From the primal source of their wrongs,—that is, the undue importance attached to the sexual character,—Mary next explains that minor causes have arisen to prevent women from realizing this ideal. The narrowness of mind engendered by their vicious education hinders them from looking beyond the interests of the present. They consider immediate rather than remote effects, and prefer to be “short-lived queens than to labor to attain the sober pleasures that arise from equality.” Then, again, the desire to be loved or respected for something, which is instinctive in all human beings, is gratified in women by the homage paid to charms born of indolence. They thus, like the rich, lose the stimulus to exertion which this desire gives to men of the middle class, and which is one of the chief factors in the development of rational creatures. A man with a profession struggles to succeed in it. A woman struggles to marry advantageously. With the former, pleasure is a relaxation; with the latter, it is the main purpose of life. Therefore, while the man is forced to forget himself in his work, the woman’s attention is more and more concentrated upon her own person. The great evil of this self-culture is that the emotions are developed instead of the intellect. Women become a prey to what is delicately called sensibility. They feel and do not reason, and, depending upon men for protection and advice, the only effort they make is to give their weakness a graceful covering. They require, in the end, support even in the most trifling circumstances. Their fears are perhaps pretty and attractive to men, but they reduce them to such a degree of imbecility that they will start “from the frown of an old cow or the jump of a mouse,” and a rat becomes a serious danger. These fair, fragile creatures are the objects of Mary Wollstonecraft’s deepest contempt, and she gives a good wholesome prescription for their cure, which, despite modern co-education and Women Conventions, female doctors and lawyers, might still be more generally adopted to great advantage. It is in such passages as the following that she proves the practical tendency of her arguments:—
“I am fully persuaded that we should hear of none of these infantine airs if girls were allowed to take sufficient exercise and not confined in close rooms till their muscles are relaxed and their powers of digestion destroyed. To carry the remark still further, if fear in girls, instead of being cherished, perhaps created, was treated in the same manner as cowardice in boys, we should quickly see women with more dignified aspects. It is true they could not then with equal propriety be termed the sweet flowers that smile in the walk of man; but they would be more respectable members of society, and discharge the important duties of life by the light of their own reasons. ‘Educate women like men,’ says Rousseau, ‘and the more they resemble our sex, the less power will they have over us.’ This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves.”
Some philosophers have asserted with contempt, as evidence of the inferiority of the female understanding, that it arrives at maturity long before the male, and that women attain their full strength and growth at twenty, but men not until they are thirty. But this Mary emphatically denies. The seeming earlier precocity of girls she attributes to the fact that they are much sooner treated as women than boys are as men. Their more speedy physical development is assumed because with them the standard of beauty is fine features and complexion, whilst male beauty is allowed to have some connection with the mind. But the truth is, that “strength of body and that character of countenance which the French term a physionomie, women do not acquire before thirty any more than men.”
There are some curious remarks in reference to polygamy as a mark of the inferiority of women, but they need not be given here, since this evil is not legally recognized by civilized people, with the exception of the Mormons. But there is a polygamy, not sanctioned by law, which exists in all countries, and which has done more than almost anything else to dishonor women. Mary’s observations in this connection are among the strongest in the book. She understands the true difficulty more thoroughly than many social reformers to-day, and offers a better solution of the problem than they do. Justice, not charity, she declares, is wanted in the world. Asylums and Magdalens are not the proper remedies for the abuse. But women should be given the same chance as men to rise after their fall. The first offence should not be made unpardonable, since good can come from evil. From a struggle with strong passions virtue is often evolved.
To sum up in a few words Mary’s statement of her subject, woman having always been treated as an irrational, inferior being, has in the end become one. Her acquiescence to her moral and mental degradation springs from a want of understanding. But “whether this arises from a physical or accidental weakness of faculties, time alone can determine.” Women must be allowed to exercise their understanding before it can be proved that they have none.
While each individual man is much to blame in encouraging the false position of women, inconsistently degrading those from whom they pretend to derive their chief pleasure, still greater fault lies with writers who have given to the world in their works opinions which, seemingly favorable, are in reality of a derogatory character to the entire sex. Having set themselves up as teachers, they are doubly responsible. They add to their personal influence that of their written doctrine. They necessarily become leaders, since the majority of men are more than willing to be led. There were several writers of the eighteenth century who had dogmatized about women and their education and the laws of behavior. Rousseau was to many as an inspired prophet. No woman’s library was then considered complete which did not include Dr. Fordyce’s Sermons and Dr. Gregory’s “Legacy to His Daughters.” Mrs. Piozzi and Madame de Staël were minor authorities, and Lord Chesterfield’s Letters had their admirers and upholders. These writers Mary treats separately, after she has shown the result of the tacit teaching of men, taken collectively; and here what may be called the second part of the book begins.
