Because of these faults of youth and haste, Mary’s “Letter” is not very powerful when considered as a reply to Burke; but its intrinsic merits are many. It is a simple, uncompromising expression of honest opinions. It is noble in its fearlessness, and it manifests a philosophical insight into the meaning and basis of morality wonderful in a woman of Mary’s age. It really deserves the praise bestowed upon it in the “Analytical Review,” where the critic says that, “notwithstanding it may be the ‘effusion of the moment,’ [it] yet evidently abounds with just sentiments and lively and animated remarks, expressed in elegant and nervous language, and which may be read with pleasure and improvement when the controversy which gave rise to them is over.”
CHAPTER VI.
“VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN.”
The “Vindication of the Rights of Women” is the work on which Mary Wollstonecraft’s fame as an author rests. It is more than probable that, but for it, her other writings would long since have been forgotten. In it she speaks the first word in behalf of female emancipation. Her book is the forerunner of a movement which, whatever may be its results, will always be ranked as one of the most important of the nineteenth century. Many of her propositions are, to the present advocates of the cause, foregone conclusions. Hers was the voice of one crying in the wilderness to prepare the way. Her principal task was to demonstrate that the old ideals were false.
The then most exalted type of feminine perfection was Rousseau’s Sophia. Though this was an advance from the conception of the sex which inspired Congreve, when he made the women of his comedies mere targets for men’s gallantries, or Swift, when he wrote his “Advice to a Young Married Lady,” it was still a low estimate of woman’s character and sphere of action. According to Rousseau, and the Dr. Gregorys and Fordyces who re-echoed his doctrines in England, women are so far inferior to men that their contribution to the comfort and pleasure of the latter is the sole reason for their existence. For them virtue and duty have a relative and not an absolute value. What they are is of no consequence. The essential point is what they seem to men. That they are human beings is lost sight of in the all-engrossing fact that they are women.
It is strange that Rousseau, who would have had men return to a state of nature that they might be freed from shams and conventionalities, did not see that the sacrifice of reality to appearances was quite as bad for women. Mary Wollstonecraft, farther-sighted than he, discovered at once the flaw in his reasoning. What was said of Schopenhauer by a Frenchman could with equal truth be said of her: “Ce n’est pas un philosophe comme les autres, c’est un philosophe qui a vu le monde.” She had lived in woman’s world, and consequently, unlike the sentimentalists who were accepted authorities on the subject, she did not reason from an outside stand-point. This was probably what helped her not only to recognize the false position of her sex, but to understand the real cause of the trouble. She referred it, not to individual cases of masculine tyranny or feminine incompetency, but to the fundamental misconception of the relations of the sexes. Therefore, what she had to do was to awaken mankind to the knowledge that women are human beings, and then to insist that they should be given the opportunity to assert themselves as such, and that their sex should become a secondary consideration. It would have been useless for her to analyze their rights in detail until she had established the premises upon which their claims must rest. It is true she contends for their political emancipation. “I really think,” she writes, “that women ought to have representatives instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.” And she also maintains their ability for the practice of many professions, especially of medicine. But this she says, as it were, in parenthesis. These necessary reforms cannot be even begun until the equality of the sexes as human beings is proved beyond a doubt. The object of the “Vindication” is to demonstrate this equality, and to point out the preliminary measures by which it may be secured.
The book is now seldom read. Others of later date have supplanted it. Conservative readers are prejudiced against it because of its title. The majority of the liberal-minded have not the patience to master its contents because they can find its propositions expressed more satisfactorily elsewhere. Yet, as a work which marks an epoch, it deserves to be well known. A comprehensive analysis of it will therefore not be out of place.
It begins strangely, as it appears to this generation, with a dedication to Talleyrand. Mary had seen him often when he had been in London, and only knew what was best in him. She admired his principles, being ignorant of his utter indifference to them. He had lately published a pamphlet on National Education, and this was a subject upon which, in vindicating women’s rights, she had much to say. He had, in pleading the cause of equality for all men, approached so closely to the whole truth that she thought, once this was pointed out to him, he could not fail to recognize it as she did. If he believed that, in his own words, “to see one half of the human race excluded by the other from all participation in government was a political phenomenon that, according to abstract principles, it was impossible to explain,” he could not logically deny that prescription was unjust when applied to women. Therefore, as a new constitution—the first based upon reason—was about to be established in France, she reminds him that its framers would be tyrants like their predecessors if they did not allow women to participate in it. In order to command his interest, she explains briefly and concisely the truth which she proposes to prove by her arguments, and thus she gives immediately the keynote to her book.
“Contending for the rights of woman, my main argument,” she tells him, “is built on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge; for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice. And how can woman be expected to co-operate unless she know why she ought to be virtuous; unless freedom strengthen her reason till she comprehend her duty, and see in what manner it is connected with her real good? If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot; and the love of mankind, from which an orderly train of virtues spring, can only be produced by considering the moral and civil interests of mankind; but the education and situation of woman, at present, shuts her out from such investigations.
“In this work I have produced many arguments, which to me were conclusive, to prove that the prevailing notion respecting a sexual character was subversive of morality; and I have contended, that to render the human body and mind more perfect, chastity must more universally prevail, and that chastity will never be respected in the male world till the person of a woman is not, as it were, idolized, when little virtue or sense embellish it with the grand traces of mental beauty or the interesting simplicity of affection.”