SOURCE: "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, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 148-67.

[In the following essay, Shanley explores Wollstonecraft's discussion of the relationship between domestic and political patriarchy.]

One of the results of the resurgence in feminist scholarship over the past twenty-five years has been the inclusion of Mary Wollstonecraft in the ranks of early modern political theorists. The "rediscovery" of Wollstonecraft focused attention on both her life and her writings. It was not surprising that feminists interested in politics and political theory found Wollstonecraft's life a source of inspiration. In an age when female writers were rare and a challenge to "the traditional male monopoly of literacy, learning, and publication,"¹ Wollstonecraft was one of the few women of her day who supported herself by her writing. She was a versatile writer, author not only of her famous A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), but also of a book on female education, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787); the novels Mary (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798); An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794); and a book of observations on nature and culture, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). She supported the French Revolution, and then traveled to France to witness its aftermath for herself. While in France she had an unhappy love affair and bore a child out of wedlock. In 1796 she became pregnant by the English philosopher and anarchist William Godwin, whom she then married. She died eleven days after giving birth in August 1797.²

Although she deeply engaged the political issues of her day, Wollstonecraft's ideas concerning women and political life have defied ready categorization. This chapter analyzes one aspect of Wollstonecraft's political thought, her biting condemnation of both domestic and political patriarchy. Her discussion of patriarchy—what it is, how it affects both men and women, and how it is sustained by both social practice and public law—is one of the most thorough and unrelenting in modern European political theory.³ Wollstonecraft developed her analysis of the relationship between women's subjection in the household and in the state first in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and then in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798). In the preface to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a critique of contemporary social mores, Wollstonecraft promised that the book would be followed by another specifically about the laws pertaining to women's rights. That sequel was never written, but in many ways The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria takes up in novelistic form the issues of women's legal status that Wollstonecraft had promised to consider. This chapterwill argue that, taken together, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria made clear Wollstonecraft's understanding of the integral relationship between social practices and political power, between a society's view of personal virtue and its political culture.

This reading of Wollstonecraft's work places her understanding of "sensibility" and of sexuality, as well as of "rights" and legal equality, at the center of her political thought. The titles of A Vindication of the Rights of Men and the A Vindication of the Rights of Woman can be somewhat misleading in this respect; as Virginia Sapiro has observed, "the apparently widespread view that Wollstonecraft should be known exclusively for her advocacy of 'women's rights' is inappropriate. Most of what she wrote was not on rights, or not on rights as most people understand the term."⁴ Moreover, while Wollstonecraft seemed to want to extend "the natural and imprescriptible rights of man … liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression"⁵ to women, she accepted the notion that one of women's primary roles and social contributions (and one not shared by men) was nurturing and raising children.⁶ Squaring Wollstonecraft's seeming acceptance of some aspects of the sexual division of labor with her espousal of universal human rights as the foundation of women's citizenship has proven a daunting task. The sexual division of labor with respect to childrearing did not mean, however, that women (or men) should accept certain damaging popular cultural notions of female "sensibility." Exaggerated notions of female sensibility corrupted both women and men, and worked against the extension of fundamental rights of citizenship to women. In their engagement with social mores and cultural practices, both A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria were much closer in their concerns to the examination of moral education of Jean Jacques Rousseau's novels Emile and La Nouvelle Heloise than to the analyses of the legal foundations of citizenship in the treatises of Thomas Hobbes or John Locke.

Wollstonecraft's argument that political freedom required not only the overthrow of hereditary aristocracy but the overthrow of sexual aristocracy—an argument developed in the context of democratic revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic—was repeatedly ridiculed for well over a century.⁷ It was nonetheless correct. While her critique drew upon laws and practices of late eighteenth-century England, the argument that private relationships and public power are interdependent and have historically given men power over women in both family and state is not only descriptive of her society but is still relevant today. So, too, is her insistence that the workings of patriarchy depend on both the enforcement of socially constructed gender roles and formal legal and economic structures. Two centuries after her death, Wollstonecraft's legacy of personal courage and intellectual insight into the dynamics of tyranny and subjection continue to inspire and instruct those interested in both women's liberation and the meaning of equal rights for men andwomen in a liberal state.

Patriarchy and the gendering of sensibility: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman analyzed the ways in which patriarchy was rooted in what Wollstonecraft called "sensibility" and social mores; its goal was the reformation of manners in order to reeducate the passions and undermine the habits that sustained patriarchy. In her "Dedication" to M. Talleyrand-Perigord, former French bishop and member of France's revolutionary legislature, Wollstonecraft set forth her disagreement with this defender of men's rights on issues of women's education and citizenship. In September, 1791, Talleyrand submitted a Rapport sur l'instruction publique to the National Assembly. In it he argued that both sexes should be educated, but he advocated different instruction for women than for men, since women would not perform the same public duties as men.

