At one time Mary Astell's scheme came very near to realisation. The devout, intellectual and wealthy Lady Elizabeth Hastings became interested in it and declared herself willing to supply the necessary funds. But it so happened that Bishop Burnet heard of the plan and of the promised donation. A scheme for a rational education for girls struck this conservative churchman as so absurd that in his Anglican hatred of Catholicism he rather irrelevantly referred to it as "a popish project", using all his influence to divert Lady Elizabeth's charity, in which effort he was completely successful.
[24] A Caveat to the Fair Sex.
[25] Letter to the Countess of Bute, March 6, 1753.
[26] "Introductory Anecdotes" to Lord Wharncliffe's Edition of the Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Paris, 1837).
CHAPTER V. Qualified Feminism: The Bluestockings.
"Feminism", says M. Ascoli, in an article in the "Revue de Synthèse historique", "is the mental attitude of those who refuse to admit a natural and necessary inequality between the faculties of the sexes, and, in consequence of this, between their respective rights; who believe that—within certain limits clearly defined by Nature—women are capable of the same occupations as men, in which they will succeed equally well when, prepared for their task by an adequate education, they will be no longer opposed by the ill-will and the hostile jealousy of the opposite sex; of those who, eager for the birth of a more extensive liberty and a more liberal justice, hope for the realisation of an ideal which will bring the greatest boon not only to women, but to all humanity."
If the above is a correct and exhaustive definition of feminism, the Bluestockings certainly cannot be called feminists, for they none of them believed that the future of the human race was in any way dependent on a recognised equality between the sexes. This, however, should not be understood as implying that they did nothing to promote the march of feminism, or rather to prepare the national mind for the first symptoms of a more directly feminine movement which were to manifest themselves before the more or less artificial conversations of the Bluestocking côteries had retired into insignificance before the looming spectre of Revolution, filling the mind with speculations of more direct importance, and arousing the hereditary conservatism which slumbers at the bottom of every true British heart in a common effort to uphold the laws of the country against the revolutionary element, sown broadcast at home, and prevailing with most disastrous consequences abroad. But the contribution of the English salons to feminism in its narrower sense, however important in its consequences, must be described as largely unintentional, and extremely qualified. The very mention of Mary Wollstonecraft's name was enough to arouse indignation and disgust in the bosom of every true "Blue" except Miss Seward, on the joint score of her being considered an extreme feminist, a revolutionary and most of all: an atheist.
The charge of atheism is of the many accusations brought against the author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" beyond any doubt the most absurd, and where there was so little mutual understanding, it is not astonishing that there should be an utter lack of appreciation between such women as Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft, both of whom were actuated by the noblest motives and whom a closer acquaintance could not have failed to bring nearer together. Of the main contentions in the former's "Strictures" a very considerable majority, stripped of their dogmatic spirit of orthodox Christianity, and worded in such a manner as to make them sound as a vindication of inalienable rights and corresponding duties rather than an exhortation to a life of moral virtue, are an exact repetition of the notions put forward in the "Rights of Women"; with the contents of which Hannah More was unacquainted. Horace Walpole, the tone of whose letters to "Saint Hannah" is so completely different from his usual scoffing as to suggest a conflict in the writer's mind between irony and genuine admiration, in referring to the Paris massacres, expresses his disgust of "the philosophing serpent", and is pleased to find that his friend has not read her works; to which Hannah replies that she has been "much pestered" to read the "Rights of Women", which she evidently never did.
Mary's feminism was of the most comprehensive description. Although very far from atheism, her religious notions, shaken by bitter experience, were not sufficiently strong to support her in what was to her the very cruel struggle for life, the facts of which were, from her earliest infancy, so hideous as to leave her no leisure for the gradual development of social ideas under the regulating influence of a riper mind, but put her through the hard school of suffering. The problem with which she found herself confronted was an urgent one, calling for immediate solution.