Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written in 1792 and is a book that should be essential reading for students of British literature for a number of reasons, including its historical value, its particular place in that history as a statement of the rights of women, and because of the place the book holds among social writings of the time. It is also an example of an early woman writer who challenges the established order and who uses literature as her means of speaking out to the world. At one time, Mary Wollstonecraft was as famous a writer as her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, would become, but today it is clear that the daughter is much the better known of the two largely because of her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley and because of her creation of the story embodied in her novel Frankenstein. Both mother and daughter were important proponents of the rights of women both in their writings and in the way they lived and served as role models for other women of their time. Much of their work as writers and political thinkers developed from and represented the spirit of the Romantic era in which they lived and helped shape the world in which we live today.

Mary Wollstonecraft's best-known work is her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a work in which she expounded in the ills facing women and on the need for justice for women. Her stand was considered radical, and as a result she had to portray her heroine in a special way:

The exaltation of feeling prized by Romantics posed severe problems for women. However liberating, female desire was singularly hard to express. women had to survive in a culture in which the search for personal fulfillment had no ready place. Small wonder then that Mary Wollstonecraft placed her heroine Maria in a prison for the insane, the better to cast into relief the terrible tension in a woman's mind resulting directly from her powerlessness (Alexander 10).

Alexander sees a clear distinction between mother and daughter in terms of their analysis of the lot of women in the world, and he notes that though Mary Shelley was aware of her mother's radical approach, she herself took a different route:

Haunted by ways in which genius had to accommodate itself to the demands of a culturally prescribed femininity, she presented a series of female figures, lovely and compliant, their powerlessness serving to clarify the limitless ambition of their men (Alexander 11).

The book is thus not an outgrowth of previous social or philosophical thought except to the degree that it arose within the wide movement for social change taking place in Europe and the United States:

Broadening that movement to include a concern for women was Mary's unique contribution, and she made it, not so much because of what she had read or the thinkers she had listened to and argued with, but from her own personal experience and her reflections on those experiences (Flexner 149).

Her concern was not with the economic exploitation of women, though she would later recognize it, but she was concerned with middle-class women and the ladies of the "gentry" because she believed that these classes set the tone for society as a whole:

She is intent on removing the stigma attaching to woman--any and all woman--as creatures of instinct and feeling, devoid of intellectual powers or the capacity for intellectual growth (Flexner 149).

Wollstonecraft's essential themes in Vindication of the Rights of Woman are directed toward removing the stigma from women and recognizing that women and men are not as different as they have been made out to be:

The theme is this: that women are human beings before they are sexual beings, that mind has no sex, and that society is wasting its assets if it retains women in the role of convenient domestic slaves and "alluring mistresses," denies them economic independence and encourages them to be docile and attentive to their looks to the exclusion of all else (Tomalin 105).

The Romantic age was bringing about a change in the way women were depicted in literature, and Mary Wollstonecraft was both reacting to and part of this change. Women had been treated harshly in literature prior to this period, but various factors at the time were bringing about a change. One was the abundance of female novelists like Fanny Burney, Charlotte Smith, Clara Reeve, and Elizabeth Inchbald, all of whom presented heroines of moral if not always intellectual stature. Another factor was the increase in humanitarian and enlightened sentiment concerning the poor, the weak, and the despised, categories that all included women. Another factor was the existence of the Bluestockings, a group of women who gained some position in a male world by combining piety, seriousness, and learning. They were not radical in what they wanted for women, but their stature helped form a more tolerant climate of opinion regarding women (Ferguson and Todd 60-61).

Wollstonecraft indicates the prevalence of certain ways of thinking about women as found in literature and in society alike, and she finds that the way men tend to view women is often justified in terms of religious belief, though she also finds contradictions in this fact:

To account for, and excuse the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to prove, that the two sexes, in the acquirement of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character; or, to speak explicitly, women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue (Wollstonecraft 170).

Mary Wollstonecraft sees this as simply wrong and proves it through her own strength of mind and her application of reason to her writing.

Mary Wollstonecraft thus reflected a major element of the late eighteenth century in that she was dedicated to the primacy of reason, and it was her belief in reason that permitted her to conceive a world in which women might be seen in the world in a new way, a way that undid the violence of social norms requiring a simple,