It seems incontestable to us that the common happiness, especially that of women, requires that they do not aspire to exercise rights and political functions … [L]et us teach them the real measure of their duties and rights. That they will find, not insubstantial hopes, but real advantages under the empire of liberty; that the less they participate in the making of the law, the more they will receive from it protection and strength; and that especially when they renounce all political rights, they will acquire the certainty of seeing their civil rights substantiated and even expanded.⁸

In response, Wollstonecraft asked whether it was not inconsistent for Talleyrand to insist that free men "be allowed to judge for themselves respecting their own happiness," while allowing such men to "subjugate women, even though you firmly believe that you are acting in the manner best calculated to promote [women's] happiness?" One of the properties of free men, this suggested, was their ability, supported by social custom and law alike, to subjugate women. If all human beings shared in reason, then to "force all women, by denying them civil and political rights, to remain immured in their families groping in the dark" was a kind of tyranny. Under such tyrannical rule, women became "convenient slaves," but slavery would have a "constant effect, degrading [to] the master and the abject dependent" alike.⁹

The belief that men and women would (and, further, should) occupy separate spheres and perform wholly different tasks resulted in their receiving quite distinct educations, and led to the corruption that Wollstonecraft deplored. Many of the characteristics of both sexes had been instilled in them through highly damaging socialization. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was at its core about what was wrong with the social construction of the sexes in her society, how this might be changed, and whysuch change was imperative.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attempted to show that men deliberately encouraged certain characteristics in women (and discouraged others) which kept women subordinate to them. As Sapiro noted, "Men, the more powerful agents in society, had rigged the system to make strength an asset for them (but not for women) and weakness more valuable to women. Self-degradation and weakness therefore become women's illusory rational choice because they are more likely to lead to 'success' as defined by the participants in the system."¹⁰ In response to Rousseau's claim that women exercised power over men through sexual attraction combined with physical weakness, Wollstonecraft insisted, "I do not wish them [women] to have power over men, but over themselves."¹¹ By being regarded above all as objects of male sexual desire, women had become not the rulers but the "slaves" of men.¹² Male lust and the desire to possess women corrupted both men and women; male domination of women had become a source of sexual attraction for both sexes. Wollstonecraft described women who had become "the slaves of casual lust"; they were like "standing dishes to which every glutton may have access."¹³ And since bodily weakness was regarded as sexually attractive in women, "genteel women … are slaves to their bodies and glory in their subjection."¹⁴ The desensualization or desexualization of women in men's eyes would deeroticize female helplessness and languor. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was, as Barbara Taylor has remarked, "an expose … of the degeneracy of modern womankind which has as its central target women's sexuality."¹⁵

Wollstonecraft's condemnation of corrupted sensuality and distorted "sensibility" was related to the eighteenth-century criticisms of aristocracy as well as of romantic fiction. Women's participation in the deliberate construction of pallor, softness, frailty, ornament, and finery as marks of sexual desirability necessitated a certain amount of leisure and luxury. Karen Offen links Wollstonecraft's criticism of women's use of sexuality as a way to gain power and influence with contemporary criticism of "courtly society, aristocratic manners, 'learned women' … and encroaching commercialism."¹⁶ She points out that at the time Wollstonecraft wrote, the French queen, Marie Antoinette, "was under sharp attack by certain revolutionaries as the very epitome of politically irresponsible seductiveness and sensuality—the very embodiment of all that was wrong with the old regime."¹⁷

While it was clear that Wollstonecraft abhorred the sharp division between men and women that underlay popular notions of female sensuality and male rationality, the question of whether she advocated equal rights and similar social roles on the one hand or saw men and women as fulfilling different roles on the other cannot be answered unequivocally. In her letter dedicating A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to Talleyrand, Wollstonecraft emphasized the universality of reason and the equal natural rights of all humans: "if women are to be excluded … from a participation of thenatural rights of mankind, prove first, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, that they want reason."¹⁸ Wollstonecraft believed that women must be educated for the independence of judgment suitable to all rational creatures: "The grand end of their exertions should be to unfold their own faculties and to acquire the dignity of conscious virtue."¹⁹ Women's "first duty is to themselves as rational creatures."²⁰ Wollstonecraft also insisted that all women should be able to lead an independent existence. In order for women's "private virtue [to become] a public benefit, they must have a civil existence in the state, married or single."²¹ Wollstonecraft asserted that no woman, including married women, should "want, individually, the protection of civil laws."²² She repeatedly wrote that women had a right to earn their own living, and urged that the professions be opened to women.²³ Acknowledging that she would be ridiculed, she confessed that she thought that "women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed, without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government."²⁴

Wollstonecraft, however, also assumed that some duties of men and women would be different, and saw these duties as rooted in nature, not simply in social convention. The care of infants was "one of the grand duties annexed to the female character by nature."²⁵ Like Rousseau, Wollstonecraft regarded the practical and moral education of children as of the utmost importance, and as a task belonging particularly to mothers. Unlike Rousseau, however, Wollstonecraft did not think that maternal duties made civic participation unnecessary or unwise for women.²⁶ Women's "first duty" was to themselves, as rational creatures, and "the next, in order of importance, as citizens, is that, which includes so many, of a mother."²⁷

Because of their duty to care for young children, women (or at least mothers) would take a somewhat different role in civic life than men. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft asserted that the civic duties of men and women were not identical: while men were to engage in politics, it was the part of a woman to "superintend her family and suckle her children, in order to fulfil her part of the social compact."²⁸ In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft envisioned a state of society in which "a man must necessarily fulfill the duties of a citizen, or be despised, and that while he was employed in any of the departments of civil life, his wife, also an active citizen, should be equally intent to manage her family, educate her children, and assist her neighbors."²⁹ In a letter, she remarked that "Considering the care and anxiety a woman must have about a child before it comes into the world, it seems to me, by a natural right, to belong to her."³⁰

