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  his own children. In the past, both married and unmarried women have been disadvantaged, and survived by exploiting their charm. In future, de Gouges insisted, they must be free to share all man’s activities. More practically, she spells out a detailed ‘social contract’ that would protect any woman – and any man – who chose to unite their lives.

  demonstration of gentility, or would-be gentility. Girls learn how to be women when they are hardly more than babies; as they grow older, and in the absence of any alternative, they exploit this femininity. This, she argues, is a covert admission of women’s inferiority; but women are no more ‘naturally’ inferior than the poor are ‘naturally’ stupid or ignorant. Moreover, she added, all the women she knew who had acted like rational creatures, or shown any vigour of intellect, had accidentally been allowed to run wild as children. She not only argued forcefully for better education for 34

  girls, but for something new in her day: universal education, at least to the age of 9.

  Any woman who tries to act like a human being, Wollstonecraft remarks, risks being labelled ‘masculine’, and she admits that the fear of being thought unwomanly runs very deep in her sex. But if

  ‘masculinity’ means behaving rationally and virtuously, she recommends that we all ‘grow more and more masculine’. Even though she defends women’s potential powers – their capacity for all kinds of intellectual activity – she was scathing about the actual behaviour of many of her contemporaries. ‘Told from their infancy and taught by the examples of their mothers’ that they must find a man to support them, they learn to exploit their charms and looks until they find a man willing to support them. They rarely think –

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  and have few genuine feelings. But Wollstonecraft also accepted that, though better education for women is all-important, it cannot change everything: ‘Men and women must be educated in a great y

  degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.’ And : Amaz without a radical change in society, there can be no real ‘revolution ons of th

  in female manners’. In this present state of things, she finds it hardly surprising that so many women are ignorant, lazy, and e pen

  irresponsible.

  It is interesting, and rather sad, that other women – even some highly literate ones – were among Wollstonecraft’s sharpest critics.

  Hannah More, for example, refused even to read Wollstonecraft’s book because its very title was ‘absurd’; while Hannah Cowley protested coyly that ‘politics are unfeminine’.

  Wollstonecraft’s Vindication may seem, at first glance, dated. But she is an effective writer; her prose is down-to-earth, lively, and often tart. The book is still highly readable, and it remains one of the foundation stones of contemporary feminism. Her argument is circular and, because it is exploratory, often breaking new ground, can seem at times confused. She was sharply, sometimes bitterly, aware of the personal difficulties that women experienced in her 35

  society. She argued, for example, that an understanding of childhood is central to any self-knowledge. The ability to recognize one’s own childishness is crucial to maturity: ‘till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child – long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it’. A few months later, she wrote sadly to the philosopher and novelist William Godwin that ‘my imagination is forever betraying me into fresh misery, and I perceive that I shall be a child to the end of the chapter’.

  As we have seen, Wollstonecraft’s story Mary, A Fiction, based in part on her own childhood and her difficult relationship with her parents, is an intriguing attempt to explore the way women grow up. (It is also an occasionally heavy-handed celebration of her heroine’s sensibility, that capacity for true feeling that sets her apart from other people.) The book draws on Wollstonecraft’s painful recognition of the way unresolved feelings from childhood so often dominate, and even pervert, adult relationships; how, throughout minism

  our lives, we may be unknowingly re-enacting dramas rooted in the Fe

  past. Women, she argued in the Vindication, are given little encouragement to become truly adult; they are ‘made women of when they are mere children, and brought back to childhood when they ought to leave the go-cart forever’. But any girl ‘whose spirits have not been damped by inactivity, or innocence by false shame, will always be a romp, and the doll will never excite attention unless confinement allows her no alternative’.

  In Thoughts on Education, she had insisted that marriage should be based on friendship and respect rather than love; in the Vindication she claimed, dismissively, that most women remain obsessed by love, dreaming of happiness with some ideal and truly loving man, simply because their lives are so empty. But it is in part Wollstonecraft’s inconsistencies, her implicit recognition that there are no easy solutions to the problems she explores, that make her such an enduringly interesting writer. She sadly acknowledges that even the most sensible people are likely to fall prey to ‘violent and 36

  3. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the first English women to write eloquently, and at times angrily, about the rights of women – and the wrongs they often experience. Her writings have never really gone out of fashion, and a great many modern women have responded eagerly, and gratefully, to her work.

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  constant passion’; as she found, to her cost, when, on a visit to Paris in 1793, she met and fell in love with the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay. Her letters, after a happy beginning, become increasingly desperate as she complains about his blatant indifference. Pregnant by Imlay and thoroughly miserable, she still managed to work hard on her Historical View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. Her attitude to women revolutionaries was ambiguous, to say the least, and affected, perhaps, by her anxiety, given her personal situation, to assert her own respectability. When, in October 1789, Paris marketwomen marched to Versailles and invaded the palace to put their complaints to the king, Wollstonecraft had no sympathy at all. She remarked, shuddering, that they were ‘the lowest refuse of the streets, women who had thrown off the virtues of one sex without having the power to assume more than the vices of the other’.

