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The Radical Ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Susan Ferguson
Susan Ferguson
Affiliation:
Ryerson Polytechnic University
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Abstract

Recent scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft portrays her as either a liberal who disrupts the boundaries between public and private spheres or as a proto-socialist paving the road for a class-based feminism. Neither of these characterizations adequately captures the radical quality of her work. A close study of her views on class and family place her squarely within the liberal tradition of political economy. While she politicizes these institutions and, in so doing represents a threat to the latenineteenth-century British ruling classes, she neither disrupts the basic tenets of liberalism nor seriously anticipates the class insights of socialist feminism.

Résumé

Les études récentes consacrées à Mary Wollstonecraft la décrivent, soit comme une critique des thèses libérales sur la séparation des sphères privée et publique, soit comme une proto-socialiste ayant posé les jalons d'un féminisme de classe. Or ni l'une ni l'autre de ces conceptions ne rend compte adéquatement de la véritable signification de son oeuvre. Une analyse plus approfondie de ses idées sur les classes sociales et la famille démontre que ces dernières appartiennent clairement ` la tradition de l'économie politique libérale. Bien que cette auteure ait mis en lumière la dimension politique de ces institutions, ce qui constituait en tant que tel un discourse inquiétant pour les classes dirigeantes britanniques de la fin du 19e siecle, elle n'a, ni remis en cause les principes fondamentaux du libéralisme, ni discerné le caractere de classe du féminisme socialiste.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , September 1999 , pp. 427 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1999

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References

1 Between 1951 and the early 1970s, many of the commentaries on Wollstonecraft's life noted her participation in the movement for radical democracy but stressed her reformist aspirations, ignoring her radical socio-economic critique. See, for example, Wardle, Ralph M., Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (Lawrence:University of Kansas Press, 1951Google Scholar); Taylor, G. R. Stirling, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Study in Economics and Romance (1911; New York: Haskell House, 1969Google Scholar); James, H. R., Mary Wollstonecraft: A Sketch (New York: Haskell House, 1971Google Scholar); and Nixon, Edna, Mary Wollstonecraft: Her Life and Times (London: Dent, 1971Google Scholar).

2 See, for example, Taylor, Barbara, Eve and the New Jerusalem (London: Virago, 1983Google Scholar); Guralnick, Elissa, “Radical Politics in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,”in Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, edited by Poston, Carol (2d ed.; New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 308–316Google Scholar; and Virginia Muller, “What Can Liberals Learn from Mary Woll-stonecraft?” and Gunther-Canada, Wendy, “Mary Wollstonecraft's ‘Wild Wish’: Confounding Sex in the Discourse on Political Rights,” in Falco, Maria J., ed., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) 47–60; 61–84, respectively.Google Scholar

3 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, 5–6. Admittedly, the proto-socialist position on Wollstonecraft represents a relatively thin current of feminist thought, but it is a current that has passed without challenge. Nor are its representatives insignificant: Barbara Taylor, for example, is widely accepted as the authority on nineteenth- century socialist feminism. As well, it can be argued, casting Wollstonecraft's work in this light reinforces a more pervasive claim that the demand for women's equality is, in itself, always and everywhere destabilizing—a position articulated early on by Eisenstein, Zillah (The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism [New York: Longman, 1981]Google Scholar) but evident in more recent scholarship. See, for example, Jensen, Pamela Grande, ed., Finding a New Feminism: Rethinking the Woman Question for Liberal Democracy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996Google Scholar).

4 For a discussion of the “petty-bourgeois” model and its centrality for both Classical Political Economy and early critics of that tradition, see McNally, David, Against the Market (London: Verso, 1993Google Scholar).

5 The discussion that follows is necessarily, if regrettably, brief. I have tried to elucidate the key distinctions between socialism and liberalism, as they apply to the issues I raise around Wollstonecraft's politics. For more in-depth analysis, see Stuart Hall, “The State in Question” and Held, David, “Central Perspectives on the Modern State” in McLennan, Gregor, Held, David and Hall, Stuart, eds., The Idea of the Modern State (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1984) 1–28; 29–79, respectivelyGoogle Scholar.