Wollstonecraft tried to show, however, that difference need not inevitably lead to hierarchy and subjugation. It is true, Wollstonecraft admitted, that women and men "may have different duties to fulfil," but these "are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same."³¹ Wollstonecraft held out hope that with new social practices as well as legal reforms, the human species could develop to new levels of refinement and appropriate sensibility. She believed that "as sound politics diffuse liberty, mankind, including woman, will become more wise and virtuous."³² The development of the species held out the possibility of "a new kind of marriage" and "a reformed family, generating the social bond of sympathy as well as individualism."³³ Wollstonecraft put great hope in all that women might accomplish for society if they properly performed their functions as mothers. "[T]he affectionate family and, at its heart, mothering … generated traits (the happy energy of social affections) that society needed."³⁴ One strong argument for improving women's education was that it would enable them to be better mothers: a mother's duty to care for her child "would afford many forcible arguments for strengthening the female understanding, if it were properly considered."³⁵ Education was also important for women who did not marry; it would enable them to support themselves and prepare them for the independence that Wollstonecraft saw as "the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue."³⁶ This independence would be enjoyed by men and women, married and unmarried alike, who might hope to be true companions and friends in a reformed society.

Improper social mores and corrupted sensibility would condemn women, men, and society alike to stagnation or degeneration. A reformed society would require not only a new education in rational thought and moral sensibility, but also legal reform and the extension of certain rights of citizenship to women. While women's sensibility was the main topic of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Wrongs of Women: or, Maria, Wollstonecraft examined the evils wrought by contemporary laws affecting women.

Patriarchy and the legal subjection of women: The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria

The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria was a much darker and more pessimistic work than A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, due perhaps both to events in Wollstonecraft's life that made her feel the power of patriarchy with particular force, and to the way in which attention to law made her see the relationships between legal and social change as thoroughly intertwined. Too often in analyses of Wollstonecraft's ideas, as Janet Todd has noted, "the life, which is remembered because of the works, tends to overshadow those works" and biography takes the place of critical analysis.³⁷ Yet Anne Mellor has argued persuasively that both "Wollstonecraft's own sexual experiences and the repressive, anti-revolutionary acts of the conservative British government dominated by William Pitt and Edmund Burke" illuminate the greater sense of danger and pessimism that infuses The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria when compared to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.³⁸

In the five years between the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Wollstonecraft's writing of The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (left unfinished at her death in 1797), Wollstonecraft had toured revolutionary France, witnessed the Terror there and seen the conservative reaction in England to the French Revolution. She had also entered into a passionate love affair with Gilbert Imlay, borne their child, and discovered Imlay's infidelity. She tried to commit suicide with an overdose of laudanum, after which Imlay sent her, with their daughter, Fanny, to Scandinavia to try to recover a shipment of goods he had lost. When Wollstonecraft returned to London, she found that Imlay was now living openly with his new mistress. Leaving Fanny with a nursemaid, Wollstonecraft again unsuccessfully attempted suicide by jumping off the Putney Bridge. In April 1796 she met the philosopher William Godwin; within three months they were lovers, although they continued to live in separate households. Wollstonecraft became pregnant, and she and Godwin married; their daughter, Mary, was born on August 30, 1797.³⁹ Wollstonecraft died from complications arising from the birth. She had worked on The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria during 1797, and left it unfinished at her death. Godwin published it with other posthumous works in 1798.

The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, a novel, was intended for a broader pubic than A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and tells a number of intertwined stories. The main one is that of Maria Venables, an upper middle-class woman, perfectly sound of mind, committed to an insane asylum by her husband who, in exercising his right to consign Maria to the asylum, separated her from her infant daughter. Also confined in the asylum is Mr. Danford, a middle-class man whose relatives have had him kidnapped and locked up. apparently to get control of the property to which he is heir. Danford tells the history of his failed venture to settle in America to Maria and her keeper, Jemima, and Maria falls in love with him. Jemima, in turn, recounts the story of her life to Maria and Danford. Jemima is at the lowest rung of the social scale, born out of wedlock to a mother who was abandoned after Jemima was born and who died shortly thereafter. Jemima herself was seduced and abandoned, and struggled to support herself throughout her life. Within these narratives are other tales, most strikingly that of Peggy, sister of Maria's childhood nurse, now the lower middle-class wife of a sailor who was impressed into the British navy and died while in service, leaving Peggy penniless.

The multiplicity of women's life stories, and the fact that they reflected the experiences of women from the poorest to the middle class, reinforced Wollstonecraft's assertion in the Author's Preface that Maria's plight was not unique; the ills that beset her were representative of the "wrongs" that plagued all British women. One such wrong was the tremendous vulnerability facing any woman who did not marry; another was the same vulnerability, along with the obliteration of her separate legal status, faced by every married woman.

