Chapter 7

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

When women, standing at length beyond the last of the gates and walls that have barred their road to freedom, measure their debt to history, there will be little to claim their gratitude before the close of the eighteenth century. The Protestant Reformation on the whole depressed their status, and even among its more speculative sects the Quakers stood alone in preaching the equality of the sexes. The English Whigs ignored the existence of women. It was left for the French thinkers who laid the foundations of the Revolution to formulate a view of society and human nature which, as it were, insisted on its own application to women. The idea of women's emancipation was alive among their principles. One can name its parents, and one marvels not at all that it seized this mind and the other, but that any mind among the professors of the "new philosophy" contrived to escape it. The central thought, which inspired the gospel of perfectibility has a meaning for men which an enlightened mind can grasp, but it tells the plain obvious fact about women.

When Holcroft compares the influence of laws and institutions upon men to the action of beggars who mutilate their children, when Godwin talks of the subtle poisons of dogma and custom, which cause mankind to grow up a race of dwarfs when they should be giants, they seem to be using metaphors which describe nothing so well as the effect of an artificial education and a tradition of subjection upon women. One by one the thinkers of this generation were unconsciously laying down the premises which the women's movement needed. At the end of all their arguments for liberty and perfectibility, we seem to hear to-day a chorus of women's voices which points the application to themselves. There was little hope for women while the opinion prevailed that minds come into the world with their qualities innate and their limitations fixed by nature. If that were the case, then the undeniable fact that women were intellectually and morally dependent and inferior must be accepted as their inevitable destiny. Helvétius, all unconscious of what he did, was the hope-bringer, when he insisted that mind is the creation of education and experience. When he urged that the very inequality of men's talents is itself factitious and the result of more or less good fortune in the occasions which provoke a mind to activity, who could fail to enquire whether the accepted inferiority of women were so natural and so necessary as the whole world assumed?

This school of thought revelled in social psychology. It studied in turn the soldier, the priest and the courtier, and shewed how each of these has a secondary character, a professional mind, a class morality impressed and imposed upon him by his education and employment. Looking down from the vantage ground of their philosophic salon upon their contemporaries in French society who owed their fortunes and reputations to the favour of an absolute court, Helvétius and his friends framed their general theory of the demoralisation which despotism brings about in the human character. They studied the natural history of the human parasite who flourished under the Bourbons. They need not have travelled to Versailles to find him. The domestic subjection of wives to husbands, the education of girls in a specialised morality, the fetters of custom and fashion, the experience of economic dependence, the denial of every noble stimulus to thought and action--these causes, more potent and more universal than any which work at Court, were making a sex condemned to an artificial inferiority, an induced parasitism. Thinkers who had discarded the notion that human minds come into the world with an innate character and with their limitations already predestined, were ripe to draw the conclusion. The Revolution believed that men by taking thought might add many cubits to their mental stature. To think in these terms was to prepare oneself to see that the "lovely follies" the "amiable weaknesses" of the "fair sex" were in their turn nothing innate, but the fostered characteristics of a class bred in subjection, the trading habits of a profession which had bent all its faculties to the art of pleasing. Reformers who sought to raise the peasant, the negro, and even the courtier to his full stature as a man, were inevitably led to consider the case of their own wives and daughters. They were not the men to be arrested by the distinction which has been recently invented. Democracy, we are told, is concerned with the removal not of natural, but of artificial inequalities. Their bias was to regard all inequalities as artificial. Looking forward to the goal of human perfection, they were prompt to realise that every advance would be insecure, and the final hope a delusion, if on their road they should leave half mankind behind them.

It requires a vigorous exercise of the historical imagination to realise the conditions which society imposed upon women in the eighteenth century. If Godwin and Paine had reflected closely on the position of women, they might have been led to modify their exaggerated antithesis between society and government. Government, indeed, imposed a barbarous code of laws upon women. It was a trifle that they were excluded from political power. The law treated a wife as the chattel of her husband, denied her the disposal of her own property, even when it was the produce of her own labour, sanctioned his use of violence to her person, and refused (as indeed it still in part does) to recognise her rights as a parent. But the state of the law reflected only too faithfully the opinions of society, and these opinions in their turn formed the minds of women. Civilised people amuse themselves to-day by detecting how much of the old prejudices still lurk in a shamefaced half-consciousness in the minds of modern men. There was no need in the eighteenth century for any fine analysis to detect the naïve belief that women exist only as auxiliary beings to contribute to the comfort and to flatter the self-esteem of men. The belief was avowed and accepted as the unquestioned basis of human society. Good men proclaimed it, and the cleverest women dared not question it.

