.

(21)

The role of the teacher was to cultivate the girl’s understanding, not to impose an artificial order on a young mind that would restrict the free flow of ideas. Wollstonecraft claimed that a girl’s potential for wisdom was determined by her own “nature and strength,” not by the social markers of birth and rank. Thus, in her scheme for female education, the “real power” is vested in the girl. Indeed, she was concerned about the potential dangers of the teacher/student relationship, a concern that prefigures her argument in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft read Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise as a dangerous depiction of the evils of trusting the moral education of an innocent girl to a man with a world of experience.

Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters is an important text because it displays her attempts to differentiate the girl from the woman. It is here that she first created the continuum of female development from childhood to adulthood that forms the foundation of her later theoretical writings. The aim of her pedagogy, teaching a girl to think for herself, is also the first principle of her political theory, namely, that rational women have the right to govern themselves. For Wollstonecraft, it was education, not marriage, that determined female maturity. Her analysis of the situation of her sex began in the intimacy of the nursery and concluded with a chapter concerning women in public places. In tracing this path she carefully distinguished the girl from the woman, using the capacity for rational thought rather than social customs of courtship and marriage to differentiate the seasons of a female life.

One of the most interesting components of her analysis of girlhood education and womanly maturation is her treatment of beauty, a discussion that would have serious implications for her response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Wollstonecraft quickly dismissed the social conventions of female beauty, which pitted the exercise of the mind against the development of the body, conventions that for centuries had been used to justify keeping women in the bondage of ignorance. Throughout her argument she contrasted the glow of youthful beauty to the “mind illumined face” of the mature woman. “The lively thoughtlessness of youth makes every young creature agreeable for the time; but when those years are flown, and sense is not substituted in the stead of vivacity, the follies of youth are acted over, and they never consider, that things which please in their proper season, disgust out of it. It is very absurd to see a woman, whose brow time has marked with wrinkles, aping the manners of a girl in her teens” (12-13). The woman who “pes the girl”and mimics the happy “thoughtlessness”of youth robs herself of the humanity of her wrinkles. Wollstonecraft was concerned that women act their age and proudly display the markings of their maturity. She suggested that society should focus its attention on the benefits bestowed by the careful actions of the thinking woman rather than applaud the frivolous attributes of the pretty girl.

Following the form of other books within the genre, Wollstonecraft devoted sections of her text to such items of female protocol as dress, artificial manners, card playing, and temper. Yet she deviated from the path taken by male authors by including a chapter entitled “Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, and Left Without a Fortune.” It is here that Wollstonecraft first speaks directly in print about the void in women’s lives created by the sexual politics of gender and generation. This chapter is unique within the context of eighteenth-century conduct books in that it considers how patriarchal privilege encoded in the customs of primogeniture and coverture limited the life choices of educated women in England. In this short chapter Wollstonecraft pointed out much of what remained to be said concerning the education of daughters. She began with a disclaimer, “I have hitherto only spoken to females, who will have a provision made for them by their parents. But many who have been well, or at least fashionably educated, are left without a fortune, and if they are not entirely devoid of delicacy, they must frequently remain single” (25).

Educated daughters of once wealthy families were not likely to attract eligible bachelors of the appropriate class. Mary Poovey argues that the marriage of daughters became an increasingly expensive burden upon families during the eighteenth century in England. The sons of the landed aristocracy were attracted to the daughters of the mercantile elite by the offer of large endowments. Finances were not the only obstacle to matrimony. Poovey writes, “The disproportionate number of socially and economically suitable bachelors also meant that a woman had less choice as to her future husband; the complaisance of male suitors, who took their success for granted, is a commonplace of eighteenth-century novels, as is the sad circumstance of uncourted daughters.”²³ As Wollstonecraft herself had learned, a young woman’s entrance into the world was mediated by money. Without a large settlement to entice the interest of a beau, the accomplished woman might be excluded from the mating rituals of courtship and later exiled from polite society by her poverty.

Wollstonecraft’s letters attest that she was well acquainted with the hardships confronted by daughters of families in financial decline. Speaking for herself, she wrote, “It is hard for a person who has a relish for polished society, to herd with the vulgar, or to condescend to mix with her former equals when she is considered in a different light. What unwelcome heart-breaking knowledge is then poured in on her.” This knowledge darkens the colors in the landscape of a woman’s life. “The painted cloud disappears suddenly, the scene is changed, and what an aching void is left in the heart!” (26). The intimate nature of Wollstonecraft’s comments in this text led Claire Tomalin to remark:

A striking omission from her book, as from her letters, was any mention of her pupils. There were plenty of personal references, but they were almost all to herself. She never could write without inserting more or less veiled remarks about her own emotional state, and though they read a little curiously in the middle of an educational manual, they make it abundantly clear that she was far more interested in the state of her own life and the prospects that lay ahead of young women than in their years at school.²⁴

At this stage in her own intellectual development Wollstonecraft suggested that her sisters in woe, the “unfortunate, fashionably educated women,” turn to religion to fill the void in life that was traditionally filled by marriage and child rearing (25). Subsequently, in Mary, a Fiction, she would modify her view that women should look to the afterlife, imagining a heaven without marriage or marrying. Even in this first book we see her emphasis on futurity to make right present wrongs. Her own experience of hardship would quickly lead her to replace an attitude of religious resignation with the spirit of political revolution.

In the remaining chapters of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, Wollstonecraft examined the conventional roles of women. Her analysis of marriage provides her definitive statement that education differentiates girls from women. Early marriages are particularly harmful in that they interrupt or restrict the rational development of females. Wollstonecraft foreshadowed the arguments of modern feminist political theorists concerning female “vulnerability in marriage” by asserting that girls and women “forced to act before they have had time to think” were at a decided disadvantage upon entering the marriage contract.²⁵

Early marriages are, in my opinion, a stop to improvement. If we were born only “to draw nutrition, propagate and rot,” the sooner the end of creation was answered the better; but as women are here allowed to have souls, the soul ought to be attended to. In youth a woman endeavors to please the other sex, in order, generally speaking, to get married, and this endeavor calls forth all her powers. If she has a tolerable education, the foundation only is laid, for the mind does not soon arrive at maturity, and should not be engrossed by domestic cares before any habits are fixed. The passions also have too much influence over the judgment to suffer it to direct her in this most important affair; and many women, I am persuaded, marry a man before they are twenty, whom they would have rejected some years after. Very frequently, when education has been neglected, the mind improves itself, if it has the leisure for reflection, and experience to reflect on; but how can this happen when they are forced to act before they have had time to think, or find that they are unhappily married?

(31)

By defining female maturity by education, not marriage, Wollstonecraft inverts the order of other models like Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Rousseau’s Emile. Although both these works moved past the politics of generation to focus on childhood neither Locke nor Rousseau, both famous tutors, could get beyond the politics of gender to educate the girl. Wollstonecraft argued that the education of the girl was first and foremost for her own benefit. “Reason must often be called in to fill up the vacuums of life; but too many of our sex suffer theirs to lie dormant” (32).For women, reason could supplement religion as they tried to fill the empty spaces of traditional femininity. Wollstonecraft bitterly attacked early marriages because she believed that they carried a girl away from her lessons to become a prisoner of the hearth and possibly the companion of the wrong man.

When a woman’s mind has gained some strength, she will in all probability pay more attention to her actions than a girl can be expected to; and if she thinks seriously, she will chuse for a companion a man of principle; and this perhaps young people do not sufficiently attend to, or see the necessity of doing. . . . Many are but just returned from a boarding school, when they are placed at the head of a family, and how fit they are to manage it, I leave the judicious to judge. Can they improve a child’s understanding, when they are scarcely out of the state of childhood themselves?

(31)

Marriage limited the sphere of a woman’s actions and further restricted the exercise of her reason. “Women are said to be the weaker vessel, and many are the miseries which this weakness brings on them. Men have in some respects very much the advantage. If they have a tolerable understanding, it has a chance to be cultivated. . . . Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as being obliged to struggle with the world; and this is not woman’s province in a married state” (32). Wollstonecraft argued that, if indeed woman was the “weaker vessel,” much of this weakness was the result of institutions and conventions that inhibit or stunt the cognitive growth of the girl into the thinking woman.

Her final chapter details the position of women in “Public Places.” Wollstonecraft concludes her thoughts on female education by again redirecting our vision. We are asked to observe the funeral of the “fine lady,” an uneducated woman who like a child is of “so little use” to society. “In the fine Lady how few traits do we observe of those affections which dignify human nature! If she has maternal tenderness, it is of a childish kind. We cannot be too careful not to verge on this character; though she lives many years she is still a child in understanding, and of so little use to society, that her death would scarcely be observed” (48). Her warning to girls is clear: get an education or else. Females, if raised to please males, would remain children all their lives without the rational education needed to mature as human beings. Only thinking women have the ability to govern themselves and the hope of escaping the female void of dependence by the reasonable management of their households and their substantive contributions to society.

In Thoughts on the Education of Daughters Wollstonecraft presents many portraits of women who have been buried alive, suffocated by their situation as women in a society in which they are economically powerless and civilly dead. In writing this educational text she articulated the connection between the obstacles that restrict the education of girls and the social and political impediments to female autonomy. She identified marriage as the primary institution that denied women the opportunity to explore the meaning of their own lives by restricting their access to and their vision of the world into which each one was born. Her own place in the world was uncertain following the failure of her school in Newington Green. This first book focused her thoughts on her experience as a teacher. She wrote that “a teacher at a school is only a kind of upper servant, who has more work than menial ones.” In the next sentence she commented that the role of a governess was “equally disagreeable” (25).

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters may have made Wollstonecraft an author, but it gave her little authority with her numerous creditors. Instead of settling her debts, she used the money she received for her book from Joseph Johnson to settle Fanny Blood’s family in Ireland. She would soon follow them across the Irish Sea. Given her own “unfortunate situation,” a penniless Wollstonecraft accepted the position of governess on the Kingsborough estate for the sum of forty pounds a year.

The Mind of a Thinking Woman is Displayed

In delineating the Heroine of this Fiction, the Author attempts to develop a character different from those generally portrayed. This woman is neither a Clarissa, a Lady G_____, or a Sophie.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, a Fiction

In the advertisement to Mary, a Fiction, Wollstonecraft promised her reader that in this “artless tale, without episodes, the mind of a woman, who has thinking powers is displayed.” She observed that both popular opinion and historical experience seemed to confirm the belief that “female organs have been thought too weak for this arduous employment.” But she countered that, “Without arguing physically about possibilities—in a fiction, such a being may be allowed to exist, whose grandeur is derived from the operations of its own faculties, not subjugated to opinion; but drawn by the individual from the original source.”²⁶ The “original source” from which Mary Wollstonecraft drew the generative power to create her heroine were her reflections on her own life. The semi-autobiographical Mary, a Fiction traced the development of a woman of mind from her infancy and childhood to her marriage and rebellion against her husband and the opinions of a world that deny women their own thoughts and restrict their actions. Wollstonecraft, who had argued in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters that most parents neglect the education of their female children, resolved this pedagogical dilemma in a new way in Mary. She wrote to her sister Everina as well as her friend the Reverend Henry Gabell that the novel served to demonstrate an idea she had drawn from her reading of Emile, that “genius will educate itself.”

Most literary critics have found little evidence of genius in Mary. Wollstonecraft wrote a few months before her death that she thought the novel a “crude production,” and that she would rather not share it with “people whose good opinion, as a writer, I wish for.”²⁷ Yet it was in writing this novel that Wollstonecraft began to see herself as the “first of a new genus.” Here she further developed the central idea of her earlier educational tract, that a woman needed her own mental resources in order to survive the “warfare of life.” In this manner Mary fulfilled Wollstonecraft’s pledge to show the intricate workings of the mind of a woman with thinking powers. But the novel accomplished far more, by demonstrating the continuity of Wollstonecraft’s own thoughts about women’s situation and expanding her critique of women as property in marriage relations. Ultimately, the novel represents her first attempt to pose the larger philosophical question of the existence of a thinking woman at the end of the Enlightenment.

Mary, a Fiction is an alternative tale of a woman’s situation that differs in dramatic detail from the stories of Clarissa, Lady Grandison, or Sophie. The plot revolves around the coming of age of a young woman, fashionably educated and left with a fortune. Here Wollstonecraft continues her discussion of female development begun in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, yet unlike the dispossessed daughters of her educational tract, the Mary of fiction inherits the family fortune when her older brother dies of a “violent fever” at boarding school. The death of the brother gives new life to the sister. Her position within the family has changed. “She was now an heiress, and her mother began to think of her of consequence, and did not call her the child” (18). From society’s perspective this transfer of wealth transformed the inconsequential girl into a woman of substance.

Marriage is the consequence of her inheritance, and her father gives the fictional Mary away as a bride to settle a patrimony dispute. But the marriage portrayed here is macabre in every aspect. Instead of the literary conventions of a church ceremony, the heroine is wed at her mother’s deathbed to fulfill her parent’s last wish. “The clergyman came in to read the service for the sick, and afterwards the marriage ceremony was performed. Mary stood like a statue of Despair, and pronounced the awful vow without thinking of it; and then ran to support her mother, who expired the same night in her arms” (20). This morbid scene juxtaposes the marriage and quest plots in gothic style as the daughter is symbolically wed over the dying body of the mother. “Her husband set off for the continent the same day, with a tutor, to finish his studies at one of the foreign universities” (20). Mary is schooled in the double standards of patriarchy while the young husband completes his education with his tutor and the grand tour of Europe. “As her mind expanded, her marriage appeared a dreadful misfortune; she was sometimes reminded of the heavy yoke, and bitter was the recollection” (22). The woman of thinking powers, in a moment of grief, unthinkingly becomes a wife. The remaining chapters of the novel detail the fictional Mary’s struggle with this contradiction.