In The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria Wollstonecraft depicts woman after woman seduced or raped, "ruined" and reduced to penury. For poor unmarried women the effects of men's desire to possess women's bodies were particularly devastating. As Virginia Sapiro remarked, "These are not delicate reservations about tarnished reputations. or lost innocence. The question for women was rape, dangerous and unwanted pregnancy, and the possibility of literally being cast out to the streets, with all that implied."⁴⁰ Jemima was motherless because her father seduced her mother, whom he never married, and who died nine days after Jemima's birth. Jemima herself was raped by her employer and thrown out of doors. She later formed a liaison with a tradesman whose mistress she barred from the house, only to find that the woman subsequently drowned herself because she could not support herself. Mr. Venables seduced and abandoned a servant who later died; the child of that seduction was near starvation when Maria began giving money to the woman to whose care the mother entrusted the child.

While the devastating consequences of bearing a child out of wedlock for poor women might involve starvation and death, middle- and upper-class women could also be "ruined" by pregnancy before marriage. Part of their vulnerability stemmed from the moral code that declared that no woman could be regarded as "virtuous" who had sexual relations outside of marriage.⁴¹ Even without such moral condemnation, however, an unmarried mother would have suffered economic ruin. Women could not keep their freedom by deciding not to marry; there were few ways except marriage by which women could earn their living. As John Stuart Mill remarked nearly a century later, men had made marriage a "Hobson's choice" for women, "that or none," by closing all other remunerative occupations to them.⁴²

Marital enslavement was particularly odious because it was sanctioned and supported by the power of the state.⁴³ Not only were there few remunerative occupations open to women, but if a woman did have any moveable property, it became her husband's when they married. A husband might be both intemperate and profligate, but "over their mutual fortune she has no power, it must all pass through his hand."⁴⁴ Any money she might subsequently earn or inherit also became his, and she could not enter into contracts or sue or be sued in her own name. Indeed, Maria exclaimed, a wife "has nothing she can call her own. [Her husband] may use any means to get at what the law considers as his, the moment his wife is in possession of it, even to the forcing of a lock" on her writing desk.⁴⁵

A married woman's inability to own property in her own name reflected the fact that in many ways "the prejudices of mankind" had "made women the property of their husbands."⁴⁶ A wife was "as much a man's property as his horse, or his ass."⁴⁷ The notion that a wife's person as well as her possessions belonged to her husband underlay the legal action for "criminal conversation," whereby a husband could sue another man for "damages" for having sexual relations with his wife, despite the fact that the husband "neverappeared to value his wife's society, till he found that there was a chance of his being indemnified for the loss of it."⁴⁸ No such action was available to a wife, regardless of the severity of a husband's offense. In one of the most chilling scenes in the novel, when Venables offers sex with Maria to his friend for a loan of five hundred pounds, both men regard the action as a plausible extension of Venables's prerogative as a husband.⁴⁹

Not only was a woman the property of her husband, but their child was also his. When Venables committed Maria to the asylum, he separated her from her daughter, and Maria's struggle to free herself from her imprisonment was simultaneously a struggle to rejoin her child. Wollstonecraft repeatedly depicted mothers torn from their children by a combination of male irresponsibility and the law. A female inmate who sings "the pathetic ballad of old Robin Gray" lost her mind and was separated from her child "during the first lying-in."⁵⁰ Peggy, sister of Maria's nurse and wife of the sailor, Daniel, found she could not support herself and her children on what she could earn after Daniel died despite the fact that she labored grueling hours; she feared the state would remove the children and send them to Daniel's distant parish.⁵¹ The woman who took in Maria after she left Venables was beaten by her husband "though she had a child at the breast," and she was without recourse to stop the beatings or protect the child.⁵²

A woman, once married, could not regain her freedom or her claim to her child, no matter what the offenses her husband committed. When Maria appeared before the judge at Danford's trial for "criminal conversation" (that is, for seduction and adultery), she declaimed, "I exclaim against the laws which throw the whole weight of the yoke on the weaker shoulders, and force women, when they claim protectorship as mothers, to sign a contract, which renders them dependent on the caprice of the tyrant, whom choice or necessity has appointed to reign over them."⁵³ In order not to be a slave, a woman had to be able to separate from her husband, and to retain custody of her child when she did so. But even as Maria announced, "I claim then a divorce," she, the judge and the reader all knew that the legal bond of marriage was not severed by such a pronouncement, and not even by offenses as heinous as Venables's acts. The legal rules governing marriage "forge adamantine fetters" between those who do not love one another and were even "more inhuman" than those that "commanded even the most atrocious criminals to be chained to dead bodies."⁵⁴

The core of Wollstonecraft's feminist vision was her belief in the desirability and moral necessity of women's independence. "Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue," she wrote in her dedicatory epistle to Talleyrand in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, "and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath."⁵⁵ In order to live independently, women had to have the possibility of supporting themselves. As Jemima lamented, "How often have I heard in conversation, and readin books, that every person willing to work may find employment? It is the vague assertion, I believe, of insensible indolence, when it relates to men; but, with respect to women, I am sure of its fallacy."⁵⁶ Almost no jobs save those of "milliners and mantua-makers" were open to women, and all too often "an attempt to earn their own subsistence, a most laudable one!" sunk women "almost to the level of those poor abandoned creatures who live by prostitution."⁵⁷

