The Vindication
Like most of her feminist predecessors Mary Wollstonecraft was a largely self-educated woman from a family of modest means. She penned a thoughtful tract on the education of girls in 1786 and befriended like-minded radicals among the Unitarians.
Like other members of her circle, she was emboldened by events in France. Her Vindication of the Rights of Man contrasted Burke's affectionate praise of Marie Antoinette with his contempt for the poor. She gained more notoriety with her sequel, Vindication of the Rights of Women, which echoed and amplified the revolutionary fervor of Olympe des Gouges.Wollstonecraft demanded that liberal democracy should be extended to women. She condemned all forms of authority modeled on that of royalty as ‘‘the pestiferous purple''. Like her English predecessor Mary Astell, she pointed out that if kings required the consent of the governed, so too should husbands and fathers. Men, she argued, had monopolized not merely rights but rationality itself. They forced women into inferiority by encouraging ‘‘gentleness, docility, and spaniel-like affection'' rather than rational self- assertion.8 Education could solve this problem—but not the type of education that Rousseau had prescribed. Only complete freedom could foster the traits women needed to better fulfill their potential. Wollstonecraft openly appealed to male self-interest:
Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers—in a word, better citizens.9
Despite her emphasis on the virtues of democratic citizenship Wollstonecraft was vilified, described as a ‘‘philosophizing serpent,'' ‘‘a hyena in petticoats,'' and an ‘‘usurping bitch.''10 Note the references to animals—as per Burke—and these ‘‘not of the highest order.'' Because she observed that poverty and misfortune sometimes forced women to sell sexual services, she was accused of encouraging prostitution. Her own extra-marital sex received far more attention than her work—particularly in the wake of a posthumous biography written by her husband, William Godwin.
Unlike many other radicals of her day (including Godwin), Wollstonecraft never condemned marriage. Yet her failure to conform to the sexual double standard condemned her work to illegitimacy. The reaction from male intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic was overwhelmingly negative.11 Still, the Vindication of the Rights of Women outlived her critics and came to be appreciated in later years. As one of Wollstonecraft's biographers waggishly put it, the book ‘‘worked a slow seminal effect.''12