A Celebration of Diversity of Women's Literature Pt 5

Mary Wollstonecraft's  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects was revolutionary at its publication and considered to be one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this treatise in the late 18^th century. It was in direct response to the educational and political theorists who thought that women should not be educated. While she is known as a proto-feminist in literary circle, it is her daughter that best known in popular literature: Mary Shelley. 

Wollstonecraft argued several points in this work and chose not to focus only on the education of women. First, she argued that educated women were necessary to the social fabric of Britain and should be viewed as more than property to be sold into marriage by their fathers and treated as ornaments by their husbands. Women were human beings who deserved the same rights as men. Additionally, she concluded that men should be held to the same moral standards as women. She vehemently fought against that double standards of morality, particularly in regards to sexuality, which plagued women of the time. The other standout argument of this work is that women were capable of rational thought and argued against the idea of sensibility. In today’s terms, sensibility would be likened to extreme sentimentality and emotion. There were numerous theorists, Jean-Jacques Rousseau included, who believed that women were incapable of rational thought because of their inherent sensibility. Wollstonecraft argued that it is not that women were incapable of rational thought but rather they were trained from an early age to indulge in sensibility. If women were to be educated like men, they would certainly be capable of rational thought. 

I first encountered this work in my undergraduate studies. It was not an assigned text in my senior seminar on Victorian literature, but it was in my British lit anthology. I decided that I wanted to use this text along with another shorter essay by George Eliot called “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” in my examination of feminist thoughts prior to the onset of modern feminism. It really opened my eyes to the pre-feminist movement. What was interesting about Wollstonecraft and Eliot was that neither really asserted that women were equal to men, but rather both argued that women should be held to the same standards as men in terms of behavior. Women should seek to be more rational rather than engage in sentimentality. 

One of the reasons that I find Vindication of the Rights of Women so compelling and also problematic is the idea that in order to be taken seriously women must curb their emotions. This is a struggle that I think all women deal with at one point in time. It seems like I am constantly being pulled between the hyper-rational and hyper-emotional. In order to be taken seriously in many situations, women are encouraged to shut down their emotional reactions. However, if we become too rational, then we are not feminine enough. It’s a constant battle, one that Wollstonecraft equated with sexuality. As part of her insistence on rationality, women could not be slaves to their own desires. This meant that we needed to forgo passion in relationships and marriage and pursue a companionate marriage as sexual desire subsides into friendship. We must take into account that the idea of marrying for love was only developing. Basically, she argued that women could be dominated by men because they choose to satisfy their lust. However, when you put this into the historical context, you can that the idea of an independent woman was fatally linked to unbridled female sexuality. It was not possible for women to be seen as both sexual and intelligent. Many critics have theorized that this is perhaps why Wollstonecraft sought to remove sexuality from the equation.

Another issue I take with this work is that the idea of education for women was based on social class. She was a part of the middle class and so much of her focus was on the education of women in this social class. While she attacked the wealthy as part of the problem in the dumbing down of women, she did not necessarily sympathize with the poor. Wollstonecraft advocated for public education; however, after the age of nine, she believed that both boys and girls of lower social standing should be taken out of school and educated according to the field that they would work in. This would be almost a vocational training. Those of great talent i.e. intelligence and/or fortune would move on to more formal education including languages (dead and living), science, politics, history, and literature.

Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women is a seminal text in feminist movement albeit a problematic one. It hit on so many of the struggles that are still relevant today. Women are constantly fighting against being labeled as too emotional or too rational. Striking that balance between the two in order to be taken seriously is difficult.