Votes For Women! Page 2
Margaret Walters, in her biography of Wollstonecraft, suggests that like the heroine of her first novel (Mary: A Fiction, published in 1788), who rejects her parents, Wollstonecraft had ‘no models, no one to identify with, so she ha[d], literally to invent herself’. Walters points to the fact that Mary faced the barriers experienced by all women who are determined to exercise their independent minds and suggests it is this all too familiar struggle that gives such a ‘curiously modern’ quality to her story and explains why we still identify with her so strongly today.
Like so many women who managed to make their way and fulfil ‘their first duty to themselves as rational creatures’, it was Mary’s father who lit what we would now call her feminist light bulb, although in her case, not in a good way. Her family life is a prime example of how the personal becomes political.
She was born in Spitalfields in London in 1759 into a relatively prosperous family. Her paternal grandfather owned a successful silk-weaving business, and when he died in 1765, her father inherited a share of the concern.
With no experience or knowledge of farming he moved his wife and children to live on a farm in Epping in Essex. Edward Wollstonecraft senior failed at every business he attempted and his daughter Mary would later describe him as a childish bully who abused his wife and family after heavy drinking sessions. She would often intervene to protect her mother from his violence. Elizabeth, her mother, seems to have made no protest on her own behalf.
There were seven Wollstonecraft children – Ned, Mary, Henry Woodstock, Eliza, Everina, James and Charles – and Ned was undoubtedly his mother’s favourite. Mary would later write in her novel Maria: The Wrongs of Woman, inspired by her mother’s adoration of her older brother, ‘in comparison with her affection for him, she might be said not to love the rest of her children’.
Of all the children Ned was the only one to receive a ‘gentleman’s’ education, which would prepare him for the Bar. As the family moved around the country from London to Epping, to Yorkshire, back to London, to Wales and finally to London again, the only formal education Mary received was a few years at a day school in Beverley in East Yorkshire where she learned to read and write. From then on everything she learned was self-taught, including several foreign languages.
No wonder such a bright young woman became determined that girls should enjoy the same education as boys. Her hard work and forcefulness did not impress her family, though. She wrote later of her life compared with that of her brother: ‘Such indeed is the force of prejudice that what was called spirit and wit in him, was cruelly repressed as forwardness in me.’
There was little opportunity to earn a living for an eighteenth-century middle-class young woman of limited means apart from teaching, becoming a governess, needlework or acting as a lady’s companion. Mary tried them all and hated them. Her prospects in the marriage market were poor as there was no money in the family, but then marrying for money would not have fitted her growing political philosophy.
She did attempt to run a girls’ school in Newington Green in London in the 1780s. She had rescued her sister Eliza from a brutal marriage and arranged a legal separation for her. They opened the school together in 1784, but it was not a success. Instead she decided to try to become a professional writer.
She was not, as she would describe herself, ‘the first of a new genus’. It was not uncommon during this period for women to earn a living by the pen, although the majority were engaged in popular fiction. Mary did not approve, believing the romantic novel to be a dangerous occupation for the young female reading public. Her first work was a stern, moral tract called Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, in which she criticised the traditional method of teaching girls, which treated them as inferior to boys. She was delighted to earn £10 from the work and a year later wrote to Eliza, ‘I hope you have not forgot that I am an Author.’
It was during her time in Newington Green that she met and befriended a minister, Richard Price. He and a scientist, Joseph Priestley, led a group of intellectuals known as Rational Dissenters. They sought to demystify religion and apply conscience and reason to moral choices. Price became Mary’s mentor and, through him, she became acquainted with the leading reformers of the time, including the publisher Joseph Johnson. It was he who commissioned Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in 1787. He then published the novel Mary: A Fiction, depicting the social limitations oppressing women, and a children’s book, Original Stories from Real Life. Between 1788 and 1792 she worked for Johnson as a translator and reviewer, helping to found his journal, Analytical Review.
Thus she achieved her aim of becoming a pioneer as a liberated woman with the intellectual and financial independence that she advocated for all women. She refused to conform to the demands of high fashion and dressed in a way we would now describe as bohemian. She wore a coarse cloth dress and worsted stockings, wearing her long hair down around her shoulders rather than pinned up as would have been expected of a ‘lady’. One disapproving observer described her as ‘a philosophical sloven’. She gave up meat and the other ‘necessities of life’ in order, she said, to better discover the truth of herself. She wrote to one of her women friends, ‘Struggle with any obstacles rather than go into a state of dependence . . . I have felt the weight, and would have you by all means avoid it.’
The French Revolution, which began in 1789, became a crucially important event for Mary and her group of liberal intellectuals. She saw it as a struggle for individual liberty against the tyranny of a spoiled and wealthy monarchy and aristocracy. Her friend and mentor, Richard Price, wrote in praise of the revolutionaries and argued that ‘the British people, like the French, had the right to remove a bad king from the throne’. He’d earlier been roundly criticised for praising the American Revolution and now the response came from the British statesman Edmund Burke. His heated riposte was called Reflections on the Revolution in France and defended the ‘inherited rights’ of monarchy.
