Mary Wollstonecraft

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

In her Introduction Mary further states the object and scope of her work. She advances the importance of bringing to a more healthy condition women, who, like flowers nourished in over-luxuriant soil, have become beautiful at the expense of strength. She attributes their weakness to the systems of education which have aimed at making them alluring mistresses rather than rational wives, and taught them to crave love, instead of exacting respect. But, to prevent misunderstanding, she explains that she does not wish them to seek to transform themselves into men by cultivating essentially masculine qualities. They are inferior physically, and must be content to remain so. Enthusiasm never carried her to the absurd and exaggerated extremes which have made later champions of the cause laughing-stocks. She also expresses her intention of steering clear of an error into which most writers upon the subject, with the exception perhaps of the author of “Sandford and Merton,” have fallen; namely, that of addressing their instruction to women of the upper classes. But she intends, while including all ranks of society, to give particular attention to the middle class, who appear to her to be in a more natural state. Then, warning her sex that she will treat them like rational creatures, and not as beings doomed to perpetual childhood, she tells them:—

“... I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex, and that secondary views should be brought to this simple touchstone.”

The Introduction is important because, as she says, it is the “very essence of an introduction to give a cursory account of the contents of the work it introduces.” Having learnt from it what she intends to do, it remains to be seen how she accomplishes her task.

For the convenience of readers, the treatise may be divided into three parts, though the author does not make this division, and was probably unconscious of its possibility. The first chapters give a general statement of the case. The second part is an elaboration of the first, and is more concerned with individual forms of the evil than with it as a whole. The third part suggests the remedy by which women are to be delivered from social slavery.

Mary assumes as the basis of her entire argument that “the more equality there is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reign in society.” The moral value of equality she demonstrates by the wretchedness and wickedness which result whenever there is a substitution of arbitrary power for the law of reason. The regal position, for example, is gained by vile intrigues and unnatural crimes and vices, and maintained by the sacrifice of true wisdom and virtue. Military discipline, since it demands unquestioning submission to the will of others, encourages thoughtless action. Even the clergy, because of the blind acquiescence required from them to certain forms of belief, have their faculties cramped. This being the case, it follows that society, “as it becomes more enlightened, should be very careful not to establish bodies of men who must necessarily be made foolish or vicious by the very constitution of their profession.” Now women, that is to say, one half of the human race, have hitherto, on account of their sex, been absolutely debarred from the exercise of reason in forming their conduct. As women it has been supposed that they cannot have the same ideals as men. What is vice for the latter is for them virtue. Their duty is to acquire “cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety.” They are to render themselves “gentle domestic brutes.” In their education the training of their understanding is to be neglected for the cultivation of corporeal accomplishments. They are bidden to obey no laws save those of behavior, to which they are as complete slaves as soldiers are to the commands of their general, or the clergy to the ex cathedra utterances of their church. Fondness for dress, habits of dissimulation, and the affectation of a sickly delicacy are recommended for their cultivation as essentially feminine qualities; yet if virtue have but one eternal standard, it should be the same in quality for the two sexes, even if there must be a difference in the degree acquired by each. If women be moral beings, they should aim at unfolding all their faculties, and not, as Rousseau and his disciples would have them do, labor only to make themselves pleasing sexually. Even if this be counted a praiseworthy end, and they succeed in it, to what or how long will it avail them? The result proves the unsoundness of such doctrines:—

“The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams, and that they cannot have much effect on her husband’s heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is past and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties; or is it not more rational to expect, that she will try to please other men, and, in the emotions raised by the expectation of new conquests, endeavor to forget the mortification her love or pride has received? When the husband ceases to be a lover—and the time will inevitably come—her desire of pleasing will then grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps the most evanescent of all passions, give place to jealousy or vanity.

“I now speak of women who are restrained by principle or prejudice; such women, though they would shrink from an intrigue with real abhorrence, yet, nevertheless, wish to be convinced by the homage of gallantry, that they are cruelly neglected by their husbands; or days and weeks are spent in dreaming of the happiness enjoyed by congenial souls, till the health is undermined and the spirits broken by discontent. How, then, can the great art of pleasing be such a necessary study? It is only useful to a mistress; the chaste wife and serious mother should only consider her power to please as the polish of her virtues, and the affection of her husband as one of the comforts that render her task less difficult, and her life happier.”

Coquettish arts triumph only for a day. Love, the most transitory of all passions, is inevitably succeeded by friendship or indifference.

The arguments which have been advanced to support this degrading system of female education are easily proved to have no foundation in reason. Women, it is said, are not so strong physically as men. True; but this does not imply that they have no strength whatsoever. Because they are weak relatively, it does not follow that they should be made so absolutely. The sedentary life to which they are condemned weakens them, and then their weakness is accepted as an inherent, instead of an artificial, quality. Rousseau concludes that a woman is naturally a coquette, and governed in all matters by the sexual instinct, because her earliest amusements consist in playing with dolls, dressing them and herself, and in talking. These conclusions are almost too puerile to be refuted:—

“That a girl, condemned to sit for hours listening to the idle chat of weak nurses or to attend at her mother’s toilet, will endeavor to join the conversation, is indeed very natural; and that she will imitate her mother or aunts, and amuse herself by adorning her lifeless doll, as they do in dressing her, poor innocent babe! is undoubtedly a most natural consequence. For men of the greatest abilities have seldom had sufficient strength to rise above the surrounding atmosphere; and if the page of genius has always been blurred by the prejudices of the age, some allowance should be made for a sex, who, like kings, always see things through a false medium.”