For the crudest statement of it we need not go to men who defended despotism and convention in other departments of life. The most repulsive of all definitions of the principle of sex-subjection is to be found in Rousseau:--"The education of women should always be relative to that of men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up, to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable; these are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy." When the men of the eighteenth century said this, they meant it, and they accepted not only its plain meaning, but its remotest logical consequences. It was a denial of the humanity and personality of women. A slave is a human being, whom the law deprives of his right to sell his labour. A woman had to learn that her subjection affected not only her relations to men, but her attitude to nature and to God. The subtle poison ran in her veins when she prayed and when she studied. Subject in her body, she was enslaved in mind and soul as well. Milton saw the husband as a priest intervening between a woman and her God:--

He for God only, she for God in him.

Even on her knees a woman did not escape the consciousness of sex, and a manual of morality written by a learned divine (Dr. Fordyce) assured her that a "fine woman" never "strikes so deeply" as when a man sees her bent in prayer. She was encouraged to pray that she might be seen of men--men who scrutinised her with the eyes of desire. It is a woman, herself something of a "blue-stocking," who has left us the most pathetic statement of the intellectual fetters which her sex accepted. Women, says Mrs. Barbauld, "must often be content to know that a thing is so, without understanding the proof." They "cannot investigate; they may remember." She warns the girls whom she is addressing that if they will steal knowledge, they must learn, like the Spartan youths, to hide their furtive gains. "The thefts of knowledge in our sex are only connived at while carefully concealed, and if displayed punished with disgrace."

Religion was sullied; knowledge was closed; but above all the sentiment of the day perverted morals. Here, too, everything was relative to men, and men demanded a sensitive weakness, a shrinking timidity. Courage, honour, truth, sincerity, independence--these were items in a male ideal. They were to a woman as unnecessary, nay, as harmful in the marriage market as a sturdy frame and well-knit muscles. Dean Swift, a sharp satirist, but a good friend of women, comments on the prevailing view. "There is one infirmity," he writes in his illuminating _Letter to a very young lady on her marriage_, "which is generally allowed you, I mean that of cowardice," and he goes on to express what was in his day the wholly unorthodox view that "the same virtues equally become both sexes." There he was singular. The business of a woman was to cultivate those virtues most conducive to her prosperity in the one avocation open to her. That avocation was marriage, and the virtues were those which her prospective employer, the average over-sexed male, anxious at all points to feel his superiority, would desire in a subject wife. Submission was the first of them, and submission became the foundation of female virtue. Lord Kames, a forgotten but once popular Scottish philosopher, put the point quite fairly (the quotation, together with that from Mrs. Barbauld, is to be found in Mr. Lyon Blease's valuable book on _The Emancipation of Englishwomen_): "Women, destined by nature to be obedient, ought to be disciplined early to bear wrongs without murmuring.... This is essential to the female sex, for ever subjected to the authority of a single person."

The rest of morality was summed up in the precepts of the art of pleasing. Chastity had, of course, its incidental place; it enhances the pride of possession. The art of pleasing was in practice a kind of furtive conquest by stratagems and wiles, by tears and blushes, in which the woman, by an assumed passivity, learned to excite the passions of the male. Rousseau owed much of his popularity to his artistic statement of this position:--"If woman be formed to please and to be subjected to man, it is her place, doubtless, to render herself agreeable to him.... The violence of his desires depends on her charms; it is by means of these that she should urge him to the exertion of those powers which nature hath given him. The most successful method of exciting them is to render such exertion necessary by resistance; as in that case self-love is added to desire, and the one triumphs in the victory which the other is obliged to acquire. Hence arise the various modes of attack and defence between the sexes; the boldness of one sex and the timidity of the other; and in a word, that bashfulness and modesty, with which nature hath armed the weak in order to subdue the strong."

The "soft," the "fair," the "gentle sex" learned its lesson with only too much docility. It grew up stunted to meet the prevailing demand. It acquired weakness, feigned ignorance, and emulated folly as sedulously as men will labour to make at least a show of strength, good sense, and knowledge. It adapted itself only too successfully to the economic conditions in which it found itself. Men accepted its flatteries and returned them with contempt. "Women," wrote that dictator of morals and manners, Lord Chesterfield, "are only children of a larger growth.... A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does a sprightly, forward child." The men of that century valued women only as playthings. They forgot that he is the child who wants the toy.