6 See Wood, Ellen Meiksins, “The Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in Capitalism,” New Left Review 127 (1981), 66–95Google Scholar.

7 See MacPherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (London: Oxford University Press, 1962Google Scholar). As critics of liberalism have convincingly argued, the state is also instrumental in reinforcing the structure and relations of the family (see Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988]Google Scholar).

8 Classical socialism here refers to the nineteenth-century Utopian and scientific socialists. See Lichtheim, George, The Origins of Socialism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968Google Scholar).

9 Not all feminists agree that socialism offers a critical analysis of the family. Many reject it as inherently hostile to women's interests—more of an obstacle than an avenue to liberation. Others, however, criticize socialistsfor incorporating sexist assumptions and ignoring the issue of women's oppression, but remain convinced that the basic principles and methodology developed within socialism have a great deal to offer women. These feminists have done ground-breaking work on analyzing women's oppression from a socialist perspective in a nonreductionist manner, and have immeasurably enriched the socialist tradition. See, for example, the work of Dorothy Smith, Pat and Hugh Armstrong, Stephanie Coontz and Himani Bannerji.

10 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, 5–7, 17; Muller, “What Can Liberals Learn?” 49, 55–56; and Gunther-Canada, “The Same Subject Continued,” 211–12.

11 The literature on the historical and theoretical relationship between nuclear households and capitalism is vast. While early articles were often marred by an uncritical functionalism, more recent work is better attuned to the contradictory nature of social processes. Still, the most convincing accounts of this relationship are historical; even if capitalism does not, strictly speaking, require a nuclear household and sexual division of labour, such domestic relations only developed with the beginning of capitalism. Many of the seminal articles on households and capitalism are reproduced in Hennessy, Rosemary and Ingraham, Chrys, eds., Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives (New York: Routledge, 1997Google Scholar). For an excellent historical account see Fox, Bonnie J., “The Feminist Challenge: A Reconsideration of Social Inequality and Economic Development,” in Prym, Robert J. and Fox, Bonnie J., eds., From Culture to Power: The Sociology of English Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989), 120–177Google Scholar.

12 I am not suggesting Wollstonecraft does not politicize both class and family, but simply that she politicizes them by way of a moral critique. However significant a development within liberalism, her critique does not challenge the structural division between public and private spheres on which liberalism depends.

13 Barbara Taylor hints at this meaning of radicalism in arguing that the Utopian vision of a world free of all oppression runs up against the reformist limits of bourgeois democracy (Eve and the New Jerusalem, 95–96). For an informed discussion of the nature of ruling-class power in the 1790s, see Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1963Google Scholar); and Wells, Roger, Insurrection: The British Experience 1795–1803 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983Google Scholar).

14 E. P. Thompson provides a wonderful social history of radical politics in the 1790s in Making of the English Working Class.For an insightful account of the links between popular political economy and the tradition of bourgeois political economy, see McNally, Against the Market, 43–61.

15 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, 11.According to R. M. Janes, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman initially passed largely unnoticed. It was not until Wollstonecraft's lifestyle was made public (with the appearance of Godwin's Memoirs in 1798) and the reaction against the French Revolution was in full swing that the book and its author were subjected to such vehement denunciation (Janes, R. M., “On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 [1978], 293–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar). For other accounts of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman's reception see Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft, 158–60; Draper, Hal, “James Morrison and Working-Class Feminism,” in Draper, Hal, ed., Socialism from Below (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992), 226–227.Google Scholar

16 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 9. Hereafter, the word “womenrdquo; will refer specifically to middle-class women. References to women from other social classes will be made explicit.

17 Ibid., 44.

18 Ibid., 167. She consistently draws an analogy between women and the very wealthy—an important reminder of just how far from her mind the plight of working-class and peasant women often was. See, for instance, 7, 60, 57.