Thomas Paine’s response to Burke in 1791, The Rights of Man, is probably the better-known work, but Mary was also prompted to respond in support of Price, and of revolution, with a pamphlet entitled ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men’, published in 1790. She expressed her opposition to a range of social practices such as the slave trade and addressed human rights and international politics. She also took Burke to task for sympathising with the aristocratic women of France, whom he described as victimised by the Revolution.
‘Your tears are reserved,’ she wrote, ‘very naturally considering your character, for . . . the downfall of queens . . . whilst the distress of many industrious mothers, whose helpmates have been torn from them, and the hungry cry of helpless babes, were vulgar sorrows that could not move your commiseration.’
Her first ‘Vindication’ was well received by the radicals in London within whom Mary assumed her rightful place, including William Godwin, Samuel Coleridge, Joseph Priestley, William Blake, Thomas Paine and William Wordsworth. These London radicals were exponents of the Enlightenment – the social revolution that celebrated reason as the absolute core of human identity. They sought to redefine the family, the state and education along the lines of the Enlightenment. It was a short step to the aim of sexual equality for Mary to take as she argued women were the moral and intellectual equals of men in her second Vindication – that of ‘the Rights of Woman’.
It took her only three months to produce more than three hundred pages and she was not convinced she had done the best possible job. She wrote to a friend, ‘I should have written to you sooner had I not been very much engrossed by writing and printing my vindication of the Rights of Woman . . . I shall give the last sheet to the printer today; and, I am dissatisfied with myself for not having done justice to the subject. Do not suspect me of false modesty – I mean to say, that had I allowed myself more time I could have written a better book.’
Nevertheless, the book had an immediate and positive impact. Lady Palmerston is said to have warned her husband, ‘I have been reading the Rights of Woman, so you must in future expect me to be very tenacious of my rights and privileges.’ In Glasgow, a Mrs Anne MacVicar Grant wrote that ‘the book was so run after here, that there is no keeping it long enough to read it leisurely’.
There were, of course, detractors. The leading evangelical writer and Bluestocking group member Hannah More wrote to Horace Walpole that she had not read the book and found that ‘there is something fantastic and absurd in the very title. There is no animal so much indebted to subordination for its good behaviour as woman.’ The general opinion of the more conservative women was that the book was an ‘Indecent Rhapsody’. One wonders how many of them had actually read it!
Mary was not alone in arguing for women’s as well as men’s rights. In the midst of the French Revolution, Olympe de Gouges, correctly arguing that Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité rather left out the female perspective, wrote Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, published in 1791, in which she challenged the exclusion of women from the revolutionaries’ Declaration of the Rights of Man. She was not so well received as Wollstonecraft. As a result of insisting on women’s rights, de Gouges was guillotined on a charge of treason.
Mary’s hope that men and women would successfully achieve equality in their education and, consequently, their relationships with each other did not quite work out for her. She had pleaded in A Vindication for intellectual companionship to be the ideal of marriage, with women able to be defined by their own character and work rather than by their marriages. When it came to men, she failed to practise what she preached. In London she had fallen passionately in love with a painter and literary figure called Henry Fuseli. He was married and his wife was unaware of their affair. Mary, never one for concealing her fee
lings, and often more likely to jump into a situation with both feet rather than consider the consequences, decided they should be open about the relationship. She went round to Fuseli’s home, asked to see his wife, Sophia, and informed her that the best solution to their dilemma was a ménage à trois. Sophia was furious, thought Mary’s plan appalling and threw her out of the house. The affair was over.
In 1792, as her feminist manifesto hit the bookshops, Mary travelled to France, ostensibly to witness the Revolution that had so inspired her, but, rather conveniently, escaping London and the Fuseli scandal. She arrived just as the Jacobin Terror, which would see mass executions and the rise of arbitrary power, was about to begin. Her book, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, published in 1794, documents her attempts to reconcile her horror at the violence with her belief in the perfectibility of man. Her disillusionment was profound.
In France, in the midst of political chaos and, as an Englishwoman, great physical danger, Mary lost her heart again. In Paris she was welcomed into a group of British and American free-thinking radicals and, in the early months of 1793, she met Captain Gilbert Imlay. He was handsome, charming, a former soldier now involved in trade, and Mary fell hopelessly in love.
In November of the same year she wrote to him: ‘I have felt some gentle twitches, which make me begin to think, that I am nourishing a creature who will soon be sensible of my care. This thought has . . . produced an overflowing of tenderness to you.’
Imlay did not share her overflowing of tenderness, but he did protect her from the possibility of imprisonment as an Englishwoman as the unrest continued by registering her as his wife at the American Embassy. (They had not actually married.) Americans were protected from the Terror by their nationality, but he soon went off on commercial travels, leaving Mary alone. She followed him to Le Havre, hoping that the birth of their child would bring him closer to her. Fanny was born there in May 1794. Imlay would not become the devoted father Mary had hoped for.