The first protests against this morality of degradation came, as one would expect, from men. Demoralising as it was for men, it did at least leave them the free use of their minds. Enquiry, reflection, scepticism, unsuitable if not immodest in a woman, were the rights of a manly intellect. Defoe and Swift uttered an unheeded protest in England, but neither of them carried the subject far. There are some good critical remarks in Helvétius about women's education; but the first man in that century who seemed to realise the importance and scope of what several dimly felt, was Baron Holbach, whose materialism was so peculiarly shocking to our forefathers. A chapter "On Women" in his _Système Social_ (1774) opens thus: "In all the countries of the world the lot of women is to submit to tyranny. The savage makes a slave of his mate, and carries his contempt for her to the point of cruelty. For the jealous and voluptuous Asiatic, women are but the sensual instruments of his secret pleasures.... Does the European, in spite of the apparent deference which he affects towards women, really treat them with more respect? While we refuse them a sensible education, while we feed their minds with tedium and trifles, while we allow them to busy themselves only with playthings and fashions and adornments, while we seek to inspire them only with the taste for frivolous accomplishments, do we not show our real contempt, while we mask it with a show of deference and respect?"

Holbach was a rash and rather superficial metaphysician, but the warm-hearted and honest pages which follow this opening inspire a deep respect for the man. He talks of the absurdities of women's education; draws a bitter picture of a woman's fate in a loveless marriage of convenience; remarks that esteem is necessary for a happy marriage, but asks sadly how one is to esteem a mind which has emerged from a schooling in folly; assails the practice of gallantry, and the fashionable conjugal infidelities of his day; writes with real indignation of the dangers to which working-class girls are exposed; proposes to punish seduction as a crime no less cruel than murder, and concludes by confessing that he would like to adopt Plato's opinion that women should share with men in the tasks of government, but dreads the effects which would flow from the admission of the corrupt ladies of his day to power.

Twenty years later this promising beginning bore fruit in the mature and reasoned pleading of Condorcet for the reform of women's education. There was no subject on which this noble constructive mind insisted with such continual emphasis. His feminism (to use an ugly modern word), was an integral part of his thinking. He remembered women when he wrote of public affairs as naturally as most men forget them. He deserves in the gratitude of women a place at least as distinguished as John Stuart Mill's. The best and fullest statement of his position is to be found in the report and draft Bill on national education (Sur l'Instruction Publique), which he prepared for the Revolutionary Convention in 1792 (see also p. 109). He maintains boldly that the system of national education should be the same for women as for men. He specially insists that they should be admitted to the study of the natural sciences (these were days when it was held that a woman would lose her modesty if she studied botany), and thinks that they would render useful services to science, even if they did not attain the first rank. They ought to be educated for many reasons. They must be able to teach their children. If they remain ignorant, the curse of inequality will be introduced into the family, and mothers will be regarded by their sons with contempt. Nor will men retain their intellectual interests, unless they can share them with women. Lastly, women have the same natural right to knowledge and enlightenment as men. The education should be given in common, and this will powerfully further the interests of morality. The separation of the sexes in youth really proceeds from the fear of unequal marriages, in other words, from avarice and pride. It would be dangerous for a democratic community to allow the spirit of social inequality to survive among women, with the consequence that it could never be extirpated among men. Condorcet was not a brilliant writer, but the humanity and generosity of his thought finds a powerful and reasoned expression in his sober and somewhat laboured sentences.

So far a good and enlightened man might go. The substance of all that need be said against the harem with the door ajar, in which the eighteenth century had confined the mind if not the body, of women, is to be found in Holbach and Condorcet. But they wrote from outside. They were the wise spectators who saw the consequences of the degradation of women, but did not intimately know its cause. Mary Wollstonecraft's _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ (1792) is perhaps the most original book of its century, not because its daring ideas were altogether new, but because in its pages for the first time a woman was attempting to use her own mind. Her ideas, as we have seen, were not absolutely new. They were latent in all the thinking of the revolutionary period. They had been foreshadowed by Holbach (whom she may have read), by Paine (whom she had occasionally met), and by Condorcet (whose chief contribution to the question, written in the same year as her _Vindication_, she obviously had not read). What was absolutely new in the world's history was that for the first time a woman dared to sit down to write a book which was not an echo of men's thinking, nor an attempt to do rather well what some man had done a little better, but a first exploration of the problems of society and morals from a standpoint which recognised humanity without ignoring sex. She showed her genius not so much in writing the book, which is, indeed, a faulty though an intensely vital performance, as in thinking out its position for herself.