19 Ibid., 53. Without reason, Wollstonecraft argues, women would be animals (rather than persons or moral beings) who live by the rule of brute force. But, she states, “surely there can be but one rule of right, if morality has an eternal foundation.” And that one rule is reason. Mankind, she writes, is to be guided by “a rational will that bows only to God” (36).

20 Ibid., 37.

21 Ibid., 18.

22 Ibid., 45; emphasis added.

23 Ibid., 7. For the discussion of education reform see 157–78.

24 Ibid., 21.

25 Ibid., 147. Interestingly, she does not outrightly advocate female suffrage, but only hints that it might not be as preposterous a proposal as she assumes her readership believes.

26 Guralnick, “Radical Politics,” 317.

27 Ibid., 314; emphasis added. Guralnick's source is questioned below.

28 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, 6, 5 and 1.

29 Ibid., 6–7; emphases added. The passage to which Taylor refers is found in Wollstonecraft, , A indication of the Rights of Men… (2d ed.; London, 1790Google Scholar) reproduced in The Pickering Masters series, Todd, Janet and Butler, Marilyn, eds., The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 5 (London, 1989), 57Google Scholar, hereafter, Men Taylor's interpretation is criticized below.

30 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited and introduced by O'Brien, Conor Cruise (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1968Google Scholar).

31 Wollstonecraft, Men, 60, 9. To be clear, Wollstonecraft does not include Burke amongst the moderns she condemns. See also Ferguson, Moira and Todd, Janet, Mary Wollstonecraft (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 46.Google Scholar

32 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 140.

33 Ibid., 22; emphasis added; 17–18, 44, 140–41. Guralnick gives two references: Poston, ed., Vindication, 22, 38 or pages 38 and 74 of an unspecified early edition, marked London, 1792, of which I found two publications (a 1929 Everyman's Library edition and a 1970 Gregg International edition). Searching the second reference yields nothing that substantiates Guralnick's thesis.

34 Wollstonecraft, Men, 57.

35 The centrality of the “improvement discourse” to early liberal theory is ably discussed by Wood, Neal in John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 15–30.Google Scholar

36 This is the model Smith develops in the early chapters of Book I of The Wealth of Nations. Although this model was popularized in the political economy tradition, in later chapters Smith introduces a more complex model. On this point, see McNally, David, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 215–216.Google Scholar

37 Ferguson and Todd, Mary WoUstonecraft, 118.

38 WoUstonecraft, Vindication, 144.

39 Ibid., 143; emphasis added.

40 Ibid., 142. See also 66.

41 Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism, 98.

42 Wollstonecraft, Mary, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, in Kelly, Gary, ed., Mary, A Fiction amp; the Wrongs of Woman (London: Oxford University Press, 1976Google Scholar).

43 Ferguson and Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 110.

44 Ibid., 122. They write: “In more general terms, Wollstonecraft seems to be saying that an individual, from whatever class, has an internal, events-motivated power that can bring about or at least allow for the possibility of personal, if not economic, autonomy” (111).

45 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 75.

46 Ibid., 169. Wollstonecraft's willingness to advance those of superior abilities softens the naked class bias that underwrites her system to advance those of superior fortune regardless of ability—but only in a manner that is consistent with the liberal principles of merit.

47 Muller, “What Can Liberals Learn?” 53.

48 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 147–49.

49 Neither is it intended for working-class men, although Pateman suggests (I think unconvincingly) that they ultimately are implicated through a fraternity of male power.

50 Ferguson and Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 122. See also Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft, 154; Kelly, Gary, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan, 1992), 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Conger, Syndy McMillen, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility (Toronto: Associated University Press, 1994) 123.Google Scholar

51 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 64. The whole discussion linking work to economic independence is far removed from the reality of working-class women's lives. While plenty of women worked, female wages in the 1790s were not sufficient to provide women with a meaningful level of independence—an issue Wollstonecraft does not consider.

52 Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft, 164. See also Korsmeyer, Carolyn W., “Reason and Morals in the Early Feminist Movement: Mary Wollstonecraft,” in Poston, , ed., Vindication, 285–297.Google Scholar

53 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 175; emphasis added.

54 Ibid., 146–47. She is, on this point, unequivocal: “whatever tends to incapacitate the maternal character, takes woman out of her sphere” (177). Wollstonecraft's suggestion that career woman would be “exceptional” is indicative of an elitist predisposition. Although all persons may be equally capable of great achievements, only a few, those of a “superiour cast,” can and should fulfill that potential. Beneath people's apparently equal natures, then, dwells a critical variation in abilities which possibly explains not only the division within the middle class between career women and mothers, but also the division between working- and middle-class women. For her explicit statements on human nature, see 9–10, 23, 42, 51–57. The same elitist predisposition can be traced in John Stuart Mill's work as well. See Smart, Paul, Mill and Marx: Individual Liberty and the Roads to Freedom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991Google Scholar).

55 Guralnick, “Radical Politics,” 314. She cites Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 177, 192.

56 Stetson, Dorothy McBride, “Women's Rights and Human Rights: Intersection and Conflict,” in Falco, , ed., Feminist Interpretations, 172Google Scholar; emphases added. Similarly, Virginia Muller contends that it is the structure of the family and the institution of marriage that Wollstonecraft identifies as the “linchpins of women's problems” (“What Can Liberals Learn?” 55; emphasis added).

57 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 7, 150–52.

58 Ibid., 6.

59 Muller, “What Can Liberals Learn?” 55; emphases added; and McBride Stetson, “Women's Rights,” 172.

60 Thompson, William, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth… (London: printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, Paternoster-Row; and Wheatly and Adlard, 1824Google Scholar).

61 Thompson, William, Appeal of One-half the Human Race, Women …, introduced by Richard Pankhurst (London: Virago, 1983), 122, 17, 79, 133Google Scholar.

62 Ibid., 56, xxx.

63 Ibid., 70; emphasis added.

64 Ibid., 78.

65 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 52.

66 Ibid., 27–28. On the sublimation of the sensual in Wollstonecraft's writing see Kaplan, Cora, “Wild Nights,” in Kaplan, Cora, ed., Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986Google Scholar); Coole, Diana, Women in Political Theory (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988Google Scholar). Grimshaw, Jean disagrees (“Mary Wollstonecraft and the Tensions in Feminist Philosophy,” in Sayers, Sean and Osborne, Peter, eds., Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy [London: Routledge, 1990], 9–26Google Scholar). Grimshaw insists that Wollstonecraft argues for a balance of rationality and female sexual pleasure. But the most textual evidence she can cite for this is that Wollstonecraft finds value, in her novel Maria, in the heroine's empathy and tenderness; emotions are not to be totally subordinated to reason.

67 Thompson, An Inquiry into the Principles, 556. See also 41, 61, 189.

68 Thompson writes, “inasmuch as they would be stripped of all their grossness and associated with intellectual and expansive sympathetic pleasures” sexual pleasures would be increased one hundredfold” (Ibid., 300). Later in the book, he increases this estimate tenfold (558).

69 Ibid., 556.

70 Ibid., 157, 150.

71 Thompson, William, Labor Rewarded: The Claims of Labor and Capital Conciliated … (London: printed for Hunt and Clarke, 1827), 112Google Scholar; and Inquiry, 549.

72 This attack on the established order was predominantly posed in political, rather than economic, terms, with most of the radical democrats either ignoring questions of political economy or endorsing a “petty-bourgeois” model. This, however, in the context of aristocratic privilege and the aftermath of the French Revolution, was sufficient to unleash the full power of the state's repressive arm. That is, the radical democrats were vilified because the authorities feared political democracy would lead to economic leveling (see Wells, Insurrection).