Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A

Five years prior to her untimely death at 38, Mary WoUstonecraft (1759-1797) made a major deposit in the historical account of Western feminism with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (subtitled With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects). The revolutionary nature of this polemic lay in its rejection of patriarchal conventions. Believing in the elevating power of education, WoUstonecraft sought to dispel the perception that a woman's ignorance has a girlish, [Page 873]innocent quality in an age when Englishwomen (who could hold no property at all) were pregnant more often than not throughout their childbearing years. This was proof, for her, of woman's slavish dependence on man whereby, with all her “spaniel-like” affection, she is made a mere plaything of man and not his equal.

While Vindication earned WoUstonecraft instant celebrity—the book went through a second edition that same year—detractors dubbed her a dangerous Jacobin, a philosophizing “serpent,” even a “hyena in petticoats.” By integrating many of the liberal presuppositions of her radical friends—she belonged to a group that included Blake, Godwin, Paine, Barbauld, and the painter Fuseli—WoUstonecraft sought to extend the Enlightenment's faith in certain unalien-able rights (to life, liberty, and the pursuit of reason) to females. In Vindication, WoUstonecraft holds that only rational women make virtuous women, through the acquisition of minds of their own. Accordingly, the best marriages are the egalitarian sort, in which women act as their husbands' companions (thus, a marriage of minds), not merely as subordinates.

Wollstonecraft's Vindication was addressed to France's educational minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838), in the hopes of bringing about a revolution in female “manners.” Outraged that the French Revolution had failed to secure equal rights for women, she protested the minister's proposal before the new Constituent Assembly in 1791 to relegate women solely to the domestic sphere by barring them from schools. (French women, meanwhile, wouldn't win suffrage until 1944.) In her rebuttal to Talleyrand's report, as well as to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762), WoUstonecraft insisted that women be granted the rights to hold and distribute property and to pursue careers in law, medicine, and business.

Written feverishly in just a matter of months, Wollstonecraft's manifesto envisions the restoration of women's lost dignity, whereupon by reforming themselves, women will reform the world. Some scholars argue that while Vindication is ahead of its time where gender and political society are concerned, the text is a great deal more conservative on the subjects of male homosexuality and prostitution. For example, in her chapter “On National Education,” she frets that when schoolboys “pig together” in the same bedchamber, sexual immorality inevitably results; and prostitutes were the very embodiment of reason-starved women, the unfortunate “wretches” whose “shameless behavior” threatened to “infest” the streets of London.

WoUstonecraft died during childbirth in August 1797. Her daughter, Mary WoUstonecraft Godwin, would become the second wife of Godwin's acolyte (Percy Shelley) and go on to pen the horror classic Frankenstein (1818). As a vital sponsor to these and other young Romantics, WoUstonecraft promoted the extinction of patriarchy and the ameliorative function of rationality as the precondition for female freedom.

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