She had her predecessors, but she owed to them little, if anything. There was not enough in them to have formed her mind, if she had come to their pages unemancipated. She freed herself from mental slavery, and the utmost which she can have derived from the two or three men who professed the same generous opinions, was the satisfaction of encouragement or confirmation. She owed to others only the powerful stimulus which the Revolution gave to all bold and progressive thought. The vitality of her ideas sprang from her own experience. She had received rather less than was customary of the slipshod superficial education permitted to girls of the middle classes in her day. With this nearly useless equipment, she had found herself compelled to struggle with the world not merely to gain a living, but to rescue a luckless family from a load of embarrassments and misfortunes. Her father was a drunkard, idle, improvident, moody and brutal, and as a girl she had often protected her mother from his violence. A sister had married a profligate husband, and Mary rescued her from a miserable home, in which she had been driven to temporary insanity. The sisters had attempted to live by conducting a suburban school for girls; a brief experience as a governess in a fashionable family had been even more formative.

When at length she took to writing and translating educational books, with the encouragement of a kindly publisher, she was practising under the stimulus of necessity the doctrine of economic independence, which became one of the foundations of her teaching. It is the pressure of economic necessity which in this generation and the last has forced women into a campaign for freedom and opportunity. What the growth of the industrial system has done for women in the mass, a hard experience did for Mary Wollstonecraft. In her own person or through her sisters she had felt in an aggravated form most of the wrongs to which women were peculiarly exposed. She had seen the reverse of the shield of chivalry, and known the domestic tyrannies of a sheltered home.

The miracle was that Mary Wollstonecraft's mind was never distorted by bitterness, nor her faith in mankind destroyed by cynicism. Her personality lives for us still in her own books and in the records of her friends. Opie's vivid painting hangs in the National Portrait Gallery to confirm what Godwin tells us of her beauty in his pathetic _Memoir_ and to remind us of Southey's admiration for her eyes. Godwin writes of "that smile of bewitching tenderness ... which won, both heart and soul, the affection of almost every one that beheld it." She was, he tells us, "in the best and most engaging sense, feminine in her manners"; and indeed her letters and her books present her to us as a woman who had courage and independence precisely because she was so normal, so healthy in mind and body, so richly endowed with a generous vitality. If she won the hearts of all who knew her, it was because her own affections were warm and true. She was a good sister, a good daughter, a passionate lover, an affectionate friend, a devoted and tender mother.

She was too real a human being to be misled by the impartialities of universal benevolence. "Few," she wrote, "have had much affection for mankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters, and even the domestic brutes whom they first played with." That eloquent trait, her love of animals and her hatred of cruelty, helps to define her character. She was, says Godwin, "a worshipper of domestic life," and, for all her proud independence, in love with love. In Godwin's prim phraseology, she "set a great value on a mutual affection between persons of an opposite sex, and regarded it as the principal solace of human life." Indeed, in the _Letters to Imlay_, which appeared after her death, it is not so much the strength and independence of her final attitude which impresses us, as her readiness to forgive, her reluctance to resent his neglect, her affection which could survive so many proofs of the man's unworthiness. The strongest passion in her generous nature was maternal tenderness. It won her the enduring love of the children whom she taught as a governess. It caused her mind to be busied with the problem of education as its chief preoccupation. It informs her whole view of the rights and duties of women in her _Vindication_. It inspired the charming fragment entitled _Lessons for Little Fanny_, which is one of the most graceful expressions in English prose of the physical tenderness of a mother's love. If she despised the artificial sensibility which in her day was admired and cultivated by women, it was because her own emotions were natural and strong. Her intellect, which no regular discipline had formed, impressed the laborious and studious Godwin by its quickness and its flashes of sudden insight--its "intuitive perception of intellectual beauty."

