Mary Wollstonecraft , the Anglo-Irish , feminist, intellectual novelist. educator, political radical and advocate for women's rights, was born on this day 1759 in Primrose Street, Spitalfields, London, the second of seven children.of.Elizabeth Dixon and Edward John Wollstonecraft.
At the time of her birth, Wollstonecraft's family was fairly prosperous:
her paternal grandfather owned a successful Spitalfields silk weaving
business and her mother's father was a wine merchant in Ireland, but her father gradually
squandered it on speculative projects. Consequently, the family became
financially unstable and they were frequently forced to move during
Wollstonecraft’s youth. As a child, she regularly defended her mother from one of her fathers drunken rages, an abusive man who wasted away a small
fortune in gambling and alcohol.
Wollstonecraft was deeply affected by
the tyrannical nature of her abusive father who completely subjugated
and emotionally destroyed his wife. During her teenage years, Wollstonecraft used to sleep outside of her mother’s bedroom to protect her from Edward’s beatings.
Because of this situation,
Wollstonecraft left home at 17, quickly learning how to survive through
adaptability and independence, educating herself through books and her own observations. At the age of nineteen Mary went out to earn her own livelihood. Mary's mother died in 1782. In 1783,
she helped her sister Eliza escape a miserable marriage by hiding her from a brutal
husband until a legal separation was arranged. With her sister and best friend Fanny
Blood, Wollstonecraft founded a girls’ school in London They first set their sights on
Islington, then moved to Newington Green, where Mary met the moral and
political thinker, the Reverend Richard Price, head of Newington's
thriving Dissenting community, and heard him preach.Rational Dissenters believed in the primacy of reason in tandem with
scripture instead of tradition and what they believed to be
superstition, Many Dissenters were committed to very radical opinions
for their time. They argued for the separation of church and state. the
rejection of church hierarchies and even the denial of original sin. This was a
crucial encounter for Mary. Several years later, she was to rise to
his defence in a
Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790), and it was through her connections to members of this
community that she was to gain an introduction to her future
publisher, friend, and one might even say, patron, Joseph Johnson.in 1784. During
its brief life, the school developed a prestigious reputation and served
as a starting point for Wollstonecraft’s radical ideas about the
necessary equality of female and male education.Wollstonecraft’s teaching experience is reflected in her pamphlet,
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787).
Far from providing her with a reliable income and some
stability, the school was to be a source of endless worries and a financial
drain. Only Joseph Johnson's advance on her first book,
Thoughts
on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct in
the more important Duties of Life (1787) helped ease her
considerable financial difficulties. Following the death of her friend
Fanny Blood in 1785 and the collapse of the school, Wollstonecraft began employment as a governess
in Ireland. However she soon learned that she was not suited for this type
of domestic work and returned to London, becoming a translator for a
publishing firm and later an advisor to Joseph Johnson, who held weekly dinners, and it was here Wollstonecraft met several of
the age’s greatest radical philosophers, including William Blake,
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2017/09/william-blake-radical-visionary.htmlThomas
Paine,
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/01/thomas-paine-2911737-861809-common-sense.html and William Godwin.who she later married. thus, began Wollstonecraft’s activism, as a writer on the obstacles to
women’s equality in late eighteenth-century Europe. She lived at 49
George Street, Blackfriars, London and worked as a reviewer for Johnson’s
“
Analytical Review”. She meets influential people at this time such as
the artist and writer Henry Fuseli, the writer Anna Laetitia Barbauld
and the political reformer Thomas Holcroft.
In May 1789 t
he Analytical Review begins publication and during the
year prints Wollstonecraft’s first novel,”
Mary: A Fiction”, which was inspired by the death of Fanny Blood. her
children’s book
“Original Stories from Real Life” and her translation of
“
Of the Importance of Religious Opinions” by Jacques Necker.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s anthology, “
The Female Reader” is
published by Johnson in 1789 under the pseudonym of Mr Cresswick. At the same time she begins to
be romantically attached with Henry Fuseli. Mary’s translations of Christian
Gotthilf Salzmann’s “
Elements of Morality” and “
Young Grandison” by
Maria Geertruida van de Werken de Cambon are published by Johnson. in 1790. The
former is illustrated by William Blake
.