She named her daughter Fanny after her closest friend from childhood, Fanny Blood. William Godwin, in his book about Mary written after her death, said that she and Fanny ‘contracted a friendship so fervent as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind’. There is no evidence to suggest that theirs was a sexual relationship, but the two women lived and worked together for ten years and Mary virtually adopted Fanny’s family as her own.
In 1785 Fanny had travelled to Lisbon to marry an Irishman who lived there. She became pregnant and Mary went to Lisbon to be with her at the time of the birth. Fanny died in childbirth and Godwin wrote that Mary had named her daughter Fanny after ‘the dear friend of her youth, whose image could never be erased from her memory’.
After her daughter’s birth, Mary followed Imlay to London where she hoped they would set up a family home together. He was busy with his commercial ventures, beginning to see other women and had no interest in family life. Mary made her first attempt at suicide by taking an overdose of opium, but was found and revived by a maid.
The miserable relationship dragged on. It seems astonishing that such a rational, clever woman could have allowed herself to be used and abused by such a man, but, when he asked her to go to Norway to sort out a business problem for him she packed her bag and, with her tiny baby and a maid, set out for Scandinavia. She spent several months negotiating for compensation for a cargo of Imlay’s that had been stolen by the Norwegian captain of his ship.
When she returned to London she was told by her cook that Imlay had another new mistress – an actress – and Mary made her second attempt at suicide. She walked to Putney Bridge and threw herself into the River Thames, but was rescued by two passing boatmen. Still she tried to revive the relationship with Imlay, constantly pleading for reconciliation. She gave up hope in 1796 when she wrote her last letter to him. ‘I now solemnly assure you this is an eternal farewell . . . I part with you in peace.’
When Mary had first met William Godwin, the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and one of the leading radicals of the time, it had been at a dinner party at Joseph Johnson’s house in 1791. The two had argued about religion and appeared to dislike each other. But then, in 1796, soon after she ended her relationship with Imlay, Mary made the first move on Godwin – not the sort of thing expected of a late-eighteenth-century woman! She went to his house, ostensibly to lend him a book, and they quickly began a highly charged erotic relationship.
Mary’s letters to Godwin bubble with obvious delight at their physical passion for each other. In November 1796 she wrote to him, ‘If the felicity of last night has had the same effect on your health as on my countenance, you have no cause to lament your failure of resolution for I have seldom seen so much live fire running about my features as this morning when recollections – very dear; called forth the blush of pleasure, as I adjusted my hair.’
Wollstonecraft and Godwin did not intend to marry – both had political reservations about the marital state and it was generally assumed, as Mary continued to use the name Imlay, that she had been married in Paris. But early in 1797 Mary discovered she was pregnant and the two decided to wed, causing yet another scandal as so many of their friends had assumed she was already married. A number dropped her, shocked that Fanny had been born out of wedlock.
Mary and Godwin seem to have achieved the kind of marriage she had hoped for. She moved into his house in Somers Town in London and he rented a study for use during the day. They wrote and visited friends, often separately, as both were keen to retain their independence, and Mary looked forward to the arrival of the child she called, in advance of ‘his’ arrival, ‘little William’.
She gave birth on 30 August to Mary – later Shelley and the author of Frankenstein – but the placenta had to be removed manually by the midwife, causing the puerperal fever from which she died eleven days after her labour.
Godwin wrote to a friend that he believed he would never find happiness again, but he did manage to write a memoir of his wife only two years after her death in which he detailed her sexual exploits. It did nothing to enhance her reputation, but no doubt made him and the two girls a pretty penny. Life, as they say, is copy.
The memoir led to some condemnation of Wollstonecraft, notably by the nineteenth-century sociologist Harriet Martineau, who wrote:
Women who would improve the condition and chances of their sex must, I am certain, be not only affectionate and devoted, but rational and dispassionate . . . But Mary Wollstonecraft was, with all her powers, a poor victim of passion, with no control over her own peace, and no calmness or content except when the needs of her individual nature were satisfied.
Later in the nineteenth century, as we have seen, she was championed as an exponent of total equality between the sexes by suffragists and educationalists such as Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Barbara Bodichon and, by the twentieth century, as attitudes to sex became more liberal, she had become the feminist hero she is today. Virginia Woolf summed up her impact:
She whose sense of her own existence was so intense, who had cried out even in her misery, ‘I cannot bear to think of being no more – of losing myself – nay, it appears to be impossible that I should cease to exist,’ died at the age of thirty-six [sic; she was thirty-eight]. But she has her revenge. Many millions have died and been forgotten in the hundred and thirty years that have passed since she was buried; and yet as we read her letters and listen to her arguments and consider her experiments, above all, that most fruitful experiment, her relation with Godwin, and realise the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly; she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.