  After her baby, Fanny, was born, she undertook a trip to Sweden (taking along the baby and a nurse) on business for Imlay. Her minism

  Letters from the trip, published in 1796, are (unlike her letters from Fe

  Paris) both perceptive and engaging. But when she arrived back in London, she found Imlay living with another woman. She survived a suicide attempt – having thrown herself into the Thames – and eventually married William Godwin.

  The unfinished second novel that Wollstonecraft left behind when she died in 1797, Maria; Or the Wrongs of Women, is pure melodrama; but perhaps only melodramatic exaggeration could help her express her lasting sense of anger and frustration about the situation of women. Her heroine, Maria, has been imprisoned in a madhouse by her vicious and dishonest husband, who wants to gain control of her property. ‘Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?’ she asks.

  Perhaps the most interesting section of the book has Maria making friends with her warder, a woman called Jemima, whose story, she discovers, is at least as sad as her own. As a child she was victimized 38

  Fiction

  Through the 18th century, increasing numbers of women had been reading prose fiction because it reflected, or commented on, their own hopes and difficulties. But they were also writing novels that often explored the possibilities and problems in their own lives. Some concentrated on everyday domestic life; the best of them – Fanny Burney, at times, certainly Jane Austen – ask serious questions about the choices facing girls, particularly about marriage and its consequences.

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  ‘Gothic’ fiction, which tackled the same questions through melodrama, was immensely popular. In scores of stories, an innocently virtuous
heroine finds herself in a nightmarish y: Amaz

  world where she has to fight masculine predators for her chastity, even her survival. The ‘sensibility’ that character-ons of th

  ized Samuel Richardson’s heroines – Pamela (1741), who gets her man, and the tragic Clarissa (1748) – is taken to e pen

  extremes, while Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho

  (1794) and The Italian (1797) are slightly later, more knowing, versions of Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman.

  Jane Austen affectionately parodied Gothic excesses in

  Northanger Abbey (1818); but though her naïve heroine’s fantasies are discounted, she is confronted with something worse: real selfishness and cruelty. The extravagances of Gothic fiction offered women readers and writers a way of exploring their feelings, of facing their darker fantasies and fears about men, marriage, and their own choices in life.

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  by the classic cruel stepmother, then put out to work as an apprentice, only to be raped and impregnated by her master. After aborting her baby, Jemima became a pick-pocket, was seduced and abandoned, and began working in a ‘house of ill fame’. She seeks refuge in a work-house, and is then hired by the owner of a madhouse who, it turns out, preys on the inhabitants. For all its Gothic exaggerations, the novel makes a radical point: that both a middle-class and a working-class woman may find themselves helplessly exploited in a male-dominated world.

  Wollstonecraft had defended her last novel angrily against criticisms from a male friend:

  I am vexed and surprised at your not thinking the situation of Maria sufficiently important, and can only account for this want of – shall I say it? Delicacy of feeling – by recollecting that you are a man.

  Her point was a serious one, and one that constitutes her legacy: minism

  women must speak out, tell their own life stories, articulate their Fe

  feelings, acknowledge both their own hopes and their sense of being cheated and wronged.

  Wollstonecraft left notes outlining the bleakest of futures for her heroine: ‘Divorced by her husband – Her lover unfaithful –

  Pregnancy – Miscarriage – Suicide.’ She probably could never have imagined a convincingly happy ending for her. Though Wollstonecraft herself, all too briefly, found peace and contentment with William Godwin, she died a few months after they married, giving birth to her second child: another Mary, who would grow up to marry the poet Percy Shelley, and to write that extraordinary and troubling novel, Frankenstein.

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  Chapter 4

  The early 19th century:

  reforming women

  The 19th century saw an increasingly widespread and articulate statement of women’s claims – perhaps in reaction to the emergence of an image of true ‘femininity’ that seemed to become more constricted as the century wore on: a class-based ideal of gentility and refinement. But though many women (and men) spoke out eloquently against and acted on their beliefs, it was not until the second half of the century that any organized campaigns –

  particularly for better education for women, for the possibility of their working outside the home, for a reform in the laws affecting married women, and for the right to vote – began to emerge.

  In 1843, a married woman, Marion Reid, had published in Edinburgh A Plea for Women, which has been described, rightly, as the most thorough and effective statement by a woman since Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication. Reid covered most of the areas that would preoccupy reformers for the rest of the century and her book deserves to be better known. (At the time, it was widely read, and reprinted several times, though it seems to have been more popular in America than in England.) Reid offers a cool and damning analysis of the way her contemporaries – and, she admits, they are mainly other women – talk so confidently about a ‘woman’s sphere’, and equate womanliness with the renunciation of self. ‘Womanly’

  behaviour, in practice, means ‘good humour and attention to her husband, keeping her children neat and clean, and attending to 41

  domestic arrangements’. But Reid insists, more forcibly than anyone else in the period, that this apparently noble and virtuous

  ‘self-renunciation’ in practice usually involves ‘a most criminal self-extinction’.

