Wollstonecraft, Mary (1757–1797)

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WOLLSTONECRAFT, MARY
(1757–1797)

Mary Wollstonecraft has long been recognized as one of the most influential feminist theorists in history, largely through her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Late-twentieth-century scholarship also began to explore her other texts and their significance.

Wollstonecraft's work is a product of the late Enlightenment, emphasizing the need to achieve virtue and progress through development of reason and sensibility. It also reflects ideas of the Dissenters and political radicals who stood among the relatively few English supporters of the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft's early mentors were Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. The circle with whom she continued to associate included writers and artists such as William Blake, Thomas Paine, Henry Fuseli, and William Godwin. Like them, she opposed slavery, standing armies, and many elements of political patriarchy such as primogeniture, aristocracy, and probably monarchy. She shared their critique of the corrupting influence of political and social institutions structured around "unnatural distinctions" based on rank, property, religion, or profession.

Wollstonecraft's most distinctive and well-known contribution was to extend this analysis to demand an end to unnatural distinctions based on sex and family relations. As she wrote in the Rights of Woman, if observation could not prove that men had more natural capability for reason than women, they could claim no superiority over women and certainly no right to rule them. In analysis shaped by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (but one that attacked Rousseau for his views on women), she concluded that education, experience, and the "present constitution of society," and not nature, created most observed character differences between men and women.

She argued that unnatural distinctions between women and men tended toward the same effects as other unjust power relations: They corrupt the character of all parties to the relationship, rendering the dominant party dependent on its power and making the subordinate party resort to cunning and unvirtuous strategies of self-preservation. In the case of women she pointed to the use of beauty as what might now be called a "weapon of the weak." Unlike better-known democratic theorists of her era, she applied an antipatriarchal analysis commonly used on institutions such as government to the family itself.

She advocated altering the social practices such as dress, courtship, employment, and family relations that had given men power over women and kept both from virtue. She sought expanded work opportunities for women. She proposed development of a public school system educating girls and boys and children of different classes similarly and together, at least for the early years of their schooling, and wanted girls to study subjects that had been forbidden to them. Her final, unfinished novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, underscored the necessity of women's ability to support themselves, divorce, and have rights over their children.

Although she is most famous for her arguments on women's rights, other contributions are worth noting. Her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) was one of the first attacks on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and it engaged his work on the sublime and the beautiful, thus integrating aesthetics and politics in a critique of Burke's defense of monarchy, aristocracy, and pomp. Her further exploration of the French Revolution in the Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) contains an underrated inquiry into the nature of political history and the relationship between ideals and human action. Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark influenced the early generation of English Romantics, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary Shelley.

Bibliography

works by wollstonecraft

The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Edited by J. Todd and M. Butler. New York: New York University Press, 1989. Includes all of Wollstonecraft's works (other than letters). Among the most important are:

Mary: A Fiction (1788).

A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (1790).

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects (1792).

An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (1794).

Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796).

Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (post.).

works on wollstonecraft

Poovey, M. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Sapiro, V. A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Tomalin, C. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.

Virginia Sapiro (1996)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy