Vindicated: Mary Wollstonecraft
Cyara Buchuck-Wilsenach
I first picked up Woll’s ‘Vindication’ (as I began fondly calling it in my student shorthand) for an English paper at uni two years ago. I skimmed the reading list, saw ‘women’, thought ‘feminism’, and was sold. As I made my way through the tiny text, I quickly became a huge fan, and my original copy of the book is filled with lots of scribbles of ‘yes!’ and ‘THIS!!’ in the margins. It is in this spirit of imaginative enthusing with the writer herself, that I present you with some musings on the topic.
I’d always planned on beginning our theoretical journey through the wonderful writings of wilful women with the worthy Wollstonecraft. The value she places on education, and the way she followed up her theoretical writings on feminism by founding a school and writing children’s books align her pretty well with my ideas in founding Grabbing Back. Add to this her doom and gloom outlook tinged with hope, and her outright radical views on society, all formed at a time of general societal upheaval courtesy of the French revolution and the Enlightenment, make her a clear trailblazer for many aspects of modern intersectional feminism (perhaps sadly including her colonialist and Islamophobic tendencies as well- more on that in a mo.)
Obviously, one mustn’t ignore the naked statue in the room. The recent(ish) controversy caused by the apparent ode to Wollstonecraft’s… perky tits(?) in the unveiling of her glorious* new statue is most interesting to me for one reason I’ve not yet seen commented on. Every single newspaper report has referred to Wollstonecraft as: ‘The mother of feminism’ (quote marks included). The notion isn’t new, but it is intriguing. Though I am beginning our journey with Wollstonecraft, she is hardly the first feminist to exist. Neither do her views on feminism so closely align with our modern notions that we can be direct descendants separated only by one intellectual generation. Perhaps we call her thusly because she was around at the same time as America’s ‘founding fathers’, and in our America-centric world we collectively conceive of all interesting and important Europeans as our fathers and mothers. Why is that? Why do we feel the need to have some form of direct familial bond with historical lawmakers, politicians, and writers?
I admit, I myself may have at times fallen to this point of view. The fact that I have chosen her specifically to begin our venture with shows it. Yet she is far from the first woman I’d single out in history as having written feminist texts. Was it because she wrote during the time of, and interacted with, the ideas of the Enlightenment, a period of major thought shift which still has a major impact on us today? Perhaps. Is it because she went on to quite literally give birth to the next generation of feminist changemakers in the form of her daughter, Mary Shelley, who went on to found the sci-fi genre with her novel ‘Frankenstein’? Potentially. Is it because she was appropriately white, wealthy, and European? Could be, although her highly unconventional religious views and romantic relationships which led to no small amount of societal shunning must be acknowledged here too. Well, I leave this as an idea for you, dear reader, to ponder as we think on the way Wollstonecraft (and not a third-party sculptor) ACTUALLY portrayed herself and her views in her infamous text ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’.
It will surprise, I think, precisely none of my current readers (formed mainly, I presume, of close friends I have dragged here to gain site traffic- thank you kindly good madams, kind sirs, and all other wonderful people reading this word-splutter I am producing) to learn that a main reason I so enjoyed ‘Vindication’ was because of Wollstonecraft’s careful balance of radical viewpoint with uncompromising practicality and a call to action. Often I think the two are placed at odds with each other, but in reality we will never reach our radical ends without taking measured, practical steps to get there. Thinking up utopias in the clouds is the motivation we- or at least I- seek and use to spur myself on with actionable steps that help reach that point. The entirety of Vindication is written in plain, simple language: “To speak disrespectfully of love is, I know, high treason against sentiment and fine feelings; but I wish to speak the simple language of truth and rather to address the head than the heart.”
She appeals purely to logic and relies not at all on your sense of *empathy* with her cause. Instead she lays out clearly the way she sees the world and steps needed to improve it. One sees that though the plans laid out by Woll are simple, they are far from easy, as they require waking up to tough truths and a collective societal effort. She calls for an end to private education, and for public education for all. She followed up her words with the establishment of her own school and by writing feminist children’s
‘ To speak disrespectfully of love is, I know, high treason against sentiment and fine feelings; but I wish to speak the simple language of truth and rather to address the head than the heart.’
books. She calls for her readers- mostly men she presumes- to not simply consume her text, but to follow it up with action. The sense of urgency she imbues her writing with means you cannot help but leave the short book with a wish to make the world a better place. She appeals purely to logic and relies not at all on your sense of *empathy* with her cause. Instead she lays out clearly the way she sees the world and steps needed to improve it. One sees that though the plans laid out by Woll are simple, they are far from easy, as they require waking up to tough truths and a collective societal effort. She calls for an end to private education, and for public education for all. She followed up her words with the establishment of her own school and by writing feminist children’s books. She calls for her readers- mostly men she presumes- to not simply consume her text, but to follow it up with action. The sense of urgency she imbues her writing with means you cannot help but leave the short book with a wish to make the world a better place.
Of course, no writer, no individual is without some great flaw, and Wollstonecraft is no exception. Her casual islamophobia and sense of Christian/ ‘Western’ moral superiority strikes you early on in the text, and serves as a reminder to the exact lesson she teaches; always read critically. Simply because one text or writer brings forward great ideas, or advances feminist discourse in one useful aspect, does not mean they should be regarded uncritically as some form of feminist ‘icon’. We can look up to individuals while acknowledging their problematisation and hold them to account in doing so. We can look up to them and do all this, but we cannot put them on a pedestal or make them into a key iconic figure and maintain our critical thinking. A lesson to be remembered in the age of social media feminist ‘icons’ I think. There will doubtless be many more feminist whose works we shall discuss on her who are not without controversy. I hope we undertake to do so with sensitivity, acknowledging both the issues they caused as well as the contributions they bring.
Having said all this, there is one particular quote which most endears me to this writer. It has been underlined in pencil, in pink pen, and has a giant post-it over it with a dozen exclamation points in my book:
‘I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving trivial attentions which men think it many to pay to the sex, when in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority. It Is not condescension to bow to an inferior. So ludicrous, in fact, do these ceremonies appear to me that I scarcely am able to govern my muscles when I see a man start with eager and serious solicitude to lift a handkerchief or shit a door, when the lady could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two.’
There was a guy at university who refused to let any women walk through a door themselves, insisting on opening it himself for us. He equally refused to go through a door *opened* by a woman. No doubt in his mind he was the utter model of a gentleman, and I have no idea he was raised to think so. This, however, infuriated me, for the exact reasons Wollstonecraft laid out, and when I first read the above passage, I was overjoyed at sharing this feeling, albeit with a long-dead compatriot. One time the Tory lad in question was leaving a room I was about to enter. I reached the door first and held it open, as I’d have done for anyone of any gender (and, I admit, because I was feeling cheeky that day). He refused to pass through it, insisting with an icy smile that I mustn’t hold it open for him. What began with humour for both of us ended up a staring contest of sorts, and at least 5 or 6 other students awkwardly shuffled past us and through the door before someone coaxed one of us to stop holding others up. Who conceded defeat I don’t recall. I do, however, remember feeling annoyed, slightly embarrassed by causing ‘a scene’ (barely), and mostly, thoroughly, entirely, fed up with the notion that it was somehow a sign of respect to be told that my actions were less worthy than a man’s, that my kind attempts at gestures were meaningless whilst a man’s same gesture was seemingly the height of politeness, when the only changing factor there was our gender. I remember, most of all, fuming at the fact that what I had initially perceived as merely an amusing fussy, fuzzy annoyance in a fellow student was indeed the hard steel backbone of misogyny and disrespect. I do wonder how Wollstonecraft might’ve reacted in such a situation. And, reader, I wonder, what would you have done?
There is far more to say about this writer, but I leave it for you all to discover in your own time if you have not yet done so. If you have had the joy of meeting Mary Wollstonecraft tell us, what did you think of her?