In November she publishes “
A Vindication of the Rights of Man”
anonymously at first and then under her own name on 18th December as she
was upset by the attacks on her friend Richard Price by Edmund Burke,and his conservative critique of the French Revolution in
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Her work was overshadowed by another response to Burke, Thomas Paine's
Rights of Man, which followed several months later. In
Rights of Men
Wollstonecraft presented her vision of a society, based upon equality
of opportunity, in which talent—not the wrongful privileges of
gentility—would be the requisite for success. Paine and Wollstonecraft
were accused in the press of seeking to "
poison and inflame the minds of
the lower class of his Majesty's subjects to violate their
subordination."
A Vindication of the Rights of Man laid the groundwork for her 1792 treatise,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
In this visionary courageous discourse.Wollstonecraft abhorred the prevailing notions that women were nothing
but adornments to their husbands and caretakers of the household. Wollstonecraft attacked the educational restrictions that
kept women in a state of "
ignorance and slavish dependence." She was
especially critical of a society that encouraged women to be "
docile and
attentive to their looks to the exclusion of all else." Wollstonecraft
described marriage as "
legal prostitution" and added that women "
may be
convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading
the master and the abject dependent." She added: "
I do not wish them
(women) to have power over men; but over themselves".
The ideas in Wollstonecraft's book were truly revolutionary and
caused tremendous controversy. One critic described Wollstonecraft as a
"
hyena in petticoats". Mary Wollstonecraft argued that to obtain social
equality society must rid itself of the monarchy as well as the church
and military hierarchies. society bred “gentle domestic
brutes,” resulting in this societal construction of “
motherhood.” The
solution, she claimed, is educational reform. Her proposed reform
included giving women access to the same educational opportunities as
men—the main doctrines of the later women’s movement.the faculties of reason
and rationality are present in all human beings and that women must be
allowed to contribute equally to society. If women were not afforded this
opportunity, social and intellectual progress would come to a halt.
To understand the radical nature of
Wollstonecraft’s work we must understand how desperately subjugated
women were in the past. The recognition of equality among genders was a
relatively new political goal. For most of history, women were
considered by many key thinkers to be irrational and intellectually
hollow beings who merely existed for beauty and procreation. The
subjection of women was considered to be justified due to women’s
apparent lack of rationality and their physical and emotional frailty, and hers was the first book to present women’s rights as an issue of universal
human rights.
Mary and her radical friends welcomed the French Revolution. In November, 1789, Richard Price
preached a sermon praising the revolution. Price argued that British
people, like the French, had the right to remove a bad king from the
throne. "
I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading; a general
amendment beginning in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for
the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priest giving way to the
dominion of reason and conscience."
In 179I she first meets William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement.incidentally at a dinner in November held by Johnson where Thomas Paine was speaking. Godwin was disappointed with Mary as she spent to whole time criticising Paine.While she'd already taken a sour view of the human condition, Godin had a more hopeful one. He called her negative, she called his optimism negative, but the two radical 18th century geniuses had glimpsed one another, and for years gravitated towards one another.
At this time Mary had become infatuated with the artist Henry Fuseli
despite the fact that he was already married. She was excited by his
genius and actually proposed a platonic arrangement where she would live
with Fuseli and his wife and travel to France. Fuseli’s wife was
understandably upset and the artist ended their relationship the
following year.
Mary decided to leave the country and while everyone was fleeing the revolution in 1792 she set out for Paris to see it for herself. The French Revolution had begun with thousands of women unhappy over the price and scarcity of bread. These women grew into a mighty force to be reckoned with , turning into a tide against royal rule in France, forcing the king to submit to the will of the people and proving that the royals were not invulnerable.
There, as a witness of Robespierre's Reign
of Terror, Mary collected materials for
An Historical and Moral View of the Origins and
Progress of the French Revolution: and the effect it has Produced in Europe (vol I,
1794),.The book sharply criticized the violence evident even in the early
stages of the French Revolution and the killing of so many
moderate Girondist revolutionaries like Olympe de Gouges and Manon Roland on the guillotine in 1793.