  The education that most girls are given merely ‘cramps and confines’ them, she claims: ‘Any symptom of independent thought is quickly repressed . . . the majority of girls are subdued into mere automatons.’ Reid also comments bitterly on the almost insurmountable difficulties many women face in

  ‘obtaining the means of a good substantial education’. Most girls are brought up to ‘a mechanical performance of duty . . .

  their own minds all the while lying barren and unfruitful’.

  This question of education would remain crucially important all through the 19th century; too little seemed to have changed since the days of Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft.

  Education for girls – whether at home by governesses, who were often barely trained, or at inadequate schools – remained a hit minism

  and miss affair.

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  Reid is careful to acknowledge women’s domestic responsibilities, though she claims that most women go about their household duties in ‘a cold, hard, mechanical, loveless spiritless way’. She admits that, as things are, domestic work must form part, and

  ‘perhaps even the chief part’, of a woman’s life. But she argues that there is no reason why woman should be limited to domesticity. A shade reluctantly, she allows that some ‘subordination’ of herself may be ‘due to man’. But, she asks, ‘if woman’s rights are not the same as those of man, what are they?’ In one sense, she admits,

  ‘woman was made for man, yet in another and higher she was also made for herself ’. Innocence, she argues, is not the same thing as virtue.

  But a married woman – living in a ‘shackled condition’ – has no rights over her own property; even the produce of her own labour is at the disposal of her husband, who can, if he chooses, take and 42

  ‘waste it in dissipation and excess’. Moreover, ‘her children, as well as her fortune, are the property of her husband’.

  In what was, for the times, her most radical argument, Reid asserts that ‘womanliness’ is quite compatible with voting. After all, woman, as much as man, is ‘a rational, moral and accountable creature’. She has no particular wish to see women representatives, she remarks cautiously; probably few women would ‘consent to be chosen’ and few electors would choose them. But she sees no reason why women should not stand, if any are ‘able or willing to overleap natural barriers’.

  The two best-known 19th-century arguments for women’s rights Th

  were written by men; though in both cases, the authors – William e early 19th centur

  Thompson and John Stuart Mill – acknowledge the influence and inspiration of their wives. It is intriguing that neither of these women – who were well educated and articulate – chose to speak out for themselves. Was this a nervousness about breaking with y:

  convention and speaking out in their own voices, or simply a tactical reformin recognition that a man’s arguments might be taken more seriously?

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  In 1825 the Irish-born William Thompson published his Appeal of ome

  One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the n Other Half, Men, to Restrain them in Political and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery. He describes the book as ‘the protest of at least one man and one woman’ against the ‘degradation of one half of the adult portion of the human race’. It is addressed to, and acknowledges the inspiration of, the widowed Anna Wheeler. Anna Wheeler had been married off when she was only 15 years of age; the couple had six children, but when her husband proved a drunkard, Anna found the courage to leave him, and in 1818 spent some time in France, where she came into contact with Saint Simonian socialists. After her husband’s death two years later, she returned to London, where she became we
ll known for her interest in reform movements. She was attacked by no less a figure than Benjamin Disraeli, who remarked sarcastically that Anna was 43

  ‘something between Jeremy Bentham and Meg Merrilees, very clever but awfully revolutionary’.

  Thompson shared and expressed Anna Wheeler’s radical views. ‘I hear you indignantly reject the boon of equality with such creatures as men now are’, he wrote to her: ‘With you I would equally elevate both sexes.’ The book concentrates on the situation of the married woman, who is reduced to being a piece of ‘movable property and an ever-obedient servant to the bidding of man’. For a married woman, her home becomes a ‘prison-house’. The house itself, as well as everything in it, belongs to the husband, ‘and of all fixtures the most abject is his breeding machine, the wife’. Married women are in fact slaves, their situation no better than that ‘of Negroes in the West Indies’. Mothers are denied rights over their children and over family property, and most are treated like ‘any other upper servant’.

  The Appeal was in part couched as an answer to James Mill’s Essay minism

  on Government, well known at the time, which argued that women Fe

  need no political rights as they are adequately represented by their fathers or husbands. ‘What happens to women who have neither husband nor father?’ Thompson asks. He then goes on to attack, pungently and at length, the unthinking assumption that the interests of husband and wife are always identical, and to criticize, bitterly, the unjust situation. He also looks forward to a time when the children of all classes, both girls and boys, will be equally provided for and educated.

  Anna Wheeler later went on to become an effective writer and lecturer on women’s rights. Sadly, her own daughter strongly disapproved of her radical inclinations, claiming that she was unfortunately deeply imbued with the pernicious fallacies of the French Revolution, which had then more or less seared their trace through Europe, and . . . was besides strongly tainted by the corresponding poison of Mrs Wollstonecraft’s book.