The possibility of maintaining oneself was crucial not only to those who did not marry, but also to the moral reformation of marriage itself. Unless women could earn their own living, they would be forced to marry, leading to the kinds of loveless and corrupt unions that Wollstonecraft depicted so bitterly. If decent jobs were open to women, "women would not then marry for a support," which turned marriage into a kind of "legal prostitution."⁵⁸ Moreover, husbands and wives could not experience the kind of equality that Wollstonecraft saw as a prerequisite for "friendship" within marriage unless women had the opportunity to earn their living (although Wollstonecraft did not contend that married women should work beyond the household, and clearly expected mothers would make the care of their children their first priority). Unless a woman knew that she could work, she would find it impossible even to contemplate leaving a marriage, for she would have no way of maintaining herself. And women's inability to leave could not but affect the quality of any marriage, even an otherwise healthy one.⁵⁹ Wollstonecraft wanted to keep women from this vulnerability by making certain that they would be able to earn their keep when necessary.

Guaranteeing women's independence, in Wollstonecraft's eyes, meant guaranteeing women the ability to support not only themselves but any children they might have. While she by no means thought that every woman would be or should be a mother, she did regard women as the proper and rightful custodians of children, and therefore any policy to provide for women of necessity had also to provide for their children.

Part of the reason to place children in women's custody was that men were often indifferent fathers. The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria was full of depictions of men who seduced or raped and then abandoned the woman and child. Venables took no responsibility for his nonmarital child. When her mother died nine days after giving birth, Jemima was left with only "a Christian name."⁶⁰ Later she laments, "I had no one to love me … I was an egg dropped on the sand; a pauper by nature, hunted from family to family, who belonged to nobody—and nobody cared for me … I was, in fact, born a slave."⁶¹ She was a "slave" because she was penniless and no one had responsibility to maintain her; without any resources, she could not hope to become a self-determining and self-possessing individual (a citizen rather than a slave). But she was neither a pauper nor a slave by "nature"; no infants have property by nature, but only through the laws establishing affiliation and rights ofinheritance. Similarly, Jemima had a biological father, that is, one by "nature," but none in the eyes of the law. When she reached puberty, Jemima herself was raped by her employer and abandoned when she became pregnant. Venables seduced and abandoned his servant girl and their child, and Maria judged the abandonment more severely than the seduction: I "could excuse the birth, [but] not the desertion of this unfortunate babe."⁶²

Wollstonecraft's sole portrait of a man able and willing to discharge the responsibilities of fatherhood was Maria's bachelor uncle. It is he who provided her with constant love and support and who extended his protection to her sisters and her child as well. He was, Maria said, "the dear parent of my mind."⁶³ His paternal solicitude extended to Maria's daughter, whom he offered to adopt.⁶⁴ His willingness to act as father to Maria's daughter, perhaps, made her exclaim when he died that she was "widowed by the death of my uncle",⁶⁵ his care of her daughter was like that a husband might have provided. In The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria Wollstonecraft gave the title of "father" to a man who was neither a biological father nor the spouse or sexual partner of the mother. In her eyes, it would seem, the rights of fatherhood derived neither from nature nor from marriage; they had to be established through concrete acts of care and responsibility.

Maria was "imprisoned" long before Venables committed her to the asylum; as she put it, "Marriage had bastilled me for life."⁶⁶ She had little choice but to get married. When she married, she lost legal control of both her possessions and her body; she could neither control her earnings nor refuse her husband sexual access. When she had a child, her husband could remove the child from her care and custody. When Wollstonecraft addressed what needed to be done to right the legal underpinnings of "the wrongs of woman," she began with what she regarded as the two most serious of those wrongs, the impossibility of a woman—married or single—to earn enough to support herself and her children, and the denial of maternal custody rights.

While Maria's suffering stemmed mainly from male perfidy and the workings of the law, Wollstonecraft also suggested that some of her difficulties were exacerbated by occasional flights of fancy unchecked by reason, the exaggeration of sensibility that Wollstonecraft had analyzed in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.⁶⁷ Maria was both a reader and a writer: she borrowed books from Danford even before she met him, and she composed her memoirs so that her daughter would have a reflective account of Maria's life. Maria valued rationality and self-awareness, and a mind eager for improvement. But her emotions at times overwhelmed her reason. The anguish she felt at her separation from her daughter "rendered [her] incapable of sober reflection."⁶⁸ Reading Dryden's romance of Guiscard and Sigismunda and Rousseau's Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse that Danford lent her "alternately soothed and inflamed her 'intoxicated sensibility."'⁶⁹

Maria's understanding of the abusive power of her husband and of its roots both in his personality and in law and economic structures was astute. As Anne Mellor noted, however, Maria committed a great error, one attributable to excessive sensibility, in turning Danford into a romantic hero:

as she reads Danford's jottings in a book he lends her, her "treacherous fancy" immediately begins to "sketch a character, congenial with her own, from these shadowy outlines." A glimpse of his back, the sound of his voice, afford "coloring for the picture she was delineating on her heart," and mere "animation of countenance" is sufficient to persuade this "enthusiast" that Danford is not only sane but the very embodiment of that "ideal lover" and "demigod," Rousseau's St. Preux.⁷⁰