As Mary says, the comments which follow can all be referred to a few simple principles, and “might have been deduced from what I have already said.” They are a mere elaboration of what has gone before, and it would be therefore useless to repeat them. She exposes the folly of Rousseau’s ideal, the perfect Sophia who unites the endurance of a Griselda to the wiles of a Vivien, and whose principal mission seems to be to make men wonder, with the French cynic, of what use women over forty are in the world. She objects to Dr. Fordyce’s eulogium of female purity and his Rousseau-inspired appeals to women to make themselves all that is desirable in men’s eyes, expressed in “lover-like phrases of pumped-up passion.” The sensuous piety of his Sermons, suggestive of the erotic religious poems of the East, were particularly offensive to her. She next regrets that Dr. Gregory, at such a solemn moment as that of giving last words of advice to his daughters, should have added the weight of his authority to the doctrine of dissimulation; she is indignant that Mrs. Piozzi and Madame de Staël should have so little realized the dignity of true womanhood as to have confirmed the fiat their tyrants had passed against them; and she vigorously condemns Lord Chesterfield’s vicious system, which tends to the early acquirement of knowledge of the world and leaves but little opportunity for the free development of man’s natural powers. These writers, no matter how much they differ in detail, agree in believing external behavior to be of primary importance; and Mary’s criticisms of their separate beliefs may therefore be reduced to one leading proposition by which she contradicts their main assertions. Right and wrong, virtue and vice, must be studied in the abstract and not by the measure of weak human laws and customs. This is the refrain to all her arguments.
These remarks are followed by four chapters which, while they really relate to the subject, add little to the force of the book. Introduced as they are, they seem like disconnected essays. There is a dissertation upon the effect of early associations of ideas to prove what has already been asserted in an earlier chapter, that “females, who are made women of when they are mere children, and brought back to childhood when they ought to leave the go-cart forever,” will inevitably have a sexual character given to their minds. Modesty is next considered, not as a sexual virtue but comprehensively, to show that it is a quality which, regardless of sex, should always be based on humanity and knowledge, and never on the false principle that it is a means by which women make themselves pleasing to men. To teach girls that reserve is only necessary when they are with persons of the other sex is at once to destroy in their minds the intrinsic value of modesty. Yet this is usually the lesson taught them. As a natural consequence, women are free and confidential with each other to a fault, and foolishly prudent and squeamish with men. They are never for a moment unconscious of the difference of sex, and, in affecting the semblance of modesty, the true virtue escapes them altogether. In their neglect of what is for what seems, they lose the substance and grasp a shadow. This consideration of behavior, arbitrarily regulated, rather than of conduct ruled by truth, leads women to care much more for their reputation than for their actual chastity or virtue. They gradually learn to believe that the sin is in being found out. “Women mind not what only Heaven sees.” If their reputation be safe, their consciences are satisfied. A woman who, despite innumerable gallantries, preserves her fair name, looks down with contempt upon another who perhaps has sinned but once, but who has not been as clever a mistress of the art of deception.
“This regard for reputation, independent of its being one of the natural rewards of virtue, however, took its rise from a cause that I have already deplored as the grand source of female depravity, the impossibility of regaining respectability by a return to virtue, though men preserve theirs during the indulgence of vice. It was natural for women then to endeavor to preserve what, once lost, was lost forever, till, this care swallowing up every other care, reputation for chastity became the one thing needful for the sex.”
As pernicious as the effects of distorted conceptions of virtue are those which arise from unnatural social distinctions. This is a return to the proposition relating to the necessity of equality with which the book opens. In treating it in detail the question of woman’s work is more closely studied. The evils which the difference of rank creates are aggravated in her case. Men of the higher classes of society can, by entering a political or military life, make duties for themselves. Women in the same station are not allowed these channels of escape from the demoralizing idleness and luxury to which their social position confines them. On the other hand, women of the middle class, who are above menial service but who are forced to work, have the choice of a few despised employments. Milliners and mantua-makers are respected only a little more than prostitutes. The situation of governess is looked upon in the light of a degradation, since those who fill it are gentlewomen who never expected to be humiliated by work. Many women marry and sacrifice their happiness to fly from such slavery. Others have not even this pitiful alternative. “Is not that government then very defective, and very unmindful of the happiness of one half of its members, that does not provide for honest, independent women, by encouraging them to fill respectable stations?” It is a melancholy result of civilization that the “most respectable women are the most oppressed.”