A revolutionary female emerges from this conflict of womanhood as the unthinking wife is transformed into the thinking woman who scorns her wedding vows. Mary establishes a household with a female friend, travels to Lisbon when her friend becomes ill, and after the friend’s death turns her intellectual attention and sentimental affections toward an older man who is not her husband. Unwilling to dismiss her unconventional ideas or repress her feelings she exclaims, “With these notions can I conform to the maxims of worldly wisdom?” (47). Certainly Mary, a Fiction did not conform to the model of the feminine novel of the late eighteenth century. Mary “gave her hand” to her husband only in the last two pages of the novel with the wish “that earth would open and swallow her” (72). Wollstonecraft concludes the book with one last journey into the mind of the thinking woman: “in moments of solitary sadness, a gleam of joy would dart across her mind—She thought she was hastening to that world where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage” (73). The fictional Mary, like the author herself, had not yet discovered a world in which women were free to pursue their intellectual interests as well as their erotic desires.

At the end of the eighteenth century the novel as a literary genre allowed the woman writer in general to explore the boundaries of convention and to challenge the ideological borders that separated men from women and adults from children. It offered Wollstonecraft a literary public space, an entry into the debates about power and membership in a radical community that was attempting to redefine and revolutionize discourse. It also served as a popular literary form for politic polemic. Before Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote The Social Contract, he was the author of La Nouvelle Heloise; William Godwin followed Political Justice with Caleb Williams. J. M. S. Tompkins’s remarks on this novel still hold true today:

Conspicuous as the male philosophers are, it was the women in the revolutionary circle who focused the horrified attention of the public. The ethics of the woman’s novel, that established harmony of submission, delicacy and self-control, were rudely shaken. Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) had said that independence was the soil of every virtue, and had based delicacy on candor instead of concealment. She had written Mary, A Fiction (1788) in which “the mind of a woman, who has thinking powers, is displayed,” and had exhibited the development of these powers as consequent of the most unconventional behavior. She had spoken freely of passion and saw it as an educative force.²⁸

Mary Wollstonecraft was first able to speak freely within the context of the novel. Mary, a Fiction represents her early theoretical attempts to analyze and respond to the powerlessness of women within the home and civil society. It was here that she began to equate women’s condition as wives with slavery (55). Modern readers will recognize that this is not the type of story that has yet been told within the history of political thought. Rather, Mary is an experimental novel, displaying the conflict between a thinking women who would make her own way in the world and the obstacles she encounters from the world of opinion. It is also a cautionary tale that has not received sufficient attention from Wollstonecraft scholars; it depicts an existential crisis of a girl becoming a woman. Her argument raises the question of how traditional political theory, which blurs the boundaries between the child and the adult, serves the purposes of fathers and husbands when the property in dispute is female. Wollstonecraft develops the power of the mind of her fictional heroine. But could this woman with thinking powers overcome the body of literature that conditioned men to treat girls as women and women as perpetual children?

Notes

1. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 132.

2. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 221.

3. See Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Martin, Reclaiming the Conversation; Pateman, Sexual Contract; Coole, Women in Political Theory.

4. See Carol Gilligan, Nona Lyons, and Trudy Hammer, eds., Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at the Emma Willard School (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Jill McLean Taylor, Carol Gilligan, and Amy Sullivan, eds., Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race, and Relationship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

5. Carol Gilligan, “Teaching Shakespeare’s Sisters: Notes from the Underground of Female Adolescence,” in Gilligan, Lyons, and Hammer, Making Connections, 25.

6. “I should likewise beg pardon for not beginning sooner so agreeable a correspondence as that I promise myself yours will prove, but from a lady of your singular good nature I promise myself indulgence.” Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Arden, May 1-20, 1773, Collected Letters, 51-52.

7. Wollstonecraft to Arden, June 4-July 31, 1773. Ibid., 56.

8. Ibid., 57.

9. Wollstonecraft to Everina Wollstonecraft, January 1784. Ibid., 86.

10. Wollstonecraft to Arden, June 4, 1773-November 16, 1774. Ibid., 60.

11. Ibid., 60-61.

12. Wollstonecraft to Arden, May-June 1779. Ibid., 64.

13. Wollstonecraft to Arden, December 10, 1779-January 5, 1780. Ibid., 70-71.

14. Wollstonecraft to Arden, April-June 1780. Ibid., 72.

15. Ibid., 71-72.

16. Wollstonecraft to Arden, June-August 1780. Ibid., 75.

17. Wollstonecraft to Arden, April-June 1780. Ibid., 73.

18. Wollstonecraft to Arden, October 20, 1782-August 10, 1783. Ibid., 79.

19. Ibid. (my emphasis).

20. Ibid.

21. Wollstonecraft to her sister Everina, November 7, 1787. Ibid., 164.

22. Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, in Works, 4:5, 7. Page references will be given parenthetically in the text. See also Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 14.

23. Poovey, Proper Lady, 13.

24. Tomalin, Life and Death, 39.

25. See “Vulnerability by Marriage,” in Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

26. Wollstonecraft, Mary, a Fiction, 5 (original emphasis). Page references will be given parenthetically in the text.

27. Wollstonecraft to Everina Wollstonecraft, March 22, 1797, Collected Letters, 385.

28. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 314.

Bibliography

Burke, Edmund. [1790] 1989. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edited by John Pocock. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers.

Coole, Diane. 1993. Women in Political Theory. Boulder:Lynne Reinner Publishers.

Fordyce, James. 1809. Sermons to Young Women. Philadelphia: Carey and Riley of New York.

Gregory, John. 1788. A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters. Edinburgh: A. Strahan and T. Cadell.

Martin, Jane Roland. 1985. Reclaiming the Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. [1761] 1987. La Nouvelle Heloise. Edited and translated by Judith McDowell. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

_____. [1762] 1979. Emile, or On Education. Edited and translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books.

_____. [1762] 1978. The Social Contract. Edited by Roger Masters, translated by Judith Masters. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Tomalin, Claire. 1974. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: New American Library.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. [1787] 1989. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. In The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 4, ed. Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd. New York: New York University Press.

_____. [1788] 1989. Mary, a Fiction. In The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 1, ed. Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd. New York: New York University Press.

_____. [1792] 1989. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 5, ed. Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd. New York: New York University Press.

_____. 1979. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Edited by Ralph Wardle. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

SOURCE: Wollstonecraft, Mary. "Letter from Mary to Godwin, September 4, 1796." In Godwin and Mary: Letters of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Ralph M. Wardle, pp. 27-9. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1966.

In the following letter, Wollstonecraft responds to Godwin's critique of her writing by describing the passion she feels for her writing and the importance of her work.

Labouring all the morning, in vain, to overcome an oppression of spirits, which some things you uttered yesterday, produced; I will try if I can shake it off by describing to you the nature of the feelings you excited.

I allude to what you remarked, relative to my manner of writing—that there was a radical defect in it—a worm in the bud—& c What is to be done, I must either disregard your opinion, think it unjust, or throw down my pen in despair; and that would be tantamount to resigning existence; for at fifteen I resolved never to marry for interested motives, or to endure a life of dependence. You know not how painfully my sensibility, call it false if you will, has been wounded by some of the steps I have been obliged to take for others. I have even now plans at heart, which depend on my exertions; and my entire confidence in Mr. Imlay plunged me into some difficulties, since we parted, that I could scarcely away with. I know that many of my cares have been the natural consequence of what, nine out of ten would [have] termed folly—yet I cannot coincide in the opinion, without feeling a contempt for mankind. In short, I must reckon on doing some good, and getting the money I want, by my writings, or go to sleep for ever. I shall not be content merely to keep body and soul together—By what I have already written Johnson, I am sure, has been a gainer. And, for I would wish you to see my heart and mind just as it appears to myself, without drawing any veil of affected humility over it, though this whole letter is a proof of painful diffidence, I am compelled to think that there is some thing in my writings more valuable, than in the productions of some people on whom you bestow warm elogiums—I mean more mind—denominate it as you will—more of the observations of my own senses, more of the combining of my own imagination—the effusions of my own feelings and passions than the cold workings of the brain on the materials procured by the senses and imagination of other writers—

I am more out of patience with myself than you can form any idea of, when I tell you that I have scarcely written a line to please myself (and very little with respect to quantity) since you saw my M.S. I have been endeavouring all this morning; and with such dissatisfied sensations I am almost afraid to go into company—But these are idle complaints to which I ought not to give utterance, even to you—I must then have done—

Mary

SOURCE: Kaplan, Cora. “Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism.” In Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, pp. 146-76. London: Methuen, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Kaplan considers Wollstonecraft as an early feminist author whose conceptions of female subjectivity and potential continue to have currency in modern discussions of women as mothers, lovers, and political actors. Kaplan examines A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and contends that Wollstonecraft’s writing—despite its still-limited sense of women’s potential—is central to formulating a modern socialist feminism that also accepts women as maternal, erotic, or simply feeling beings.

Feminist criticism, as its name implies, is criticism with a Cause, engaged criticism. But the critical model presented to us so far is merely engaged to be married. It is about to contract what can only be a mésalliance with bourgeois modes of thought and the critical categories they inform. To be effective, feminist criticism cannot become simply bourgeois criticism in drag. It must be ideological and moral criticism; it must be revolutionary. (Lillian Robinson, ‘Dwelling in Decencies’ (1978))

The ‘Marriage’ of marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that is marxism . . . we need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce.

(Heidi Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism’ (1981))

I

In spite of the attraction of matrimonial metaphor, reports of feminist nuptials with either mild-mannered bourgeois criticism or macho mustachioed Marxism have been greatly exaggerated. Neither liberal feminist criticism decorously draped in traditional humanism, nor her red-ragged rebellious sister, socialist feminist criticism, has yet found a place within androcentric literary criticism, which wishes to embrace feminism through a legitimate public alliance. Nor can feminist criticism today be plausibly evoked as a young deb looking for protection or, even more problematically, as a male ‘mole’ in transvestite masquerade. Feminist criticism now marks out a broad area of literary studies, eclectic, original and provocative. Independent still, through a combination of choice and default, it has come of age without giving up its name. Yet Lillian Robinson’s astute pessimistic prediction is worth remembering. With maturity, the most visible, well-defined and extensive tendency within feminist criticism has undoubtedly bought into the white, middle-class, heterosexist values of traditional literary criticism, and threatens to settle down on her own in its cultural suburbs. For, as I see it, the present danger is not that feminist criticism will enter an unequal dependent alliance with any of the varieties of male-centred criticism. It does not need to, for it has produced an all too persuasive autonomous analysis which is in many ways radical in its discussion of gender, but implicitly conservative in its assumptions about social hierarchy and female subjectivity, the Pandora’s box for all feminist theory.

This reactionary effect must be interrogated and resisted from within feminism and in relation to the wider socialist feminist project. For, without the class and race perspectives which socialist feminist critics bring to the analysis both of the literary texts and of their conditions of production, liberal feminist criticism, with its emphasis on the unified female subject, will unintentionally reproduce the ideological values of mass-market romance. In that fictional landscape the other structuring relations of society fade and disappear, leaving us with the naked drama of sexual difference as the only scenario that matters. Mass-market romance tends to represent sexual difference as natural and fixed—a constant, transhistorical femininity in libidinized struggle with an equally ‘given’ universal masculinity. Even where class difference divides lovers, it is there as narrative backdrop or minor stumbling-block to the inevitable heterosexual resolution. Without overstraining the comparison, a feminist literary criticism which privileges gender in isolation from other forms of social determination offers us a similarly partial reading of the role played by sexual difference in literary discourse, a reading bled dry of its most troubling and contradictory meanings.

The appropriation of modern critical theory— semiotic with an emphasis on the psychoanalytic—can be of great use in arguing against concepts of natural, essential and unified identity: against a static femininity and masculinity. But these theories about the production of meaning in culture must engage fully with the effects of other systems of difference than the sexual, or they too will produce no more than an anti-humanist avant-garde version of romance. Masculinity and femininity do not appear in cultural discourse, any more than they do in mental life, as pure binary forms at play. They are always, already, ordered and broken up through other social and cultural terms, other categories of difference. Our fantasies of sexual transgression as much as our obedience to sexual regulation are expressed through these structuring hierarchies. Class and race ideologies are, conversely, steeped in and spoken through the language of sexual differentiation. Class and race meanings are not metaphors for the sexual, or vice versa. It is better, though not exact, to see them as reciprocally constituting each other through a kind of narrative invocation, a set of associative terms in a chain of meaning. To understand how gender and class—to take two categories only—are articulated together transforms our analysis of each of them.

The literary text too often figures in feminist criticism as a gripping spectacle in which sexual difference appears somewhat abstracted from the muddy social world in which it is elsewhere embedded. Yet novels, poetry and drama are, on the contrary, peculiarly rich discourses in which the fused languages of class, race and gender are both produced and re-represented through the incorporation of other discourses. The focus of feminist analysis ought to be on that heterogeneity within the literary, on the intimate relation there expressed between all the categories that order social and psychic meaning. This does not imply an attention to content only or primarily, but also entails a consideration of the linguistic processes of the text as they construct and position subjectivity within these terms.