While both were confined in the asylum, Danford expressed his wish that she "'put it out of the power of fate to separate them,'" and "[a]s her husband she now received him, and he pledged himself as her protector—and eternal friend."⁷¹ Maria's confidence was misplaced. In Wollstonecraft's notes for the conclusion of the novel, Danford was away from Maria on business and his return was delayed; "his delaying to return seemed extraordinary" but love "to excess, excludes fear or suspicion."⁷² Suspicion would have been wise, for in one of the several plot sketches "Her lover [proved] unfaithful."⁷³

In Wollstonecraft's view, true sensibility, "the sensibility which is the auxiliary of virtue, and the soul of genius," was, as Maria wrote in her memoir to her daughter, "so occupied with the feelings of others, as scarcely to regard its own sensations."⁷⁴ Maria, nonetheless, was sometimes swept away by sensation fostered by her own imagination. Right sensibility, by contrast, was always allied with reason. The lesson of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and of The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, read together, was that sensibility would remain mired in sensuality unless women's public roles and rights expanded, while rights unaccompanied by proper sensibility would not produce the changes in character necessary for enduring social reform.

Sexual inequality and women's citizenship: the legacy of Wollstonecraft's dilemma

When Wollstonecraft spoke of the "slavery" of women in eighteenth-century England, she clearly described circumstances vastly different from those of chattel slavery. Yet like many British and American abolitionists, she found women's inability to earn money, married women's legal incapacity to hold property in their own names, and mothers' inability to have custody of their children sure marks of their slavery.⁷⁵ To establish a just regime, social practice and law would have to guarantee women the possibility of being autonomous, of supporting themselves and their children. This would require a number of measures. First, men had to be made to support their children, whether born in or out ofwedlock, and the state had to guarantee women's rights to custody, so that children did not become pawns by which men bound women to them. Second, jobs would have to be open to women, and would have to pay enough for women to be self-supporting; without such jobs, women could neither support children born out of wedlock nor leave abusive marriages. Wollstonecraft's outrage was directed not only at the closing of professional positions to women, but at the low wages of working-class women. Jemima could find no work other than prostitution, assisting in the Poor House, or working at the asylum. Peggy, who worked back-breaking hours as a laundress to feed her children, was utterly ruined when vagabonds stole sheets she had hung out to dry.

Given her understanding of the psychological, cultural, and legal reach of patriarchy, it is neither surprising that Wollstonecraft suggested that women needed political representation, nor that she did not give it more than the passing mention she did in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The workings of patriarchy infused everything from the legal rules governing marital property to the dynamics of sexual attraction. The vote would be a means by which women might acquire a sense of themselves as independent creatures, and by which they might affect their ability to acquire the material preconditions of independence by influencing public policy and legislation.

Wollstonecraft was acutely aware of the part that sexual difference played in women's subordination: biology assigned women and men different roles in human gestation and lactation, and these became the rationale for different social roles. The ensuing social differentiation between men and women then became the basis of disparity of political and economic resources. Socially created hierarchy thus took on the appearance of natural distinction, and male domination became eroticized for both men and women, and a part of heterosexual attraction. For women to participate in civil society as independent citizens, the inequality that underlay the eroticization of domination had to be eliminated or at least greatly diminished. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman condemned the culture of sensibility that sustained the erotic dynamic of inequality, while The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria explored the impact of law on creating and perpetuating sexual inequality. Together they constituted an extraordinary analysis of both the public and interpersonal workings of patriarchal power.

Wollstonecraft's depiction of sexual and marital relationships in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria indicated that she had come to believe that, while women's role as childbearer was given by nature, the social consequences of that role were constructed by notions of proper sensibility as well as by law, and were thus under human control. From Wollstonecraft's day to our own, feminists have debated how best to construct law and social policy to take account of the different biological functions of men and women in human procreation and their different social roles in childrearing. For some feminists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, legal equality promised the end to male domination.⁷⁶ Others, however, remained skeptical about whether laws that made no distinction between the rights and responsibilities of mothers and fathers could procure justice for women.⁷⁷ Wollstonecraft believed that the law allowed men to "possess" both women and their children, and her work suggested that she would have given both married and unmarried mothers custodial rights to their offspring.⁷⁸

Wollstonecraft knew that to attempt to alter the social construction of gender would be an extremely difficult and risky endeavor that would not only require great political effort but also place severe strain on intimate heterosexual relationships. Although she died before she finished her novel, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, she sketched a number of endings which provide clues to her thinking. One of the concluding fragments ends with Maria suffering a miscarriage and then dying herself.⁷⁹ Another reunites Maria with the daughter she thought had died, and causes Maria to exclaim, "I will live for my child!" Even this "happy" ending, however, would have followed upon a life in which Maria had been imprisoned in marriage, and then in an asylum. The laws that "enslaved" Maria might also trap others; they had not been altered at the novel's end. Even if Maria were to raise her daughter, she would do so outside of marriage with the companionship of the social outcast, Jemima.