The _Vindication_ is certainly among the most remarkable books that have come down to us from that opulent age. It has in abundance most of the faults that a book can have. It was hastily written in six weeks. It is ill-arranged, full of repetitions, full of digressions, and almost without a regular plan. Its style is unformed, sometimes rhetorical, sometimes familiar. But with all these faults, it teems with apt phrases, telling passages, vigorous sentences which sum up in a few convincing lines the substance of its message. It lacks the neatness, the athletic movement of Paine's English. It has nothing of the learning, the formidable argumentative compulsion of Godwin's writing. But it is sold to-day in cheap editions, while Godwin survives only on the dustier shelves of old libraries. Its passion and sincerity have kept it alive. It is the cry of an experience too real, too authentic, to allow of any meandering down the by-ways of fanciful speculation. It said with its solitary voice the thing which the main army of thinking women is saying to-day. There is scarcely a passage of its central doctrine which the modern leaders of the women's movement would repudiate or qualify; and there is little if anything which they would wish to add to it. Writers like Olive Schreiner, Miss Cicely Hamilton, and Mrs. Gilman have, indeed, a background of historical knowledge, an evolutionary view of society, a sense of the working of economic causes which Mary Wollstonecraft did not possess and could not in her age have acquired, even if she had been what she was not, a woman of learning. But she has anticipated all their main positions, and formulated the ideal which the modern movement is struggling to complete. Her book is dated in every chapter. It is as much a page torn from the journals of the French Revolution as Paine's _Rights of Man_ or Condorcet's _Sketch_. And yet it seems, as they do not, a modern book.

The chief merit of the _Vindication_ is its clear perception that everything in the future of women depends on the revision of the attitude of men towards women and of women towards themselves. The rare men who saw this, from Holbach and Condorcet to Mill, were philosophers. Mary Wollstonecraft had no pretensions to philosophy. A brilliant courage gave her in its stead her range and breadth of vision. It would have been so much easier to write a treatise on education, a plea for the reform of marriage, or even an argument for the admission of women to political rights. To the last of these themes she alludes only in a single sentence: "I may excite laughter, by dropping a hint, which I mean to pursue, some future time, for I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government." She had the insight to perceive that the first task of the pioneer was to raise the whole broad issue of the subjection of her sex. She begins by linking her argument with a splendid imprudence to the revolutionary movement. It had proclaimed the supremacy of reason, and based freedom on natural right. Why was it that the new Constitution ignored women? With a fresh simplicity, she appeals to the French Convention in the name of its own abstract principles, as modern women appeal (with more experience of the limitations of male logic) to English Liberalism. But she knew very well what was the enormous despotism of interest and prejudice that she was attacking. The sensualist and the tyrant were for her interchangeable terms, and with great skill she enlists on her side the new passion for liberty. "All tyrants want to crush reason, from the weak king to the weak father." She demands the enlightenment of women, as the reformers demanded that of the masses: "Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a plaything."

With a shrewd if instinctive insight into social psychology, she traces to the unenlightened self-interest of the dominant sex the code of morals which has been imposed upon women. Rousseau supplies her with the perfect and finished statement of all that she opposed. He and his like had given a sex to virtue. She takes her stand on a broad human morality. "Freedom must strengthen the reason of woman until she comprehend her duty." Against the perverted sex-morality which treated woman in religion, in ethics, in manners as a being relative only to men, she directs the whole of her argument. It is "vain to expect virtue from women, till they are in some degree independent of men."

"Females have been insulated, as it were, and while they have been stripped of the virtue that should clothe humanity, they have been decked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-lived tyranny.... Their sole ambition is to be fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character. Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.... Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties.... If marriage be the cement of society, mankind should all be educated after the same model, or the intercourse of the sexes will never deserve the name of fellowship, nor will women ever fulfil the peculiar duties of their sex, till they become enlightened citizens, till they become free by being enabled to earn their own subsistence, independent of men; in the same manner, I mean, to prevent misconstruction, as one man is independent of another. Nay, marriage will never be held sacred till women, by being brought up with men, are prepared to be their companions rather than their mistresses."

It is a brave but singularly balanced view of human life and society. There is in it no trace of the dogmatic individualism that distorts the speculations of Godwin and clogs the more practical thinking of Paine. It is, indeed, a protest against the exaggeration of sex, which instilled in women "the desire of being always women." It flouts that external morality of reputation, which would have a woman always "seem to be this and that," because her whole status in the world depended on the opinion which men held of her. It demands in words which anticipate Ibsen's _Doll's House_, that a woman shall be herself and lead her own life. But "her own life" was for Mary Wollstonecraft a social life. The ideal is the perfect companionship of men and women, and the preparation of men and women, by an equal practice of modesty and chastity, and an equal advance in education, to be the parents of their children. She is ready indeed to rest her whole case for the education of women upon the duties of maternity. "Whatever tends to incapacitate the maternal character takes woman out of her sphere." The education which she demanded was the co-education of men and women in common schools. She attacked the dual standard of sexual morality with a brave plainness of speech. She demanded the opening of suitable trades and professions to women. She exposed the whole system which compels women to "live by their charm." But a less destructive reformer never set out to overthrow conventions. For her the duty always underlies the right, and the development of the self-reliant individual is a preparation for the life of fellowship.