For without doubt literary texts do centre the individual as object and subject of their discourse. Literature has been a traditional space for the exploration of gender relations and sexual difference, and one in which women themselves have been formidably present. The problem for socialist feminists is not the focus on the individual that is special to the literary, but rather the romantic theory of the subject so firmly entrenched within the discourse. Humanist feminist criticism does not object to the idea of an immanent, transcendent subject but only to the exclusion of women from these definitions which it takes as an accurate account of subjectivity rather than as a historically constructed ideology. The repair and reconstitution of female subjectivity through a rereading of literature becomes, therefore, a major part, often unacknowledged, of its critical project. Psychoanalytic and semiotically oriented feminist criticism has argued well against this aspect of feminist humanism, emphasizing the important structural relation between writing and sexuality in the construction of the subject. But both tendencies have been correctly criticized from a socialist feminist position for the neglect of class and race as factors in their analysis. If feminist criticism is to make a central contribution to the understanding of sexual difference, instead of serving as a conservative refuge from its more disturbing social and psychic implications, the inclusion of class and race must transform its terms and objectives.

II

The critique of feminist humanism needs more historical explication than it has so far received. Its sources are complex, and are rooted in that moment almost 200 years ago when modern feminism and Romantic cultural theory emerged as separate but linked responses to the transforming events of the French Revolution. In the heat and light of the revolutionary decade 1790-1800, social, political and aesthetic ideas already maturing underwent a kind of forced ripening. As the progressive British intelligentsia contemplated the immediate possibility of social change, their thoughts turned urgently to the present capacity of subjects to exercise republican freedoms—to rule themselves as well as each other if the corrupt structures of aristocratic privilege were to be suddenly razed. Both feminism as set out in its most influential text, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and Romanticism as argued most forcefully in Wordsworth’s introduction to Lyrical Ballads (1800) stood in intimate, dynamic and contradictory relationship to democratic politics. In all three discourses the social and psychic character of the individual was centred and elaborated. The public and private implications of sexual difference as well as of the imagination and its products were both strongly linked to the optimistic, speculative construction of a virtuous citizen subject for a brave new egalitarian world. Theories of reading and writing—Wollstonecraft’s and Jane Austen’s as well as those of male Romantic authors—were explicitly related to contemporary politics as expressed in debate by such figures as Tom Paine, Edmund Burke and William Godwin.

The new categories of independent subjectivity, however, were marked from the beginning by exclusions of gender, race and class. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in the 1750s, specifically exempted women from his definition; Thomas Jefferson, some twenty years later, excluded blacks. Far from being invisible ideological aspects of the new subject, these exclusions occasioned debate and polemic on both sides of the Atlantic. The autonomy of inner life, the dynamic psyche whose moral triumph was to be the foundation of republican government, was considered absolutely essential as an element of progressive political thought.

However, as the concept of the inner self and the moral psyche was used to denigrate whole classes, races and genders, late nineteenth-century socialism began to de-emphasize the political importance of the psychic self, and redefine political morality and the adequate citizen subject in primarily social terms. Because of this shift in emphasis, a collective moralism has developed in socialist thought which, instead of criticizing the reactionary interpretation of psychic life, stigmatizes sensibility itself, interpreting the excess of feeling as regressive, bourgeois and non-political.

Needless to say, this strand of socialist thought poses a problem for feminism, which has favoured three main strategies to deal with it. In the first, women’s psychic life is seen as being essentially identical to men’s, but distorted through vicious and systematic patriarchal inscription. In this view, which is effectively Wollstonecraft’s, social reform would prevent women from becoming regressively obsessed with sexuality and feeling. The second strategy wholly vindicates women’s psyche, but sees it as quite separate from men’s, often in direct opposition. This is frequently the terrain on which radical feminism defends female sexuality as independent and virtuous between women, but degrading in a heterosexual context. It is certainly a radical reworking of essentialist sexual ideology, shifting the ground from glib assertions of gender complementarity to the logic of separatism. The third strategy has been to refuse the issue’s relevance altogether—to see any focus on psychic difference as itself an ideological one.

Instead of choosing any one of these options, socialist feminist criticism must come to grips with the relationship between female subjectivity and class identity. This project, even in its present early stages, poses major problems for the tendency. While socialist feminists have been deeply concerned with the social construction of femininity and sexual difference, they have been uneasy about integrating social and political determinations with an analysis of the psychic ordering of gender. Within socialist feminism, a fierce and unresolved debate continues about the value of using psychoanalytic theory, because of the supposedly ahistorical character of its paradigms. For those who are hostile to psychoanalysis, the meaning of mental life, fantasy and desire—those obsessive themes of the novel and poetry for the last two centuries—seems particularly intractable to interpretation. They are reluctant to grant much autonomy to the psychic level, and often most attentive to feeling expressed in the work of non-bourgeois writers, which can more easily be read as political statement. Socialist feminism still finds unlocated, unsocialized psychic expression in women’s writing hard to discuss in non-moralizing terms.

On the other hand, for liberal humanism, feminist versions included, the possibility of a unified self and an integrated consciousness that can transcend material circumstance is represented as the fulfilment of desire, the happy closure at the end of the story. The psychic fragmentation expressed through female characters in women’s writing is seen as the most important sign of their sexual subordination, more interesting and ultimately more meaningful than their social oppression. As a result, the struggle for an integrated female subjectivity in nineteenth-century texts is never interrogated as ideology or fantasy, but seen as a demand that can actually be met, if not in 1848, then later.

In contrast, socialist feminist criticism tends to foreground the social and economic elements of the narrative and socialize what it can of its psychic portions. Women’s anger and anguish, it is assumed, should be amenable to repair through social change. A positive emphasis on the psychic level is viewed as a valorization of the anarchic and regressive, a way of returning women to their subordinate ideological place within the dominant culture, as unreasoning social beings. Psychoanalytic theory, which is by and large morally neutral about the desires expressed by the psyche, is criticized as a confirmation and justification of them.

Thus semiotic or psychoanalytic perspectives have yet to be integrated with social, economic and political analysis. Critics tend to privilege one element or the other, even when they acknowledge the importance of both and the need to relate them. A comparison of two admirable recent essays on Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, one by Mary Jacobus and the other by Judith Lowder Newton, both informed by socialist feminist concerns, can illustrate this difficulty.

Jacobus uses the psychoanalytic and linguistic theory of Jacques Lacan to explore the split representations of subjectivity that haunt Villette, and calls attention to its anti-realist gothic elements. She relates Brontë’s feminized defence of the imagination, and the novel’s unreliable narrator-heroine, to the tension between femininity and feminism that reaches back to the eighteenth-century debates of Rousseau and Wollstonecraft. Reading the ruptures and gaps of the text as a psychic narrative, she also places it historically in relationship to nineteenth-century social and political ideas. Yet the social meanings of Villette fade and all but disappear before ‘the powerful presence of fantasy’, which ‘energizes Villette and satisfies that part of the reader which also desires constantly to reject reality for the sake of an obedient, controllable, narcissistically pleasurable image of self and its relation to the world’ (Jacobus 1979, p. 51). In Jacobus’s interpretation, the psyche, desire and fantasy stand for repressed, largely positive elements of a forgotten feminism, while the social stands for a daytime world of Victorian social regulation. These social meanings are referred to rather than explored in the essay, a strategy which renders them both static and unproblematically unified. It is as if, in order to examine how Villette represents psychic reality, the dynamism of social discourses of gender and identity must be repressed, forming the text’s new ‘unconscious’.

Judith Lowder Newton’s chapter on Villette in her impressive study of nineteenth-century British fiction, Women, Power, and Subversion (1981), is also concerned with conflicts between the novel’s feminism and its evocation of female desire. Her interpretation privileges the social meanings of the novel, its search for a possible détente between the dominant ideologies of bourgeois femininity and progressive definitions of female autonomy. For Newton, ‘the internalized ideology of women’s sphere’ includes sexual and romantic longings— which for Jacobus are potentially radical and disruptive of mid-Victorian gender ideologies. The psychic level as Newton describes it is mainly the repository for the worst and most regressive elements of female subjectivity: longing for love, dependency, the material and emotional comfort of fixed class identity. These desires which have ‘got inside’ are predictably in conflict with the rebellious, autonomy-seeking feminist impulses, whose source is a rational understanding of class and gender subordination. Her reading centres on the realist text, locating meaning in its critique of class society and the constraints of bourgeois femininity.

The quotations and narrative elements cited and explored by Jacobus and Newton are so different that even a reader familiar with Villette may find it hard to believe that each critic is reading the same text. The psychic level exists in Newton’s interpretation, to be sure, but as a negative discourse, the dead weight of ideology on the mind. For her, the words ‘hidden’, ‘private’ and ‘longing’ are stigmatized, just as they are celebrated by Jacobus. For both critics, female subjectivity is the site where the opposing forces of femininity and feminism clash by night, but they locate these elements in different parts of the text’s divided selves. Neither Newton nor Jacobus argues for the utopian possibility of a unified subjectivity. But the longing to close the splits that characterize femininity—splits between reason and desire, autonomy and dependent security, psychic and social identity—is evident in the way each critic denies the opposing element.

III

My comments on the difficulties of reading Villette from a materialist feminist stance are meant to suggest that there is more at issue in the polarization of social and psychic explanation than the problem of articulating two different forms of explanation. Moral and political questions specific to feminism are at stake as well. In order to understand why female subjectivity is so fraught with Angst and difficulty for feminism, we must go back to the first full discussion of the psychological expression of femininity, in Mary Wollstonecroft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The briefest look will show that an interest in the psychic life of women as a crucial element in their subordination and liberation is not a modern, post-Freudian preoccupation. On the contrary, its long and fascinating history in ‘left’ feminist writing starts with Wollstonecraft, who set the terms for a debate that is still in progress. Her writing is central for socialist feminism today, because she based her interest in the emancipation of women as individuals in revolutionary politics.

Like so many eighteenth-century revolutionaries, she saw her own class, the rising bourgeoise, as the vanguard of the revolution, and it was to the women of her own class that she directed her arguments. Her explicit focus on the middle class, and her concentration on the nature of female subjectivity, speaks directly to the source of anxiety within socialist feminism today. For it is at the point when women are released from profound social and economic oppression into greater autonomy and potential political choice that their social and psychic expression becomes an issue, and their literary texts become sites of ambivalence. In their pages, for the last 200 years and more, women characters seemingly more confined by social regulation than women readers today speak as desiring subjects. These texts express the politically ‘retrogade’ desires for comfort, dependence and love as well as more acceptable demands for autonomy and independence.

It is Mary Wollstonecraft who first offered women this fateful choice between the opposed and moralized bastions of reason and feeling, which continues to determine much feminist thinking. The structures through which she developed her ideas, however, were set for her by her mentor Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose writing influenced the political and social perspectives of many eighteenth-century English radicals. His ideas were fundamental to her thinking about gender as well as about revolutionary politics. In 1792, that highly charged moment of romantic political optimism between the fall of the Bastille and the Terror when A Vindication was written, it must have seemed crucial that Rousseau’s crippling judgement of female nature be refuted. How else could women freely and equally participate in the new world being made across the Channel? Rousseau’s ideas about subjectivity were already immanent in Wollstonecraft’s earlier book Mary: A Fiction (1788). Now she set out to challenge directly his offensive description of sexual difference which would leave women in post-revolutionary society exactly where they were in unreformed Britain, ‘immured in their families, groping in the dark’ (Wollstonecraft 1975a, p. 5).

Rousseau had set the terms of the debate in his Emile (1762), which describes the growth and education of the new man, progressive and bourgeois, who would be capable of exercising the republican freedoms of a reformed society. In Book V, Rousseau invents ‘Sophie’ as a mate for his eponymous hero, and here he outlines his theory of sexual asymmetry as it occurs in nature. In all human beings passion was natural and necessary, but in women it was not controlled by reason, an attribute of the male sex only. Women, therefore,

must be subject all their lives, to the most constant and severe restraint, which is that of decorum; it is therefore necessary to accustom them early to such confinement that it may not afterwards cost them too dear . . . we should teach them above all things to lay a due restraint on themselves.

(Rousseau 1974, p. 332)

To justify this restraint, Rousseau allowed enormous symbolic power to the supposed anarchic, destructive force of untrammelled female desire. As objects of desire Rousseau made women alone responsible for male ‘suffering’. If they were free agents of desire, there would be no end to the ‘evils’ they could cause. Therefore the family, and women’s maternal role within it, were, he said, basic to the structure of the new society. Betrayal of the family was thus as subversive as betrayal of the state; adultery in Emile is literally equated with treason. Furthermore, in Rousseau’s regime of regulation and restraint for bourgeois women, their ‘decorum’—the social expression of modesty—would act as an additional safeguard against unbridled, excessive male lust, should its natural guardian, reason, fail. In proscribing the free exercise of female desire, Rousseau disarms a supposed serious threat to the new political as well as social order. To read the fate of a class through the sexual behaviour of its women was not a new political strategy. What is modern in Rousseau’s formulation is the harnessing of these sexual ideologies to the fate of a new progressive bourgeoisie, whose individual male members were endowed with radical, autonomous identity.