In her insightful "Introduction" to The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, Anne Mellor notes that it would be "nearly a century before the reform of the marriage laws removed the legal basis for the oppressive conditions that Maria depicts so unsparingly."⁸⁰ But despite extensive changes in the law, patriarchy in law and social practice is not yet a thing of the past. Carole Pateman has characterized those who struggle to achieve equal civil and political rights for women as well as some kind of public acknowledgment and accommodation of the distinct demands of motherhood as "impaled on the horns of … Wollstonecraft's dilemma." Whether to give men and women identical social roles and legal rights, or whether to recognize certain social effects of sexual difference and create "equality within difference" is still widely debated among feminist political and legal theorists. The dilemma is that under "existing patriarchal conceptions of citizenship, the choice always has to be made between equality and difference, or between equality and womanhood."⁸¹

The challenge for theorist and activist alike is what to do with our knowledge that equality under the law may lead not to equality of circumstances and opportunities but to continued subjection. While differential rights offer a way to obtain women's freedom from patriarchal control in both family and civil society, they may purchase that present freedom at a serious cost for the future. Differential rights run the danger of reinscribing sex-based roles (women as childrearers), offer little incentive to men to takeresponsibility for the private realm (particularly the care of children), and may treat unfairly some men who do in fact assume that responsibility. Unless deeply rooted notions about sexuality and rationality, masculinity and femininity change, legal reform alone will not bring about the transformation to the new society which Wollstonecraft hoped to usher into being. "Wollstonecraft's dilemma" is a dilemma for those living between an oppressive past of sexual inequality, and a hoped-for future of sexual equality whose institutions and social practices can only at present be imagined. What the laws in such a future should be requires theoretical argument informed by difficult judgments about the dynamics of social life, and what forms of life and social practices are likely to lead to greater lived equality in the future. In debating these matters, contemporary feminists are greatly enriched by Wollstonecraft's rich depictions of the relationships between mothers and fathers, parents and children, and her passionate commitment to free women from the bonds of patriarchy in social custom and law alike.…

Notes

¹ G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 310.

² On Mary Wollstonecraft's life see Eleanor Flexner, Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1972); Emily Sunstein, A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft (Boston: Twayne-G. K. Hall, 1984); Jennifer Lorch, Mary Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Radical Feminist (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990); and Janet Todd, "The Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (1976): 721-34.

³ The themes of J. S. Mill's The Subjection of Women bear a close resemblance to many of Wollstonecraft's arguments. Virginia Sapiro says no one who played a key role in the feminist movement except Lucretia Mott appears to have read Wollstonecraft prior to the late nineteenth century (Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 227), and no entry to "Wollstonecraft" appears in the Index to the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. But Mill may have known Wollstonecraft's work through William Thompson's Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against, the Pretensions of the Other Half Men, to Retain Them in Political and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery (1825).

⁴ Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, xxv.

⁵ Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1974), 162, quoted in Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, 90.

⁶ Zillah Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York: Longman, 1981); Jean Grimshaw, "Mary Wollstonecraft and the Tensions in Feminist Philosophy," Radical Philosophy 52 (Summer 1989): 11-17; Moira Gatens, "'The Oppressed of My Sex': Wollstonecraft on Reason, Feeling and Equality," in Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, eds. Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman (Cambridge: Polity Press and University Park: Penn State University Press, 1991), 112-28; Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue.

⁷ The reception of Wollstonecraft's work was mixed. On favorable reactions see R. M. Janes, "On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd ed., ed. Carol Poston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 297-307; on the ridicule heaped on Wollstonecraft see Sapiro, A Vindication of the Political Virtue, 28-30 and 274-77.

⁸ Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, Rapport sur l 'instruction publique fait au nom du Comite de constitution, a I'Assemblee nationale, les 10, 11, et 19 de septembre 1791 (Paris, 1791), quoted in Karen Offen, "Was Mary Wollstonecraft a Feminist? A Contextual Re-reading of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792-1992," in Quilting a New Canon. Stitching Women's Words, ed. Uma Parameswaran (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1996), 3-25, p. 7.

⁹ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, v, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 67-68.

¹⁰ Sapiro, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 124 (reference omitted).

¹¹ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 131.

¹² For Rousseau's views, which Wollstonecraft clearly had in mind, see Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (New York: Dutton, Everyman's Library, 1966), Book v, 321-444. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was in many respects a response to Emile. Wollstonecraft agreed with and admired much of what Rousseau had to say about moral education, but disagreed sharply with his understanding of women's proper education and role in civil society.

¹³ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 208.

¹⁴ Ibid., 112.

¹⁵ Barbara Taylor, "Introduction," in Many Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Everyman's Library, Knopf, 1992), xviii.

¹⁶ Offen, "Was Mary Wollstonecraft a Feminist?", 10.

¹⁷ Ibid., 10.

¹⁸ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 68.

¹⁹ Ibid., 95.

²⁰ Ibid., 157.

²¹ Ibid., 219.

²² Ibid., 216.

²³ Ibid., 218-20.

²⁴ Ibid., 217.

²⁵ Ibid., 222. One of a mother's duties was that she should nurse her children (in this Wollstonecraft fully agreed with Rousseau): "Her parental affection, indeed, scarcely deserves the name, when it does not lead her to suckle her children … What sympathy does a mother exercise who sends her babe to nurse, and only takes it from a nurse to send it to school?" (223).

²⁶ Rousseau expressed his views about motherhood and citizenship in Emile, Book v.

²⁷ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 216.

²⁸ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 24.

²⁹ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 216.

³⁰ Letter, 1794: 242, quoted in Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, 157.

³¹ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 120.

³² Ibid., quoted in Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, xxxi.

³³ Anne K. Mellor, "Introduction," Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria or the Wrongs of Woman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), xvi; Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 286.