,Mary met Captain
Gilbert Imlay, an American timber-merchant, the author of
The Western Territory of
North America (1792). She agreed to become his common law wife and at Le Havre in May
1794, she bore him a daughter, Fanny. In November 1795, after a four months' visit to
Scandinavia as his "wife,".Imlay deserted Mary which left her so emotionally unstable. that she tried to drown herself from Putney Bridge, but was saved, .
Mary eventually recovered her courage, and reconciled herself with life with the help of William Godwin. who shared many of her ideas and like her was a forward looking free thinker, who said that their friendship melted into love and she went to live with him in
Somers-town Although
both Godwin and Mary abhorred marriage as a form of tyranny, they eventually married on 29 March 1797. By all accounts,
theirs was a happy and stable, though brief, relationship, that was unique for the time because they lived independently of one another, each engaged in their own literary occupations, seldom meeting, unless they walked together, till dinner time, each day. In August, her second daughter Mary who
later became the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's wife
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2017/08/percy-bysshe-shelley-august-4-1792-july.html who in 1816, published her own masterpiece,
Frankenstein was born, and although the delivery seemed to go well initially, tragically the placenta broke
apart during the birth and became infected; puerperal (childbed) fever
was a common and often fatal occurrence in the eighteenth century. After
several days of agony, Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia on 10
September.. having survived so many difficult situations, she died when she had so much to live for. Godwin was devastated: he wrote to his friend Thomas
Holcroft, "
I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world.
I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have
not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again. "
Following her death, Godwin published all of her writings, including the
letters she had written to Gilbert Imlay. While he intended them as a
tribute, the general reception of these works proved to be quite
opposite. Wollstonecraft faced a plethora of criticisms, as
people attacked her “unusual” lifestyle consisting of free will,
independence, sex, and suicide attempts. For over a century
Wollstonecraft’s work and reputation was sadly diminished, deemed crazy, socially unacceptable, and immoral.
It was not until the modern feminist
movement fortunately resurrected her works that she became a popular and
influential figure. Although her life was short and tumultuous, she reminded us that the foundation of
morality in all human beings, male or female, is their common
possession of the faculty of reason. It's this insistence on reason , in these alienating times that we should be reading and listening to more than ever, She also pushed for the rights of
all those she thought were victims of a society that assigned people
their roles according to the artificial distinctions of class, age, and
gender. and
the core of her literary
career was to envision a social and political order in which women were
treated as rational, autonomous beings capable of independence and
virtue.
Wollstonecraft was initially buried in the Old Saint Pancras Churchyard in London.Godwin was buried with her in 1836, but in 1851 their remains were moved to St. Peter's Churchyard, Bournemouth, Dorset,
England.. Mary Wollstonecraft's legacy is secure, as an exceptional thinker and advocate, the foremother of feminism, a key Enlightenment thinker, and an early human rights champion. whose groundbreaking contributions leave her as an important influence on modern feminist theory. Although of course, it took more than a
century before society began to put her views into effect, her
prodigious works and her messages of equality still continue to
inspire. Let us raise a fitting statue in her honour.
https://www.change.org/p/sadiq-khan-a-statue-for-feminist-icon-mary-wollstonecraft-whereswolly-vindicationformary
"The mind will ever be unstable that has only
prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive
fury when there are no barriers to break its force." - Mary Wollstonecraft
Further Reading :-
Charlotte Gordon - Romantic Outlaws :The Extraordinaey lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley : Windmill Books
Todd, Janet, 2000, Mary Wollstonecraft: a revolutionary
life, London: Weidenfel and Nicholson.
Tomalin, Claire, 1992, The Life and Death of Mary
Wollstonecraft, revised edition, London: Penguin Books.
Taylor, Barbara, 1983, Eve and The New Jerusalem: Socialism
and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, London: Virago
Press.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wollstonecraft-mary/1792/vindication-rights-woman/index.htm