In many ways, Mary Wollstonecraft, writing thirty years after Emile, shared with many others the political vision of her master. Her immediate contemporary Thomas Paine thought Rousseau’s work expressed ‘a loveliness of sentiment in favour of liberty’, and it is in the spirit of Rousseau’s celebration of liberty that Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication. Her strategy was to accept Rousseau’s description of adult women as suffused in sensuality, but to ascribe this unhappy state of things to culture rather than nature. It was, she thought, the vicious and damaging result of Rousseau’s punitive theories of sexual difference and female education when put into practice. Excessive sensuality was for Wollstonecraft, in 1792 at least, as dangerous if not more so than Rousseau had suggested, but she saw the damage and danger first of all to women themselves, whose potential and independence were initially stifled and broken by an apprenticeship to pleasure, which induced psychic and social dependency. Because Wollstonecraft saw pre-pubescent children in their natural state as mentally and emotionally unsexed as well as untainted by corrupting desire, she bitterly refuted Rousseau’s description of innate infantile female sexuality. Rather, the debased femininity she describes is constructed through a set of social practices which by constant reinforcement become internalized parts of the self. Her description of this process is acute:

Every thing they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind. . . . This cruel association of ideas, which every thing conspires to twist into all their habits of thinking, or, to speak with more precision of feeling, receives new force when they begin to act a little for themselves.

(Wollstonecraft 1975a, p. 177)

For Wollstonecraft, female desire was a contagion caught from the projection of male lust, an ensnaring and enslaving infection that made women into dependent and degenerate creatures, who nevertheless had the illusion that they acted independently. An education which changed women from potentially rational autonomous beings into ‘insignificant objects of desire’ was, moreover, rarely reversible. Once a corrupt subjectivity was constructed, only a most extraordinary individual could transform it, for ‘so ductile is the understanding and yet so stubborn, that the association which depends on adventitious circumstances,during the period that the body takes to arrive at maturity, can seldom be disentangled by reason’ (p. 116).

What is disturbingly peculiar to A Vindication is the undifferentiated and central place that sexuality as passion plays in the corruption and degradation of the female self. The overlapping Enlightenment and Romantic discourses on psychic economy all posed a major division between the rational and the irrational, between sense and sensibility. But they hold sensibility in men to be only in part an antisocial sexual drive. Lust for power and the propensity to physical violence were also, for men, negative components of all that lay on the other side of reason. Thus sensibility in men included a strong positive element too, for the power of the imagination depended on it, and in the 1790s the Romantic aesthetic and the political imagination were closely allied. Sexual passion controlled and mediated by reason, Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’, could also be put to productive use in art—by men. The appropriate egalitarian subjects of Wordsworth’s art were ‘moral sentiments and animal sensations’ as they appeared in everyday life (Wordsworth and Coleridge 1971, p. 261). No woman of the time could offer such an artistic manifesto. In women the irrational, the sensible, even the imaginative are all drenched in an overpowering and subordinating sexuality. And in Wollstonecraft’s writing, especially in her last, unfinished novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1798), which is considerably less punitive about women’s sexuality in general than A Vindication, only maternal feeling survives as a positively realized element of the passionate side of the psyche. By defending women against Rousseau’s denial of their reason, Wollstonecraft unwittingly assents to his negative, eroticized sketch of their emotional lives. At various points in A Vindication she interjects a wish that ‘after some future revolution in time’ women might be able to live out a less narcissistic and harmful sexuality. Until then they must demand an education whose central task is to cultivate their neglected ‘understanding’.

It is interesting and somewhat tragic that Wollstonecraft’s paradigm of women’s psychic economy still profoundly shapes modern feminist consciousness. How often are the maternal, romantic-sexual and intellectual capacity of women presented by feminism as in competition for a fixed psychic space. Men seem to have a roomier and more accommodating psychic home, one which can, as Wordsworth and other Romantics insisted, situate all the varieties of passion and reason in creative tension. This gendered eighteenth-century psychic economy has been out of date for a long time, but its ideological inscription still shadows feminist attitudes towards the mental life of women.

The implications of eighteenth-century theories of subjectivity were important for early feminist ideas about women as readers and writers. In the final pages of A Vindication, decrying female sentimentality as one more effect of women’s psychic degradation, Wollstonecraft criticizes the sentimental fictions increasingly written by and for women, which were often their only education. ‘Novels’ encouraged in their mainly young, mainly female audience ‘a romantic twist of the mind’. Readers would ‘only be taught to look for happiness in love, refine on sensual feelings and adopt metaphysical notions respecting that passion’. At their very worst the ‘stale tales’ and ‘meretricious scenes’ would by degrees induce more than passive fantasy. The captive, addicted reader might, while the balance of her mind was disturbed by these erotic evocations, turn fiction into fact and ‘plump into actual vice’ (p. 183). A reciprocal relationship between the patriarchal socialization of women and the literature that supports and incites them to become ‘rakes at heart’ is developed in this passage. While Wollstonecraft adds that she would rather women read novels than nothing at all, she sets up a peculiarly gendered and sexualized interaction between women and the narrative imaginative text, one in which women become the ultimately receptive reader easily moved into amoral activity by the fictional representation of sexual intrigue.

The political resonance of these questions about reader response was, at the time, highly charged. An enormous expansion of literacy in general, and of the middle-class reading public in particular, swelled by literate women, made the act of reading in the last quarter of the eighteenth century an important practice through which the common sense and innate virtue of a society of autonomous subject-citizens could be reached and moulded. An uncensored press, cheap and available reading matter and a reading public free to engage with the flood of popular literature, from political broadsheets to sensational fiction, was part of the agenda and strategy of British republicanism. ‘It is dangerous’, Tom Paine warned the government in the mid-1790s after his own writing had been politically censored, ‘to tell a whole people that they shall not read.’ Reading was a civil right that supported and illustrated the radical vision of personal independence. Political and sexual conservatives, Jane Austen and Hannah More, as well as the republican and feminist left, saw reading as an active, not a passive function of the self, a critical link between the psychic play of reason and passion and its social expression. New social categories of readers, women of all classes, skilled and unskilled working-class males, are described in this period by contemporaries. Depending on their political sympathies, observers saw these actively literate groups as an optimistic symptom of social and intellectual progress or a dire warning of imminent social decay and threatened rebellion.

Wollstonecraft saw sentiment and the sensual as reinforcing an already dominant, approved and enslaving sexual norm, which led women to choose a subordinate social and subjective place in culture. The damage done by ‘vice’ and ‘adultery’, to which sentimental fiction was an incitement, was a blow to women first and to society second. Slavish legitimate sexuality was almost as bad for women in Wollstonecraft’s view as unlicensed behaviour. A more liberal regime for women was both the goal and the cure of sentimental and erotic malaise. In A Vindication women’s subjection is repeatedly compared to all illegitimate hierarchies of power, but especially to existing aristocratic hegemony. At every possible point in her text, Wollstonecraft links the liberation of women from the sensual into the rational literally and symbolically to the egalitarian transformation of the whole society.

‘Passionlessness’, as Nancy Cott has suggested (Cott 1978), was a strategy adopted both by feminists and by social conservatives. Through the assertion that women were not innately or excessively sexual, that on the contrary their ‘feelings’ were largely filial and maternal, the imputation of a degraded subjectivity could be resisted. This alternative psychic organization was represented as both strength and weakness in nineteenth-century debates about sexual difference. In these debates, which were conducted across a wide range of public discourses, the absence of an independent, self-generating female sexuality is used by some men and women to argue for women’s right to participate equally in an undifferentiated public sphere. It is used by others to argue for the power and value of the separate sphere allotted to women. And it is used more nakedly to support cruder justifications of patriarchal right. The idea of passionlessness as either a natural or a cultural effect acquires no simple ascendancy in Victorian sexual ideology, even as applied to the ruling bourgeoisie.

As either conservative or radical sexual ideology, asexual femininity was a fragile, unstable concept. It was constructed through a permanently threatened transgression, which fictional narrative obsessively documented and punished. It is a gross historical error to infer from the regulatory sexual discourses in the novel the actual ‘fate’ of Victorian adulteresses, for novels operated through a set of highly punitive conventions in relation to female sexuality that almost certainly did not correspond to lived social relations. However, novels do call attention to the difficulty of fixing such a sexual ideology, precisely because they construct a world in which there is no alternative to it.

References

Alexander, Sally (1984) ‘Women, Class and Sexual Difference’, History Workshop, 17, pp. 125-49.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.

Brontë, Charlotte (1976) Jane Eyre (1847) ed. Margaret Smith. London: Oxford University Press.

Cott, Nancy F. (1978) ‘Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850’, Signs, 2, 2, pp. 219-33.

Hartmann, Heidi (1981) ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’. In Lydia Sargent (ed.), The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: A Debate on Class and Patriarchy, pp. 1-42. London: Pluto Press.

Jacobus, Mary (1979) ‘The Buried Letter: Feminism and Romanticism in Villette’. In Mary Jacobus (ed.), Women Writing and Writing about Women, pp. 42-60. London: Croom Helm.

Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective (1978) ‘Women’s Writing: Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, Aurora Leigh’. In 1848: The Sociology of Literature, proceedings of the Essex conference on the Sociology of Literature (July 1977), pp. 185-206.

Newton, Judith Lowder (1981) Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction 1778-1860. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press.

Radcliffe, Ann (1966) The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). London: Oxford University Press.

Robinson, Lillian S. (1978) ‘Dwelling in Decencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective’. In Sex, Class and Culture, pp. 3-21. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1974) Emile (1762). London: Dent.

Said, Edward W. (1978) Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Stedman Jones, Gareth (1983) Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832-1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1975a) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). New York: Norton.

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1975b) Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798). New York: Norton.

Woolf, Virginia (1973) A Room of One’s Own (1929). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Woolf, Virginia (1979) ‘Women and Fiction’. In Michéle Barrett (ed.), Women and Writing, pp. 44-52. London: Women’s Press.

Wordsworth, William, and Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1971) Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800), ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones. London: Methuen.

SOURCE: Gubar, Susan. “Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of ‘It Takes One to Know One.’” In Feminism Beside Itself, edited by Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman, pp. 133-54. New York: Routledge, 1995.

In the following essay, Gubar examines the anti-woman aspects of Wollstonecraft’s feminist writings, and places her work in the context of a long history of so-called “feminist misogyny.” Reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Gubar finds Wollstonecraft frequently describing women in highly negative terms and taking pains to dissociate herself from women even as she attempts to assert their value. According to the critic, Wollstonecraft’s paradoxical stance prefigures the attitude of many modern feminists, including Olive Schreiner, Kate Millett, and Andrea Dworkin, among others.

In a self-reflexive essay representative of current feminist thinking, Ann Snitow recalls a memory of the early seventies, a moment when a friend “sympathetic to the [woman’s] movement but not active [in it] asked what motivated” Snitow’s fervor:

I tried to explain the excitement I felt at the idea that I didn’t have to be a woman. She was shocked, confused. This was the motor of my activism? She asked, “How can someone who doesn’t like being a woman be a feminist?” To which I could only answer, “Why would anyone who likes being a woman need to be a feminist?”

Quite properly my colleague feared woman-hating. . . . Was this, as [she] thought, just a new kind of misogyny?

Though Snitow eventually finds “woman-hating—or loving—. . . beside the point,” she admits that she “wouldn’t dare say self-hatred played no part in what I wanted from feminism,” a remark that takes on added resonance in terms of her first reaction to consciousness raising: “‘Woman’ is my slave name,” she felt back then; “feminism will give me freedom to seek some other identity altogether.”¹

“‘Woman’ is my slave name; feminism will give me freedom to seek some other identity altogether”: Snitow’s formulation dramatizes a curious contradiction that feminism exhibits from its very inception to present times. The oxymoronic title of this essay—feminist misogyny—risks political incorrectness and implicitly asks us to pause, to consider the efficacy of the appellations “feminism” and “misogyny,” not to derail our commitment to social justice but to make it more savvy, more supple. When put to the test in the “Can you really tell?” game, current conceptualizations may not always help us distinguish feminist from misogynist claims.

On the one hand, can you judge the sexual politics of the thinker who wrote the sentence “There is a pleasure, … an enjoyment of the body, which is . . . beyond the phallus?” What does it mean that this apparently liberated sentiment comes from Jacques Lacan (the same Lacan who boasted, “[women] don’t know what they’re saying, that’s all the difference between them and me”)?² On the other hand, can you surmise the ideology of the writer who declared that “woman is body more than man is” or of the theorist who stated that “woman has sex organs more or less everywhere?”³ What does it mean that these two quotations, authored by feminist theorists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, eerily reiterate a proposition made by masculinist writers from Rousseau to Ambrose Bierce, so as to deny women equal educational opportunities, specifically the idea that “to men a man is but a mind. . . . But woman’s body is the woman”?⁴

Pursuing the same inquiry, we might ask why Denise Riley recently chose the allusive title “Am I That Name?” (1988) for a book advocating a post-structural approach to feminism, when the line (originally spoken in the femicidal atmosphere of Shakespeare’s Othello) conflates the “name” woman with the name-calling that demotes woman to whore?⁵ Finally, who would guess that this critique of Adrienne Rich—“The feminist dream of a common language . . . is a totalizing and imperialist one”—issues not from Lacan or some modern-day Iago but from the women’s studies scholar Donna Haraway?⁶ If the histories of feminism and misogyny have been (sometimes shockingly) dialogic, as I will try to suggest, what impact should that have on the ways in which we understand the once and future state of feminist theory?