³⁴ Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 276.

³⁵ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 222.

³⁶ Ibid., 65.

³⁷ Janet Todd, "The Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft," Signs 1 (1976): 721-34, esp. 721.

³⁸ Mellor, "Introduction" to Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, vii.

³⁹ Their daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, married Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote the novel Frankenstein. For her biography see Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Romance and Reality (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).

⁴⁰ Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, 129.

⁴¹ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Right of Woman, 140.

⁴² John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women 11869], in Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Alice Rossi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 156.

⁴³ On the legal status of married women see Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).

⁴⁴ Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, 145.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 149.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 139.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 149.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 146.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 151-52.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 95.

⁵¹ Ibid., 128.

⁵² Ibid., 158.

⁵³ Ibid., 179.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 154.

⁵⁵ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 65.

⁵⁶ Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, 115.

⁵⁷ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 218.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 218.

⁵⁹ Susan Okin has analyzed the effect of the inequality of men's and women's economic resources and employment opportunities on present-day marriage and divorce, in Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 134-69.

⁶⁰ Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, 88.

⁶¹ Ibid., 110.

⁶² Ibid., 179.

⁶³ Ibid., 163.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 165.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 166.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 146.

⁶⁷ This paragraph draws on insights found in Mellor, "Introduction" to Maria or the Wrongs of Woman.

⁶⁸ Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, 86.

⁶⁹ Mellor, "Introduction" to Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, xiii (page references omitted).

⁷⁰ Ibid., xiv (page references omitted).

⁷¹ Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, 173.

⁷² Ibid., 182.

⁷³ Ibid., 183.

⁷⁴ Quoted in Mellor, "Introduction" to Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, xv.

⁷⁵ It is interesting to compare this aspect of Wollstonecraft's thought to that of two nineteenth-century works that also discussed women, slavery, and citizenship. In 1869 John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women compared the situation of married women to that of slaves; in 1861 Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl recounted the story of her life as a slave in North Carolina. Mill's analysis of women's subordination in the familyand in civil society, and his insistence that married women's position amounted to a form of "slavery," paralleled Wollstonecraft's very closely. Like Wollstonecraft, Mill showed how married women's lack of rights and legal equality with their husbands not only subjected them to male domination in the household, but made their equal participation in civil society impossible. Mill's solution to the problem of women's subjection, however, was to equalize the rights of women and men. In The Subjection of Women he wrote that nothing more was needed for women to achieve equality than that "the present duties and protective bounties in favour of men should be recalled" (Mill, The Subjection of Women, 154). With respect to child custody, mothers and fathers would have equal claims, and if they disagreed they would have to advance their claims through litigation. As Christine di Stefano has said, in advocating equal treatment for women and men, Mill allowed women to become citizens if they would become like men (Christine di Stefano, Configurations of Masculinity [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991], 185-86). This assimilation of women into a gendered model for the citizen resulted from the fact that Mill paid little attention to women's bodies or sexuality.

Jacobs's account of her struggle for freedom contained her reflections on both citizenship and maternity. While from one perspective the situation of all slaves was similar, a state of radical lack of freedom, Jacobs repeatedly insisted that the experience of slavery was different for males and females. In slavery men were deprived of the ownership of their bodies and of their labor. Women suffered these injustices, but were also the objects and instruments of their masters' sexual appetites, and had no custodial claim to their children. The appropriation of women's procreative as well as their productive labor, and the denial of the claims of maternity were, for Jacobs, the particular evils of slavery for women. Her understanding of what freedom would mean was also inextricably linked to women's role as mothers. On several occasions she said that, were she free, she would be able to marry and have her maternal rights recognized as wife and mother. But since her children were in fact conceived and born out of wedlock (their father was a prominent white man in Jacobs's home town), she focused her attention on her need and her right to keep her children with her, to be able to support them, and to provide them with a home (Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19871).

⁷⁶ Mill, The Subjection of Women; see the discussion of various theorists, including Mill, in Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism.

⁷⁷ See, for example, Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Martha Albertson Fineman, The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (New York: Routledge, 1995).

⁷⁸ In her concern to break the hegemony of male power and control over women and children, Wollstonecraft anticipated the perspective of that branch of feminist legal theory of our own day that contends that only if law abandons the notion of the gender-neutral citizen will women receive justice in matters like rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence; see Susan Estrich, Real Rape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Christine Littleton, "Reconstructing Sexual Equality," California Law Review 75 (1987): 1279-1337. The argument of The Wrongs of Woman bears a striking resemblance, for example, to that of Martha Fineman's The Neutered Mother, which condemns the trend of the past twenty-five years of giving fathers and mothers equal rights with respect to such matters as child custody. Both Wollstonecraft and Fineman espouse what Fineman calls the "threatening" proposal that law support "unmediated motherhood—motherhood outside of patriarchal controls" (Fineman, The Neutered Mother, 233).

⁷⁹ Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, 182-84.

⁸⁰ Mellor, "Introduction" to Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, xviii.

⁸¹ Carole Pateman, "Equality, Difference, and Subordination: the Politics of Motherhood and Women's Citizenship," in Beyond Equality and Difference, eds. Gisela Bock and Susan James (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 20.

For a good account of the debates on equality and difference, see Deborah L. Rhode, Justice and Gender: Sex Discrimination and the Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).