The 1789 Discourse: Wollstonecraft, The First Feminist
Print Collector
Mary Wollstonecraft was a feminist writer in a time period when the word ‘feminist’ hadn’t even been invented yet. Her daughter, also named Mary, would go on to marry the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and write one of the earliest and most spectacular works of science fiction in history, Frankenstein. However, Wollstonecraft herself was an accomplished writer and astute thinker, often surpassing her male contemporaries in the eyes of modern readers.
Born in London, 1759, Wollstonecraft originally embarked on a career as an educator. It wasn’t until 1787 that she decided to pursue her dream of becoming an author. She found herself in the company of thinkers and philosophers like Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense had helped to inspire the American War of Independence from Britain. She also embarked on an ill-fated affair with artist Henry Fuseli, whose eventual rejection spurred her to move to France as the French Revolution was in full swing.
In 1790, Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Man, making her an overnight sensation in intellectual circles. The book was written in response to Reflections on the Revolution in France by Irish statesman and conservative philosopher Edmund Burke. Burke criticized the French Revolutionaries on their lack of status and education while holding up the French Monarchy in an idealized light. Wollstonecraft rejected Burke’s critique, seeing the Revolution as a “glorious chance to obtain more virtue and happiness than hitherto blessed our globe”.
Building on the ideas put forward in Vindication of the Rights of Man, she would go on to write Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. This is undoubtedly her most well-known work, articulating feminist arguments before feminism was even a movement in society. Wollstonecraft wrote that men and women are all human beings who deserve the same human rights. In particular, she argued that women should be given access to the same educational opportunities as men, and that the only reason for the difference between the intellectual capabilities of men and women at the time was the lack of education afforded to women. Here she found herself clashing with philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that women should only be educated for the pleasure of men.
Wollstonecraft died in 1797 after complications with the birth of her daughter Mary. After her death her widower, the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, published Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The memoir revealed details of Wollstonecraft’s life that would unfortunately destroy her reputation in the intellectual circles that once applauded her. Her affairs, illegitimate children, and several suicide attempts made her ideas unwelcome in the ‘proper’ societies of the time, but those same ideas have ramifications and applications in the modern world.
As can be seen in An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft viewed the Revolution as the inevitable conclusion to the economic and social crisis gripping France at the time. Years of bad harvests and regressive taxation was taking too heavy a toll on the peasants and workers of the country, while the aristocracy remained in relative comfort. The COVID-19 pandemic has produced in much of the world a similar set of circumstances.
25% of American workers, 40 million people, are out of a job due to the coronavirus. 128,000 Americans have died. Meanwhile, healthcare professionals can’t get enough personal protection equipment and President Trump is demanding that the rate of testing be slowed down. Trump himself has reportedly been tested multiple times, however, and of course the rich and wealthy of society will be able to pay huge amounts of money to get themselves tested.
Wollstonecraft would look at Trump’s America dealing with COVID-19, and she would see a lot of similarities to pre-Revolution France under King Louis XVI. She would argue that, unless the Government steps up in its duty to provide for and take care of its citizens, then those same citizens have a duty to remove their Government. No doubt in today’s democratic world she would advocate for that removal to occur through the ballot box, rather than through violent revolution.
The events of the French Revolution shaped much of her philosophy, and from reading the aforementioned An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution it can be assumed that Wollstonecraft would be in favour of free trade. Not only does she see the demand for bread among the peasants as symbolic of an economy with an impeded circulation of knowledge, provision and improvement, but she also witnessed firsthand the food shortages in France brought on by Britain’s economic blockade of the country.
Her lover at the time, American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, chartered ships from America to dodge the blockade and deliver goods to the French. In this way, one revolutionary country helped to provide for another. To Wollstonecraft, free trade could unite people across national borders in pursuit of similar Enlightenment goals.
Wollstonecraft’s ideas on the relationship between men and women can also be applied to the issue of police misconduct. According to her, within the power dynamics between men and women men are restricted to the sphere of reason, while women are restricted to the sphere of emotion. Therefore, men must disguise their emotions as reasonable logic, and women must dress up their reason in the language of emotion.
The same power dynamics are present in the relationship between police and citizens. The police must pretend that their emotional responses, the violence and fear, are reasonable. On the other hand, the victims of that violence must use the language of emotion to be heard. Wollstonecraft would say that when police try to justify the shooting of an unarmed black person, they are trying to disguise emotion as reason.
With the police monopolizing reason, a movement like Black Lives Matter has nothing left to it but appealing to human emotions for support. This is in fact unnatural, as just like men and women, police and protesters are equally capable of experiencing both reason and emotion. Until society recognizes that a group like the police can have emotional responses to situations, those officers will never receive the training they need on how to properly deal with those emotions without resorting to murder and brutality.
While Wollstonecraft supported the French Revolution, she came to despise the Jacobins who rose to power following the execution of King Louis XVI. The Revolution was, in her mind, “the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded”, but life under the Jacobins was “nightmarish”. As the populist movement of the day, her opinions of the architects of the Reign of Terror could easily be transferred to the modern populist wave on which President Trump rides.
Trump may not have guillotined anyone yet, however Wollstonecraft would see plenty of similarities. The devoted following, the boisterous rallies, the imprisonment of ‘enemies’ like migrants on the Southern border, and the constant attacks on the free press are all aspects of Trump’s presidency that link him to the Jacobins Wollstonecraft so hated for corrupting her beloved Revolution. Were she alive today, she would warn America of the dangers of falling for populist rhetoric.
Mary Wollstonecraft may have lived nearly 300 years ago, at a time when America was taking its first fledgling steps as a nation, but her ideas have proved timeless. Not only was she a feminist thinker way ahead of her time, but her philosophical and political outlooks can provide insights into many of the issues facing our society today.