The subtitle of my meditation may seem just as incongruous as its title because we generally view Mary Wollstonecraft as a pioneer whose feminist efforts were tragically misunderstood by the misogynist society in which she lived. And, of course, as the aesthetic foremother of feminist expository prose, Wollstonecraft established a polemical tradition mined by such literary descendants as Olive Schreiner, Emma Goldman, and Virginia Woolf as well as by contemporary thinkers from Simone de Beauvoir to Kate Millett and, yes, Cixous and Riley. Indubitably, all of these theorists profited from and extended Wollstonecraft’s insistence on righting the wrongs done to women. Paradoxically, however, they also inherited what I am calling her feminist misogyny. Indeed, the very troubling tenacity of this strain in feminist expository prose calls out for further thought.

That Wollstonecraft did, in fact, function as an effective advocate for women is probably self-evident, especially to anyone familiar with the political and literary culture into which she interjected her views. Though I will be examining a pervasive contradiction in her life and work, in no way do I mean to diminish or disparage her achievements. Quite rightly regarded as the founding feminist text in English, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) links the radical insurrection of the French revolution to the equally radical insubordination of the feminist project. Nor do I think we should judge Wollstonecraft by late twentieth-century definitions of feminism and find her wanting, “as if”—to quote Frances Ferguson—“Wollstonecraft would have turned out better work if she had had a word processor or a microwave oven.”⁷

Although she has been faulted for adhering to a suspect faith in reason as an innate human characteristic,⁸ Wollstonecraft exploited enlightenment language to claim that—at least theoretically—men and women were alike in being endowed with reason, a divine faculty that only needed to be cultivated so as to perfect the human species. Many of the thinkers of her time emphasized the differences between the sexes, with the influential Rousseau demanding that women’s education “should be always relative to the men. To please, to be useful to [men,] . . . to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable: these are the duties of women at all times.”⁹ But Wollstonecraft believed that because both sexes shared an equal capacity for reason, women—considered as human, not as sexual, beings—should benefit from the educational programs historically only afforded men. In addition, Wollstonecraft’s commitment to rationality made her especially sensitive to representations of female irrationality that enslaved women’s hearts and minds.

From her meditations on the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost to her interpretations of Pope’s, Dr. Gregory’s, and Rousseau’s treatises, Wollstonecraft’s analyses of debilitating female images assume that we are what we read, and therefore these passages in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman constitute one of the earliest instances we have of feminist criticism. According to Wollstonecraft, female readers necessarily internalize male-authored and manifestly false impressions of who they are and what they should aspire to be, impressions that weaken rather than strengthen women’s self-image. Confronting the socialization process effected by reading as well as by other childrearing practices, Wollstonecraft used her expository prose and her two novels to theorize about the psychological and cultural engendering of femininity. None of her contemporaries devised as sophisticated a model for understanding the social construction of womanhood, speculations that laid the groundwork for Simone de Beauvoir’s famous claim that “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.”¹⁰ Yet it is in this area—Wollstonecraft’s analysis of the feminine—that we will find most striking evidence of the contradiction in her thinking that I am terming “feminist misogyny.”

What image of woman emerges from the pages of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ? Repeatedly and disconcertingly, Wollstonecraft associates the feminine with weakness, childishness, deceitfulness, cunning, superficiality, an overvaluation of love, frivolity, dilettantism, irrationality, flattery, servility, prostitution, coquetry, sentimentality, ignorance, indolence, intolerance, slavish conformity, fickle passion, despotism, bigotry, and a “spaniel-like affection.”¹¹ The feminine principle, so defined, threatens—like a virus—to contaminate and destroy men and their culture. For, as Wollstonecraft explains, “Weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner, undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society.”¹²

Here in A Vindication, as in the next sentences I quote, femininity feels like a malady:

[Women’s] senses are inflamed, and their understandings neglected, consequently they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling. Civilized women are, therefore, . . . weakened by false refinement. . . . Ever restless and anxious, their over exercised sensibility not only renders them uncomfortable themselves, but troublesome . . . to others. . . . [T]heir conduct is unstable, and their opinions are wavering. . . . By fits and starts they are warm in many pursuits; yet this warmth, never concentrated into perseverance, soon exhausts itself. . . . Miserable, indeed, must be that being whose cultivation of mind has only tended to inflame its passions! (emphases mine)¹³

According to this passage, civilized women suffer from an illness, a veritable fever of femininity, that reduces them to “unstable” and “uncomfortable,” “miserable,” exhausted, invalids. Wollstonecraft’s description of women’s restlessness, of the “warm gusts” of inflammation they suffer, sounds like nothing less than contemporary complaints about hot flashes and menopausal mood swings, as if the long disease of femininity has itself become a critical “change of life.” At the close of the paragraph in which these words appear, Wollstonecraft takes to its logical conclusion the implications of women’s “fits and starts”: when “passions” are “pampered, whilst the judgement is left unformed,” she asks, “what can be expected to ensue?” and she promptly answers, “Undoubtedly, a mixture of madness and folly!”

Elsewhere in a related series of metaphors, women operate like “gangrene, which the vices engendered by oppression have produced,” and the mortal damage they inflict “is not confined to the morbid part, but pervades society at large.”¹⁴ Even if she is not noxious, the female is obnoxious, a diminished thing that has dwindled, dehumanized, into something like a doll, providing merely an aimless leisure pastime for men: “She was created,” Wollstonecraft claims, “to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.”¹⁵ Like a virus spreading corruption; like an illness condemning its victim to madness; like gangrene contaminating the healthy; like a jingling toy distracting irrational pleasure-seekers: because femininity figures as, at best, frivolity and, at worst, fatality, the principle character emerging from the pages of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman is the femme fatale.

Wollstonecraft’s derogations of the feminine, to be sure, are framed in terms of her breakthrough analysis of the social construction of gender. The above quotations, for instance, insist that women’s “senses are inflamed” because “their understandings [are] neglected”; that women are artificially “raised” above the race; that the gangrene of their vices is “engendered” by oppression; and that they are “created” to be toys. Thus, her thesis—that a false system of education has “rendered [women] weak and wretched”—emphasizes the powerful impact of culture on subjectivity, the capacity of the psyche to internalize societal norms.¹⁶ Indeed, Wollstonecraft stands at an originatory point in feminist thought precisely because she envisioned a time when the female of the species could shed herself of an enfeebling acculturation or feminization. Yet although (or perhaps because) A Vindication sets out to liberate society from a hated subject constructed to be subservient and called “woman,” it illuminates how such animosity can spill over into antipathy of those human beings most constrained by that construction.

Laying the groundwork for the first and second wave of the women’s movement, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman implies that “‘Woman’ is my slave name; feminism will give me freedom to seek some other identity altogether.” About the “few women [who] have emancipated themselves from the galling yoke of sovereign man,” therefore, Wollstonecraft speculates that they are virtually transsexuals. Just as Newton “was probably a being of superior order accidentally caged in a human body,” she imagines that “the few extraordinary women” in history “were male spirits, confined by mistake in female frames.”¹⁷ No wonder that, as Mary Poovey has pointed out, Wollstonecraft often speaks of herself “as a philosopher,” “as a moralist,” even “as [a] man with man,” concluding her work with a plea to “ye men of understanding.”¹⁸ Rarely, in other words, does she present herself as a woman speaking to women.

Curiously, then, Wollstonecraft’s radical stance nevertheless ends up aligning her with women’s most fervent adversaries, as she herself admits: “after surveying the history of woman,” she concedes, “I cannot help, agreeing with the severest satirist, considering the sex as the weakest as well as the most oppressed half of the species.”¹⁹ And several passages in A Vindication do seem to agree with “the severest satirist[s]” of women. While analyzing the “sexual weakness that makes woman depend upon man,” for example, Wollstonecraft scorns “a kind of cattish affection which leads a wife to purr about her husband as she would about any man who fed and caressed her.”²⁰ If the female looks subhuman in her cattiness here, elsewhere she appears sinful in her cunning trickery. To castigate those made “inferior by ignorance and low desires,” Wollstonecraft describes “the serpentine wrigglings of cunning” that enable women to “mount the tree of knowledge, and only acquire sufficient to lead men astray.”²¹ Like their foremother, Eve, women bear the responsibility for the fall of man and they do so because of their misuse of knowledge. Predictably, one of Wollstonecraft’s favorite Greek allusions is to Eve’s prototype, Pandora.

And a number of other passages in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman concur with the severest satirists of the weaker sex, whom Wollstonecraft actually echoes. Take, for example, the following attack on the institution of marriage as a commodities market:

It is acknowledged that [women] spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of accomplishments; meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves—the only way women can rise in the world—by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act—they dress; they paint, and nickname God’s creatures—Surely these weak beings are only fit for a seraglio!²²

Not only does Wollstonecraft paraphrase Hamlet’s angry speech to Ophelia—“You jig, you amble, and you lisp; you nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance”; by relegating the feminine woman to a seraglio, she also glosses his refrain—“get thee to a nunnery”: both nunnery and seraglio were common euphemisms for whorehouse. But the word “seraglio”—a Turkish or Eastern lodging for the secluded harem of Islamic noblemen—captures Wollstonecraft’s disdain for a feminine lassitude so degenerate, so threatening to Western Civilization that it must be marked as what Edward Said would call a kind of “Orientalism.”²³

If we compare Wollstonecraft’s portrait of the feminine here with the notoriously severe eighteenth-century satirists of the weaker sex, it becomes clear that she shares with them Hamlet’s revulsion. Judge Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on libertine notions of beauty, for example, in terms of Pope’s famous lines in his “Epistle to a Lady”— “ev’ry Woman is at heart a Rake” and “Most women have no characters at all”—as well as his insistence that the best woman is “a contradiction” in terms, “a softer man.” Consider her picture of female animality and dilettantism in relation to Swift’s monstrous Goddess of Criticism in The Tale of the Tub, a symbol of ignorance portrayed as part cat, part ass. Compare Wollstonecraft’s vision of feminine hypocrisy and prostitution to Swift’s attacks in his mock pastorals on dressing and painting, debased arts that conceal syphilitic whores; or place her indictment that unaccomplished women “nickname God’s creatures” up against Dr. Johnson’s comparison between a woman preaching and a dog dancing. Finally, examine Wollstonecraft’s childish wives in terms of the Earl of Chesterfield’s definition of women as “children of a larger growth.”²⁴

Why does Wollstonecraft’s text so eerily echo those composed by masculinist satirists?²⁵ A number of critics have noted problems, tensions, and repressions in the oeuvre produced by Wollstonecraft.²⁶ In particular, these scholars claim that, by appropriating an enlightenment rhetoric of reason, Wollstonecraft alienated herself and other women from female sexual desire. While it is certainly the case that throughout A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft elevates friendship between the sexes over romantic and erotic entanglements (which she condemns as ephemeral or destructive), I would view this motif not merely as a repression of sexuality but more inclusively as a symptom of the paradoxical feminist misogyny that pervades her work, only one sign of the ways in which Wollstonecraft’s feminism operates vis-á-vis feminization and by no means an eccentric fault of her philosophizing. For, as Cora Kaplan has insightfully remarked, “There is no feminism that can stand wholly outside femininity as it is posed in a given historical moment. All feminisms give some ideological hostage to femininities and are constructed through the gender sexuality of their day as well as standing in opposition to them.”²⁷

If feminist expository prose necessarily situates itself in opposition to self-demeaning modes of feminization even as it is shaped by them, what Moira Ferguson describes as Wollstonecraft’s propensity “to find women culpable of their vanity, their acceptance of an inferior education, their emphasis on feeling,” her tendency to “locate herself outside what she deem[ed] self-demeaning behavior,” takes on not only personal but also political and philosophical import.²⁸ Indeed, the tensions at work in Wollstonecraft’s text dramatize, on the one hand, the ways in which “feminisms give some ideological hostage to femininities,” as Kaplan puts it, and on the other hand, the ironies embedded in the stage of patrilineal affiliation that Sandra Gilbert and I have examined in the aesthetic paradigm we call “the female affiliation complex.”²⁹

To take the first subject first, is it possible to view Wollstonecraft’s description of the fever of femininity in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a portrait of any middle-class woman of her age, indeed as a self-portrait? Could the disgust at fallen, fated, or fatal females be self- disgust? In the words of Emma Goldman, the “sexually starved” Wollstonecraft was “doomed to become the prey of more than one infatuation” and her “insatiable hunger for love” led not only to a tragic desire for the married painter Fuseli but also to the two suicide attempts resulting from her tempestuous involvement with the philanderer Gilbert Imlay.³⁰ Wollstonecraft was so overcome by passion for Fusseli that she had suggested a ménage á trols to his shocked wife; after discovering Gilbert Imlay’s actress-mistress, she soaked her skirts so as to sink into the water after she threw herself from Putney Bridge. Did anyone better understand slavish passions, the overvaluation of love, fickle irrationality, weak dependency,the sense of personal irrelevance, and anxiety about personal attractiveness than Wollstonecraft herself?

Thus, Virginia Woolf, considering the various ways in which Wollstonecraft “could not understand . . . her own feelings,” believed that the eighteenth-century polemicist made theories every day, “theories by which life should be lived,” but “Every day too’—for she was no pedant, no cold-blooded theorist—something was born in her that thrust aside her theories and forced her to model them afresh.”³¹ From the perspective of Goldman’s and Woolf’s essays, therefore, the misogyny of A Vindication dramatizes the self-revulsion of a woman who knew herself to be constructed as feminine and thus it exhibits a kind of “anti-narcissism.”³² Indeed, what both Goldman and Woolf implicitly ask us to confront is the disparity between the feminist feats of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the gothic fates inflicted on Wollstonecraft’s fictional heroines in Mary, a Fiction (1788) and Maria (1798).

Of course the subtitle of Maria—The Wrongs of Woman —establishes it as a counterpart or extension of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as does the gloomy insight of its heroine when she asks, “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?”³³ Curiously, however, both novels negate or traverse the argument of A Vindication which, after all, condemns precisely the conventions of sentimental fiction Mary and Maria exploit. For the enflamed, volatile emotions Wollstonecraft castigates as weakness, folly, and madness in A Vindication infuse, motivate, and elevate the heroines of both novels. After weeping, fainting, and bemoaning her love for a dead friend and a dead lover, the admirable paragon of sensibility who is the central character of Mary exclaims, “I cannot live without loving—and love leads to madness.”³⁴ Just as rapturous and tearful, the heroine of Maria exhibits the passion denounced throughout A Vindication in a narrative that at moments seems not to caution against romance so much as to consecrate it: “So much of heaven” do the lovers of Maria enjoy together “that paradise bloomed around them. . . . Love, the grand enchanter, ‘lapt them in Elysium,’ and every sense was harmonized to joy and social extasy.”³⁵

But the startling slippages in Wollstonecraft’s thinking about heterosexuality are accompanied by equally dramatic strains in her meditations on the bonds between women. Though historians of homosexuality have been led by Wollstonecraft’s emotional relationships with Jane Arden and Fanny Blood to argue that the female intimacies celebrated in Mary should be situated on what Adrienne Rich calls a “lesbian continuum,” several passages in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman inveigh against the “grossly familiar” relationships spawned in female communities.³⁶ Women “shut up together in nurseries, schools, or convents” engage in “nasty customs,” share “secrets” (on subjects “where silence ought to reign”), and indulge in “jokes and hoiden tricks.”³⁷ Wollstonecraft the novelist valorizes the nurturing comfort and intensity of female intimacies; however, Wollstonecraft the philosopher hints at the obscene debaucheries of such contacts.

The odd juxtapositions between the Vindication and the novels imply that the misogynist portrait of the feminine penned by the feminist may, in fact, represent Wollstonecraft’s efforts to negotiate the distance between desire and dread, what she thought she should have been and what she feared herself to be. In other words, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman presents a narrative voice of the feminist-philosopher and a fictive profile of femininity that interact to illuminate a dialogue between self and soul, the culturally induced schizophrenia of an anti-narcissist. And in some part of herself, Wollstonecraft seemed to have understood this very well. In October 1791, after she had begun composing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and while she was sitting for a portrait a friend had commissioned, she wrote that friend the following lines: “I do not imagine that [the painting] will be a very striking likeness; but, if you do not find me in it, I will send you a more faithful sketch—a book that I am now writing, in which I myself . . . shall certainly appear, head and heart.”³⁸

Just this dialectic—between head and heart, between a hortatory philosophic voice and a debased self-portrait of femininity—characterizes the feminist misogyny Wollstonecraft bequeathed to her literary descendants, including feminist polemicists writing today. Partially, it was informed by Wollstonecraft’s inexorable entrapment inside a patrilineal literary inheritance. In The War of the Words, Sandra Gilbert and I argued that women writers before the late nineteenth century necessarily affiliated themselves with an alien and alienating aesthetic patrilineage. But this is even more true for the author of feminist expository prose than it is for the woman poet or novelist who, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “look[ed] everywhere for [literary] grandmothers and [found] none” because, instead of looking for aesthetic grandmothers, Wollstonecraft set out to debate the most powerfully paternal influences on her own culture: Moses and St. John, Milton and Rousseau, Pope and the authors of conduct and etiquette books.³⁹

As a genre, feminist expository prose inevitably embeds itself in the misogynist tradition it seeks to address and redress. Representing the masculinist voice in order to controvert its messages, one chapter of A Vindication —brilliantly analyzed by Patricia Yaeger—proceeds by lengthily quoting Rousseau’s portrait of womanhood “in his own words, interspersing [Wollstonecraft’s] comments and reflections.”⁴⁰ Thus, another dialectic emerges beyond the one between the individual author’s head and heart, specifically in A Vindication the conversation between Wollstonecraft and Rousseau and more generally in the expository prose of her descendants the dialogic relationship between the histories of feminism and misogyny.

“It Takes One to Know One”: the “One” in my subtitle is meant to indicate that it takes a feminist to know a misogynist, and vice versa. The terms of their engagement—as they bob and weave, feint and jab, thrust and parry in their philosophical fencing match or boxing ring—are particularly important to understand because, although feminism historically has not been the condition for misogyny’s emergence, the pervasive threat of misogyny brought into being feminist discourse. To the extent that there can be (need be) no feminism without misogyny, the sparring of this odd couple—the feminist, the misogynist— takes on a ritualized, stylized quality as they stroll through the corridors of history, reflecting upon each other and upon their slam dancing. A full description of the choreography of their steps remains beyond the scope of this paper; however, a brief study of the eccentric dips and swirls executed by these curiously ambivalent partners at the beginning and end of this century can begin the task Judith Butler sets feminist critique, namely understanding “how the category of ‘woman,’ the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought.”⁴¹

Like Mary Wollstonecraft’s, Olive Schreiner’s feminist prose stands in a vexed relationship to her fiction: specifically her polemical Woman and Labour (1911)—calling for “New Women” and “New Men” to enter “a new earth”—contrasts with a novel that obsesses over the self-pitying masochism of those who dream of altered sexual arrangements, just as it broods with nauseated fascination on the horrible tenacity of traditional women.⁴² The would-be author of an introduction to A Vindication, Schreiner formulated her demands for female liberation as an attack not on men but on women, and specifically on what she called “the human female parasite—the most deadly microbe . . . on the surface of any social organism.”⁴³ In Woman and Labour, which functioned as “the Bible” for first wave feminists, the idle, consuming “parasite woman on her couch” signals “the death-bed of human evolution.”⁴⁴ Strangely, too, Schreiner seems to blame the limits of evolution on female anatomy when she speculates that the size of the human brain could only increase “if in the course of ages the os cervix of women should itself slowly expand.”⁴⁵

Just as discomforting as the thought of an os cervix having to extend so as to produce larger human heads may be the less biologistic but comparable woman-blaming in Schreiner’s second-wave descendants. Perhaps Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (1977) furnishes the best case among the pioneers in women’s studies. For here, nineteenth-century women’s “debased religiosity, their sentimental peddling of Christian belief for its nostalgic value,” and their “fakery” manage to “gut Calvinist orthodoxy” of its rigorous intellectual vitality.⁴⁶ So aware was Douglas herself about faulting women for the fall (the “feminization”) of American culture that she used her introduction to defend herself against the charge that she had “Sid[ed] with the enemy.” Though Douglas claimed to be motivated by a “respect” for “toughness,” this (implicitly male) toughness seems entwined with self-hatred: “I expected to find my fathers and my mothers,” she explains about her investigations into the past; “instead I discovered my fathers and my sisters” because “The problems of the women correspond to mine with a frightening accuracy that seems to set us outside the processes of history.”⁴⁷

About the immersion of Douglas’s contemporaries in the literary history of the fathers, we might ask, what does it mean that a generation of readers was introduced to the works of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer through the long quotations that appeared in Kate Millett’s important text, Sexual Politics (1969)? In this respect, her work typifies a paradox that persists in a branch of feminist criticism which, following in the wake of A Vindication, tackles the problematics of patriarchy by examining sexist authors (from Milton to Mailer) or by exploring male-dominated genres (pornography, the Western, adventure tales, men’s magazines, film noir). No matter how radical the critique, it frequently falls into the representational quandary of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman : replication or even recuperation. Throughout the feminist expository prose of the 1970s, the predominant images of women constellate around the female victim: foot-binding and suttee, cliterodectomy and witch-burning appear with startling frequency; the characters of the madwoman, the hysteric, the abused whore, the freak, and the female eunuch abound.

From The Troublesome Helpmate (1966), Katharine Roger’s ground-breaking history of misogyny in literature, to my own work with Sandra Gilbert, moreover, feminist literary criticism has demonstrated that the most deeply disturbing male-authored depictions of women reveal with exceptional clarity the cultural dynamics of gender asymmetries. Thus, although Sandra and I usually focus on the female tradition, it seems striking that our most extended meditations on male authors center on such infamous masculinists as Milton, Rider Haggard, Freud, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot, rather than, say, John Stuart Mill, George Meredith, or George Bernard Shaw, all self-defined friends of the women’s movement. When questioned about our reliance on Freud, Sandra and I tend to respond by emphasizing how we have sought to disentangle the de scriptive powers of his insights into the sex/ gender system from the pre scriptive overlay contained in the values he assigns aspects or stages of that system.

Perhaps this speculation tells us as much about the masculinist tradition as it does about the intervention of feminism. Can we extend it by proposing that misogynist texts often elaborate upon feminist insights, but within structures of address or rhetorical frames that—in different ways, to different degrees—vilify, diminish, or dismiss them? To return to Hamlet or, for that matter, Othello and King Lear, can it be that Shake-speare’s portraits of femicidal heroes lay bare the causes and dynamics of woman-hating, albeit in plots that equivocate about the value placed upon such an emotion? To return to Freud, didn’t his description of psychosexual development in Western culture make possible the radical revisions of a host of feminist theorists, ranging from Joan Riviere and Karen Horney to Shulamith Firestone, Juliet Mitchell, Gayle Rubin, Nancy Chodorow, and Adrienne Rich? In other words, if Wollstonecraft’s Vindication embeds within it a misogynist text, do Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Rousseau’s Confessions, and Freud’s “Female Sexuality” contain antithetical feminist subscripts?⁴⁸

The idea of feminist misogyny might thereby explain a host of critical controversies over the ideological designs of individual authors or texts. For at the current time probably every “major” writer in the canon, possibly every touchstone work, has been claimed by one scholar or another as prototypically feminist and quintessentially masculinist. Nor is this surprising, given that each individual’s “language,” according to the foremost theorist of this issue, “lies on the borderline between oneself and the other.” As Bakhtin’s most evocative description of the “overpopulation” of language explains,

The word in language is half someone else’s . . . it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions; it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.⁴⁹

“[E]xpropriating” language from the purposes or designs of others, “forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents”: this is the “complicated process” in which feminists and misogynists necessarily engage so their discourses inevitably intersect in numerous ways, undercutting or supplementing each other over time, contesting what amounts to a complex nexus of ideas, values, perspectives, and norms, a cultural “heteroglossia” of gender ideologies and power asymmetries. Like the concept of black self-hatred and Jewish anti-Semitism, feminist misogyny might bring to critical attention the interlocutionary nature of representation; that is, the crucially different effects of the sentence “I am this” and “You are that.”⁵⁰

Inevitably, as the interaction between “I am this” and “You are that” implies, feminist consciousness today still bears the marks of its having come into being through interactions with a masculinism that has been shaped, in turn, by women’s independence movements, a phenomenon that explains a number of anomalies: that Mary Daly, not Norman Mailer, entitled a volume Pure Lust (1984) and coined the phrase “fembot,” for instance; that Norman Mailer, not Kate Millett, wrote The Prisoner of Sex (1971); that after Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics’—an analysis of masculine domination, feminine subordination—she published The Basement (1979), a gothic meditation on the sexual subordination and ultimate annihilation of a young girl by a power-crazed, sadistic woman.⁵¹ Similarly, feminist misogyny amplifies the eerie reverberations set in motion by Germaine Greer’s decision to follow The Female Eunuch (1970) with Sex and Destiny (1984). The former sprinkles quotations from A Vindication throughout a plea for a “revolution” in consciousness that requires that women refuse to bow down to “the Holy Family,” reject the desexualization of their bodies, and protest against the manifold ways “our mothers blackmailed us with self-sacrifice.”⁵² However, the latter champions the family as the best social organization for women and children; touts chastity, coitus interruptus, and the rhythm method as optimal birth control methods; and nostalgically hymns the praises of the nurturance provided in so-called primitive cultures, specifically lauding “Mediterranean mothers [who] took their boy babies’ penises in their mouths to stop their crying.”⁵³

Feminist misogyny in Mary Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre may also help us understand why Andrea Dworkin has supplemented her anti-pornography expository prose with a gothic novel that could be said to be pornographic: Ice and Fire (1986) stands in as vexed a relation to Intercourse (1987) as Mary and Maria do to A Vindication. Dworkin the anti-pornography polemicist condemns sexual intercourse in our culture as “an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation: colonializing, forceful (manly) or nearly violent.”⁵⁴ However, her novel Ice and Fire includes two types of sexually explicit scenes that contravene this definition, one in which “a girl James Dean” uses men to invade or colonize herself:

When a man fucks me, she says, I am with him, fucking me. The men ride her like maniacs. Her eyes roll back but stay open and she grins. She is always them fucking her, no matter how intensely they ride.

In the second, the female narrator takes on the office of instructing her male lover on how to invade or colonize her:

I teach him disrespect, systematically. I teach him how to tie knots, how to use rope, scarves, how to bite breasts: I teach him not to be afraid: of causing pain.⁵⁵

To be sure, when the masochistic speaker here explains about her abusive lover “Reader, I married him” and when “Reader, he got hard” meta-morphoses into “he got hard: he beat me until I couldn’t even crawl,” we are meant to understand that Dworkin is returning to the romance tradition of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (“Reader, I married him”) so as to uncover its abusive sexual politics.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, the question remains, if the anti-pornography ordinance Dworkin framed with Catherine McKinnon were deemed constitutional,would she be able to publish this kind of fiction? How can it be that her heroines resemble the actresses in the snuff films she seeks to outlaw, women bent on finding sexual fulfillment in their own destruction?

More generally, the feminist misogyny that pervades Dworkin’s work typifies the uncanny mirror dancing that repeatedly links feminist polemicists to their rivals and antagonists. In 1975, the feminist-linguist Robin Lakoff published her ground-breaking Language and Woman’s Place, a description of the genderlect she called “women’s language”: euphemism, modesty, hedging, polite forms of address, weak expletives, tag questions, empty adjectives and intensives, and hyper-correct grammar were said to characterize women’s speech. Curiously, her findings accorded with those of Otto Jesperson, whose 1922 study Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin proved that women were timid, conservative, even prudish language-users and thus incapable of linguistic inventiveness. As I intimated earlier, another odd coupling could be said to exist between Jacques Lacan, who viewed women as inexorably exiled from culture, and the French feminists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, who valorize female fluidity, multiplicity, sensuality, and libidinal jouissance. Are all these feminists dancing with wolves?

“Feminism,” Nancy Cott reminds us in much less heated or metaphorical terms, “is nothing if not paradoxical”:

It aims for individual freedoms by mobilizing sex solidarity. It acknowledges diversity among women while positing that women recognize their unity. It requires gender consciousness for its basis, yet calls for the elimination of prescribed gender roles.⁵⁷

Just as aware of internal differences, Jane Gallop locates tensions within the psychology of feminism that explain the questions with which I began, the query of Ann Snitow’s friend (“how can someone who doesn’t like being a woman be a feminist?”) as well as Snitow’s response (“Why would anyone who likes being a woman need to be a feminist?”): “The feminist,” according to Gallop, “identifies with other women but also struggles to rise above the lot of women. Feminism both desires superior women and celebrates the common woman.”⁵⁸

Over the past two decades, the stresses described by Cott and Gallop, along with professional competition inside the academy and social setbacks outside it, have given rise to internecine schisms in women’s studies, divisions widened by feminists faulting other feminists as politically retrograde or even misogynist: activists and empiricists denounced theorists and vice versa; lesbian separatists castigated integrationists; “prosex” and anti-pornography advocates clashed; class and race divided feminists, as did competing methodologies based on sexual difference or sexual equality, as did contested definitions of womanhood arising from cultural or poststructuralist thinkers.⁵⁹ In-fighting reached a kind of apex in literary criticism as various histories began to appear, some featuring feminist critiques of feminism which served intentions not always hospitable to academic women. Here the Toril Moi of Sexual/Textual Politics (1985) can officiate over feminist woman-bashing: Moi dismisses American women’s studies scholars as “patriarchal” because of their naive faith in the authority of the female subject and the unity of the work of art while she touts as her heroine Julia Kristeva, who “refuses to define ‘woman’” and judges the belief that one “is a woman” to be “absurd.”⁶⁰

This atmosphere in which women need to beware women is probably what has led me to see feminist misogyny now and not, say, back in the seventies. As “constructionists” like Moi continue to vilify “essentialists,” both groups segue into defensive and offensive steps that recall nothing so much as the rhythms of competing nationalities satirized in Sheldon Harnick’s song “Merry Little Minuet”:

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate
the Poles,
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the
Dutch,
And I don’t like anybody very much.⁶¹

Does the price of institutionalization—of women’s studie’s inclusion in the academy— consist of our reduction to a plethora of jostling fields or approaches in which unhappy souls war for precedence with even more ferocity than they do in longer established areas or departments?

Have we attained our maturity in an age of ethnic purges and nationalistic frays that in our own domain take the form of battle dances that cause us to lose sight of our common aim to expropriate not only language but also society of overpopulated intentions hostile to women’s health and welfare? When strutting our stuff with each other, among ourselves (and who, after all, are “we,” given our institutional, generational, ethnic, and methodological differences?), have we lost sight of the ways in which unsympathetic outsiders or hostile institutions can appropriate or co-opt our internal debates, transforming self-critiques into assaults against our larger project? The recent brouhaha over Katie Roiphe’s book epitomizes such difficulties. When in The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus Roiphe—a self-defined feminist—attacked Take Back the Night, anti-pornography, and sexual harassment activists for re-enforcing Victorian stereotypes of predatory men and victimized women, it seemed eerily appropriate that she aligned herself with Ishmael Reed by entitling one of her chapters “Reckless Eyeballing”: just as Reed’s masculinist novel Reckless Eyeballing lambastes Alice Walker for promoting a knee-jerk, racist suspicion about the criminality of African-American men (and in the process illuminates the culturally diverse constructions of the feminist-misogynist dialogue), Roiphe’s chapter presents contemporary feminists as retrograde zealot-puritans who would criminalize all men and indeed all forms of heterosexuality.⁶²

Questioning another feminist critique of other feminists, namely constructionists’ wholesale dismissal of essentialists, Diana Fuss has recently argued that “the political investments of the sign ‘essence’ are predicated on the subject’s complex positioning in a particular social field, and . . . the appraisal of this investment depends not on any interior values intrinsic to the sign itself but rather on the shifting and determinative discursive relations which produced it.”⁶³ Similarly, about feminist misogyny I think that—instead of furnishing us with yet another label to brand each other—it should make us sensitive to the proliferation of sexual ideologies, to the significance of who is deploying these ideologies and with what political effect, even as it breeds a healthy self-skepticism born of an awareness of our own inexorable embeddedness in history. Because we cannot escape how culture makes us know ourselves, we need to understand that even as our own theorizing engages with the social relations of femininity and masculinity, it is fashioned by them. Ultimately, then, the game of “Can you really tell?” reminds us that claims and counter-claims in the feminist-misogynist dialogue cannot be appraised without some consideration of the complex social identities, rhetorical frameworks, and historical contexts upon which they are predicated.

To adopt Gallop’s words once again, “I am as desirous of resolving contradictions as the next girl, but I find myself drawing us back to them, refusing the separations that allow us to avoid but not resolve contradiction.”⁶⁴ On the list of paradoxes she and other thinkers have enumerated, I would write the one so telling and compelling in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. For the contradiction-in-terms that her life and letters dramatizes continues to fashion the discourses through which many have struggled to vindicate the rights of men and women. As I think this, I seem to see them lining up for a succession of pas de deux; or is it a Virginia Reel? a dos-e-doe? a last tango? a merry little minuet?—Rousseau and Wollstonecraft, Havelock Ellis and Olive Schreiner, Freud and Woolf, Sartre and Beauvoir, Mailer and Millett or Dworkin, Lacan and Irigaray or Cixous, Reed and Walker.

But out of whose mouth does a voice issue to save the waltz by declaring, “Your turn to curtsy, my turn to bow”? And who takes the lead, if (when?) we turn to tap-dance or shuffle along with one another?

Notes

1. Ann Snitow, “A Gender Diary,” Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 33, p. 9.

2. Both Lacan passages are discussed by Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 34, p. 45.

3. Hélène Cixous in Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, tr. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 95; Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 28.

4. Ambrose Bierce, in “Know Your Enemy: A Sampling of Sexist Quotes,” Sisterhood Is Powerful; an anthology of writings from the women’s liberation movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 34. Throughout this paragraph, I am grateful to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who questions the efficacy of the “Can you really tell?” test with reference primarily to the ethnicity of the author in “‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree,” New York Times Book Review 24 (November 1991), p. 1.

5. Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Tania Modleski cogently argues about this and other so-called “postfeminist” theorists that “for many ‘women’ the very term arouses a visceral, even phobic reaction” (Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age [New York: Routledge, 1991], p. 16).

6. Donna Harraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 80, 15, 2, (March-April 1985), p. 92.

7. Frances Ferguson, “Wollstonecraft Our Contemporary,” Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 60-61.

8. See Timothy J. Reiss, “Revolution in Bounds: Wollstonecraft, Women, and Reason,” Gender and Theory, pp. 11-50.

9. Rousseau’s infamous remark appears in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (1792; rpt. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1988), p. 79.

10. Sandra M. Gilbert and I have examined the seeming eccentricity of the literary women of Wollstonecraft’s generation and the problem they pose to conventional definitions of the period in “‘But Oh! That Deep Romantic Chasm: The Engendering of Periodization,’” Kenyon Review 13, 3 (1991), pp. 74-81. For an interesting discussion of Beauvoir’s much quoted point, as well as Monique Wittig’s revisionary response to it, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 111-12.

11. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 34.

12. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 9.

13. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, pp. 60-61.

14. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 178.

15. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 34.

16. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 7.

17. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 35. Equally telling, as Elissa S. Guralnick points out, Wollstonecraft couples the term “woman” with bashaws, despots, kings, emperors, soldiers, and courtiers, all of whom exercize “illegitimate power” and thus “enjoy the degradation of the exalted”: Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 21 and Guralnick, “Radical Politics in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Wollstonecraft, Vindication, pp. 308-16.

18. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 79-80. Along similar lines, Joan B. Landes argues that Wollstonecraft subscribes to an ideology of republican motherhood that views women’s civic role as one performed inside the home, ascribes to men unbridled physical appetites, sets up a model of female duty, and displays an adherence toward male linguistic control that aligns her with the male philosophers of her day: see Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 129-38.

19. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 35.

20. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 175.

21. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 173.

22. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 10.

23. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

24. For a general discussion of the misogyny in these eighteenth-century texts, see my “The Female Monster in August Satire,” Signs 3 (1977), pp. 380-94.

25. Ironically, then tragically, Wollstonecraft’s detractors exploited precisely the images she shared with her philosophical opponents. She was depicted as one of the “philosophizing serpents in our bosom,” a “hyena in petticoats,” lampooned in The Unsex’d Females: A Poem as a “Poor maniac,” ridiculed in a review in the European Magazine as a “philosophical wanton,” and mocked in The Shade of Alexander Pope on the Banks of the Thames as “passion’s slave.” Similarly, her Memoirs and Posthumous Works was judged to be “A Convenient Manual of speculative debauchery” and in 1801 the author of “The Vision of Liberty” intoned, “Lucky the maid that on her volume pores / A scripture, archly fram’d, for propagating w_____s”: see Ralph M. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1951), p. 318, p. 321, p. 322 as well as Janet Todd, “Introduction,” in A Wollstonecraft Anthology, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 16-19.

26. Besides Poovey’s and Landes’s studies, see Mary Jacobus, “The Difference of View,” Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, 1979), pp. 16-17, as well as Cora Kaplan, “Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism,” Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 157-60. Janet Todd reviews all these critics in Feminist Literary History (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 103-10. On Wollstonecraft’s making “genius a machismo male,” see also Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women’s Press, 1989), p. 98.

27. Cora Kaplan, “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/ Feminism,” Formations of Pleasure (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 29.

28. Moira Ferguson, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery,” Feminist Review 42 (1992), p. 97.

29. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The War of the Words, vol. 1 of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), chpt. 4.

30. Emma Goldman, “Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Struggle for Freedom,” Wollstonecraft, Vindication, pp. 254-55.

31. Virginia Woolf, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” in Wollstonecraft, Vindication, pp. 269-70.

32. I am relying here on a term proposed by Hélène Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” tr. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 (1976), p. 878.

33. Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Women (1798; rpt. New York: Norton, 1975), p. 27.

34. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Fiction (1788; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1977), p. 102.

35. Wollstonecraft, Maria, p. 51.

36. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Women: Sex and Sexuality, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 60-91. On Wollstonecraft, see Jeannette Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956; rpt. Baltimore: Diana Press, 1976), pp. 56-60 and Lillian Faderman, “Who Hid Lesbian History?,” Lesbian Studies: Present and Future, ed. Margaret Cruikshank (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982), p. 117. Interesting in this regard is the misogyny in lesbian literature that can be traced back to Radclyffe Hall’s portraits of “feminine” women in The Well of Loneliness; many of whom strike her mannish Stephen Gordon as manipulative, materialistic, and frivolous (“Grossly familiar”: Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 127).

37. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 128.

38. Mary Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 202-3.

39. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon, 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1897), 1, pp. 231-32. In The War of the Words, Sandra Gilbert and I discuss the woman writer’s “turn toward the father”: pp. 171-81. The two female precursors Wollstonecraft admires are Hester Mulso Chapone and Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham, both discussed quite briefly in A Vindication, pp. 105-6, p. 137.

40. Patricia Yaeger, “Writing as Action: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Minnesota Review 29 (1987), pp. 74-75; and Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 77.

41. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 2.

42. Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (1911; rpt. London: Virago, 1978), p. 272, p. 282. The long, slow death of the New Womanly Lyndall in The Story of an African Farm (1883) contrasts throughout the novel with the obesity, stupidity, voracity, racism, and cruelty of the traditional woman Tant’ Sannie. Like Wollstonecraft, too, Schreiner publicly protested against female dependency on men but suffered repeated thralldom to men in her private life.

43. Schreiner, Woman and Labour, p. 82.

44. On Schreiner’s plans to produce an introduction to A Vindication and on Woman and Labour as a “Bible,” see Joyce Avrech Berkman, Olive Schreiner: Feminism on the Frontier (St. Alban’s, Vt.: Eden Women’s Publications, 1979), p. 7, p. 10, and p. 2. Schreiner’s discussion of the “parasite woman on her couch” appears in Woman and Labour, pp. 132-33.

45. Schreiner, Woman and Labour, pp. 129-30.

46. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 6, p. 12, and p. 8.

47. Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, p. 11.

48. In a recent essay, Sandra M. Gilbert explains her own attraction to D. H. Lawrence’s works and that of women readers from Katherine Mansfield and H. D. to Anais Nin by envisioning Lawrence as “a proto French feminist” (Gilbert, Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence [2nd ed., rpt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. xix]. It is interesting in this regard that Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ often reprinted essay “For the Etruscans” evokes D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places (The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice [New York: Routledge, 1990], pp. 1-19).

49. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 293-94.

50. According to Barbara Johnson, in a subtle analysis of the impact of racial stereotypes on racial identity, “questions of difference and identity are always a function of a specific interlocutionary situation—and the answers a matter of strategy rather than truth” (“Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston,” Critical Inquiry 12 [1985]), p. 285.

51. On “fembot,” see Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 93.

52. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: Bantam, 1971), p. 335, p. 12, and p. 157.

53. Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 248.

54. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 63.

55. Andrea Dworkin, Ice and Fire (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), p. 72, pp. 54-55, and p. 101.

56. Dworkin, Ice and Fire, p. 101 and pp. 104-5.

57. Nancy Cott, “Feminist Theory and Feminist Movements: The Past Before Us,” What Is Feminism?, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (New York: Pantheon, 1986), p. 49.

58. Jane Gallop, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 138.

59. For background on such debates, see Joan Scott, “De-constructing Equality-Versus-Difference” and Theresa de Lauretis, “Upping the Anti (sic) in Feminist Theory,” both in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller ed., Conflicts in Feminism, pp. 134-48 and pp. 255-70.

60. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 62-63 and p. 163. Later, Moi stated that her book was “written from a feminist perspective, or, in other words, from a perspective of political solidarity with the feminist aims of the critics and theorists I write about.” In addition, she claimed that after “the reactionary backlash of the eighties,” she found it “far more difficult to be sanguine about one’s feminist position” and “would now emphasize much more the risks of being a feminist”: see Moi, Feminist Theory and Simone de Beau-voir (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 95 and p. 102.

61. Quoted in Songs of Peace, Freedom, and Protest, ed. Tom Glazer (New York: McKay Press, 1970), pp. 217-18. Here, as always and elsewhere, I am grateful for the help of Marah Gubar.

62. Katie Roiphe, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), p. 85. Significantly, Roiphe also aligns herself with John Irving and David Mamet: p. 35 and p. 107. Yet in the opening of the book, she describes her own brand of feminism which she inherited from her mother. On Reckless Eyeballing and Alice Walker, see Ishmael Reed, “Steven Spielberg Plays Howard Beach,” Writin’ Is Fightin’ (New York: Atheneum, 1988), pp. 145-60.

63. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 20. See also Claire Goldberg Moses, “‘Equality’ and ‘Difference’ in Historical Perspective: A Comparative Examination of the Feminisms of French Revolutionaries and Utopian Socialists,” Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E. Meltzer and Leslie W. Rabine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 248, in which Goldberg Moses points out that “The argument that feminist discourses of ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ are neither right nor wrong but relate to historically specific concerns or opportunities is further strengthened by noting the instability of these categories.”

64. Jane Gallop, Around 1981, p. 139.

Bibliographies

Todd, Janet M. Mary Wollstonecraft: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishers, 1976, 124 p.

Surveys criticism on Wollstonecraft from her contemporaries through the mid-1970s.

Windle, John. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, 1759-1797: A Bibliography of the First and Early Editions, with Briefer Notes on Later Editions and Translations. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2000, 71 p.

Contains entries covering the publishing history of Wollstonecraft's major and minor works.

Biographies

Flexner, Eleanor. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., 1972, 307 p.

Emphasizes the role of Wollstonecraft's early life in the development of her ideas, but is somewhat critical of Wollstonecraft's behavior; updates and corrects Ralph Wardle's 1951 biography.

Jacobs, Diane. Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001, 333 p.

Uses new letters and sources to update Wollstonecraft's biography; also discusses the lives and work of her daughters and the scope of her influence in women's history.

Jump, Harriet Devine. Mary Wollstonecraft, Writer. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994, 172 p.

Stresses the development of Wollstonecraft's feminist thought in the context of the political atmosphere of her times, especially the growth of radicalism; also offers a complete overview of Wollstonecraft's life as an author.

Rauschenbusch-Clough, Emma. A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman. New York: Longmans, Green, 1898, 234 p.

Links Wollstonecraft to the emerging thought of her time as well as the socialist writers who followed her; the first full-length study of Wollstonecraft.

Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000, 516 p.

A scholarly but engaging biography from an important scholar of eighteenth-century women's writing; details Wollstonecraft's difficult family relationships, drawing primarily from Wollstonecraft's letters.

Tomalin, Claire. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, 316 p.

Narrative biography recounting Wollstonecraft's many personal quirks and failings as well as her drive and intellectual achievements; Tomalin is the author of several popular biographies of major writers including Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, and Samuel Pepys.

Wardle, Ralph. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1951, 366 p.

Relies heavily on letters to tell the story of Wollstonecraft's life, noting the course of her intellectual development; considered a milestone in twentieth-century scholarship on Wollstonecraft.

Criticism

Badowska, Ewa. "The Anorexic Body of Liberal Feminism: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 17, no. 2 (fall 1998): 283-303.

Focuses on the intersection of the female body and political discourse as sites for constructing feminine identity in Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Barlowe, Jamie. "Daring to Dialogue: Mary Wollstonecraft's Rhetoric of Feminist Dialogics." In Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Andrea A. Lunsford, pp. 117-36. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.

Examines Wollstonecraft's use of different genres as an effort to engage in dialogue with the male-dominated intellectual tradition in the larger service of achieving the practical social ends of feminism.

Blakemore, Steven. "Rebellious Reading: The Doubleness of Wollstonecraft's Subversion of Paradise Lost." Texas Studies in Language and Literature 34, no. 4 (winter 1992): 451-80.

Claims that Wollstonecraft subverted the ideology of Paradise Lost by creating a picture of Eve that both sustains and undermines Wollstonecraft's feminist myth.

Brody, Miriam. "Mary Wollstonecraft: Sexuality and Women's Rights." In Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Key Women Thinkers, edited by Dale Spender, pp. 40-59. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.

Considers Wollstonecraft's view of sexuality and its implications for her feminist argument in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

——. "The Vindication of the Writes of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Rhetoric." In Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Maria J. Falco, pp. 105-23. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

Contends that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman asserts women's right to write polemically.

Cole, Lucinda. "(Anti)Feminist Sympathies: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wollstonecraft, and More." ELH 58, no. 1 (spring 1991): 107-40.

Discusses the language of sympathy in Wollstonecraft's works as compared with Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the works of Hannah More.

Conger, Syndy M. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994, 214 p.

Addresses the apparent paradox of Wollstonecraft's strong faith in reason and her intense emotionalism, applying modern critical insight from diverse fields including linguistics, psychology, and feminist theory.

D'Arcy, Chantal Cornut-Gentille. "Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as Generator of Differing Feminist Traditions." Links and Letters 2 (1995): 47-61.

Relates Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to the development of modern feminist literary theory in its various aspects.

Ellison, Julie. "Redoubled Feeling: Politics, Sentiment, and the Sublime in Williams and Wollstonecraft." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1990): 197-215.

Compares Helen Maria Williams's Letters from France to Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, noting the relationship between politics and the language of feeling.

Gunther-Canada, Wendy. "Mary Wollstonecraft's 'Wild wish': Confounding Sex in the Discourse on Political Rights." In Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Maria J. Falco, pp. 61-84. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

Demonstrates how Wollstonecraft disputed the gender distinctions that excluded women from the discourse of political rights; examines both A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and her Vindication of the Rights of Men.

Guralnick, Elissa S. "Radical Politics in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Studies in Burke and His Times 18, no. 3 (autumn 1977): 155-66.

Argues that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman carries implications beyond feminism in that it is a "radical political tract" on the order of, though surpassing, A Vindication of the Rights of Men.

Harasym, S. D. "Ideology and Self: A Theoretical Discussion of the 'Self' in Mary Wollstonecraft's Fiction." English Studies in Canada 12, no. 2 (June 1986): 163-77.

Examines the novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, contending that Wollstonecraft's identification of herself with her protagonist complicated her portrayal of a utopian feminist ideology.

Homans, Margaret. "Feminist Fictions and Feminist Theories of Narrative." Narrative 2, no. 1 (January 1994): 3-16.

Compares the ways in which Wollstonecraft's Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God comment on the narrative structures available to women.

Johnson, Claudia L. "Mary Wollstonecraft." In Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen, p. 239. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Considers the language of sentiment, particularly "excessive" feminine feeling, as a site of feminist struggle in Wollstonecraft's writing.

——, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 284 p.

Collects several essays addressing Wollstonecraft's views on women, education, and religion; contributors include Wollstonecraft scholars Janet Todd, Mitzi Myers, Vivien Jones, Anne K. Mellor, Cora Kaplan, and others.

Jones, Vivien. "Femininity, Nationalism, and Romanticism: The Politics of Gender in the Revolution Controversy." History of European Ideas 16, nos. 1-3 (1993): 299-305.

Compares Helen Maria William's Letters From France and Wollstonecraft's Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution in terms of the construction of national, sexual, and literary identities.

Keane, Angela. "Mary Wollstonecraft's Imperious Sympathies: Population, Maternity, and Romantic Individualism." In Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality, edited by Avril Horner and Angela Keane, pp. 29-42. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Views Wollstonecraft's feminism as a critique of capitalism as it enforced a mind-body split in women; focuses on images of motherhood in Wollstonecraft's writing.

Mackenzie, Catriona. "Reason and Sensibility: The Ideal of Women's Self-Governance in the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft." Hypatia 8, no. 4 (fall 1993): 35-55.

Examines the language of feeling and sentiment in Wollstonecraft's writings as applied to women and the capacity for individual authority.

Maurer, Shawn Lisa. "The Female (As) Reader: Sex Sensibility, and the Maternal in Wollstonecraft's Fictions." Essays in Literature 19, no. 1 (spring 1992): 36-54.

Contends that Wollstonecraft attempted to develop an active subjectivity for women constituted in relation to a woman's role as mother.

Myers, Mitzi. "Pedagogy as Self-Expression in Mary Wollstonecraft: Exorcising the Past, Finding a Voice." In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock, pp. 192-210. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Applies a feminist approach and theory of autobiography to reading Wollstonecraft's autobiographical writings as well as her fiction; addresses the female struggle to craft an identity in writing.

——. "Sensibility and the 'Walk of Reason': Mary Wollstonecraft's Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique." In Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics; Essays in Honor of Jean H. Hagstrum, edited by Syndy McMillen Conger, pp. 120-44. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990.

Examines Wollstonecraft's writings for the Analytical Review as attempts to develop her unique voice as a theorist of gender, particularly as she attempts to combine sensibility and reason into a broader humanism.

Paulson, Ronald. "Burke, Paine, and Wollstonecraft: The Sublime and the Beautiful." In Representations of Revolution (1789-1820), pp. 57-87. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

Examines Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men as an answer to Burke, focusing on Wollstonecraft's critique of feminine beauty as a tyrannical concept.

Poovey, Mary. "Mary Wollstonecraft: The Gender of Genres in Eighteenth-Century England." Novel 15, no. 2 (winter 1982): 111-26.

Delineates Wollstonecraft's central ambivalence in Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman.

——. "Man's Discourse, Woman's Heart: Mary Wollstonecraft's Two Vindications. "In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology and Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, pp. 48-81. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984.

Posits that Wollstonecraft's life and work indicate an unresolved conflict between the author's belief in female autonomy and her continuing adherence to traditional bourgeois cultural roles.

Robinson, Daniel. "Theodicy versus Feminist Strategy in Mary Wollstonecraft's Fiction." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9, no. 2 (January 1997): 183-202.

Contrasts the ways in which Wollstonecraft attempts to reconcile her feminism and her religious faith in Mary, A Fiction and Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman.

Sapiro, Virginia. A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 366 p.

Describes Wollstonecraft's views on women as part of a fully developed political philosophy; links Wollstonecraft's thought to modern debates on liberal democracy.

Shanley, Mary Lyndon. "Mary Wollstonecraft on Sensibility, Women's Rights, and Patriarchal Power." In Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, edited by Hilda L. Smith, pp. 148-67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Explores Wollstonecraft's discussion of the relationship between domestic and political patriarchy; focuses on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman.

Taylor, G. R. Stirling. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Study in Economics and Romance. John Lane, 1911, 210 p.

A very admiring early study of Wollstonecraft's work and thought, with attention to the condition of women in Wollstonecraft's time and the ongoing need for improvement in women's rights.

Wilson, Anna. "Mary Wollstonecraft and the Search for the Radical Woman." Genders 6 (November 1989): 88-101.

Compares Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, emphasizing the treatment of radicalism.

Woolf, Virginia. "Four Figures." In Collected Essays. Vol. III, pp. 181-206. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967.

Characterizes Wollstonecraft's life, work, and influence, focusing on the writer's passion and originality.

Yeo, Eileen James, ed. Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1997, 276 p.

Contains essays addressing Wollstonecraft's influence on modern feminism and surveying the history of Wollstonecraft's reputation and critical interpretations of her work.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Wollstonecraft's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: British Writers Supplement, Vol. 3; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1789-1832; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 39, 104, 158, 252; Feminist Writers; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 1; Literature Criticism from 1400-1800, Vols. 5, 50, 90; Literature Resource Center; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; Twayne's English Authors; and World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3.