A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - women's freedom in the twenty-first century

Ella Whelan shares her speech from this year's Living Freedom summer school, organised by Ideas Matter.

First published in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman railed against the view of women as being in a perpetual state of childhood. Wollstonecraft insisted that women should be thought of as able to stand alone as autonomous, robust and rational individuals. ‘I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves’, she wrote.

In our post #MeToo age - when the demand for safety and protection takes precedence over the fight for rights and liberation, and when many struggle to even answer the simple question ‘What is a woman?’ - Wollstonecraft’s liberatory demand for autonomy still appears revolutionary.

How best should we understand her work and her place in history? With women’s rights once more under the microscope - whether due to the threat to abortion rights or the battle to retain single-sex spaces - and as mainstream feminism looks to the law to solve problems from equality to misogyny, what did Wollstonecraft have to say on the relationship between rights, responsibility and human agency?

As many of us head off to The Academy for the weekend (come and join us) here is a reminder of why understanding the ideas and philosophy of historic figures really matters. In a world in which politics is too often reduced to memes, tick-box slogans and social-media posts, engaging with important thinkers allows us to deepen our understanding of today’s trends. The fight for women’s freedom is not just a contemporary issue; well over 200 years ago Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman gave us an invaluable way to look at the question, as Ella Whelan explains here.

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The following speech has been edited for clarity.

‘The being who can govern itself has nothing to fear in life.’ This is Mary Wollstonecraft’s daring vision for women’s liberation in her famous text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - the idea that woman can, with access to education and commitment to reason, achieve the same freedom of thought and rationality as man.

Writing in the late eighteenth century - the Age of Enlightenment - Wollstonecraft challenged her fellow thinkers to extend their ambitious belief in humanity’s potential beyond the confines of their own sex. There was a glaring blind spot in the heated discussions about the rights of man, freedom of conscience, equality of opportunity - and the blind spot was woman-sized.

Briefly, who was Mary Wollstonecraft? Born into a relatively wealthy family in 1759, she had something of a mixed upbringing. Her father squandered the family inheritance, becoming a drunk and a brute. She had both exposure to the upper echelons of society and a sense of their injustice - her brother was to inherit what little there was left, despite Wollstonecraft and her sisters doing most of the work to support her failing family. 

She was educated, set up a school with her sisters and later became a governess to an aristocratic family in Ireland. Some of these pursuits failed, some Wollstonecraft found she could not see herself continuing - and so her career as a professional writer began with Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in 1787.

But it was back in Newington Green in North London where Wollstonecraft’s political education and engagement really started to take shape, attending dinner parties with the likes of the revolutionary Thomas Paine, author of Rights of Man and The Age of Reason. It was these electric discussions about the French Revolution and the potential for man to shape his own destiny inspired her to retaliate against the philosopher Edmund Burke’s critique of the goings on in France in a pro-republican pamphlet, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Wollstonecraft’s name was made, and her position as a dissenter and somewhat radical voice in British political circles became known.

Possibly sick of sitting at dinner tables at which men underestimated her, and certainly inspired by the misrepresentation of women’s capabilities and ambitions in the works of writers she admired like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wollstonecraft wrote her most famous work - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - in 1792. Despite it being a provocative challenge to the status quo of sex relations, it was received well. In fact, it wasn’t until after her death that her radical view of women’s equality and educational prospects was criticised.

Wollstonecraft was incredibly adventurous. She went to Paris following the publication of her book and even began writing a history of its early days, which was a dangerous task - one which had landed others in line for the guillotine. It’s in Paris, following disheartenment with the beginning of the reign of terror and the gory days of the revolution, that she becomes involved with American businessman Gilbert Imlay, the father of her daughter, Fanny. Unfortunately for Wollstonecraft, he proves to be unworthy - leaving mother and daughter after taking up with an actress.

Following a very hard time of heartbreak, two suicide attempts and a recovery in Sweden, Wollstonecraft returns home with Fanny. It’s back in London where she reunites with William Godwin, one of the intellectuals she shared a dinner table with during her time in Newington Green. They form a relationship of equals, living separately while married, and Wollstonecraft continues to write both fiction and political texts. Tragically, her story ends abruptly - she dies days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary, who we know as the author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 

Wollstonecraft was remarkable at a time when women were expected to remain invisible. And her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is, at times, an incredibly angry protest against the injustices faced by her fellow women. ‘Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalise them, when principles would be a surer guard, only to sweeten the cup of man?’, she writes.

When quoting Rousseau’s famous work, Emile, in which he depicts women as defined by their relationship to men - ornamental, pleasing and pliant - she rebuts: ‘What nonsense. When will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject?’

Her argument is simply this - that knowledge, education and reason, those great Enlightenment beliefs - have been kept from women and hoarded by men. As such, women have become infantile, superficial and weak. And rather than see this injustice, men point out their weaknesses as proof of their ineligibility for the same freedoms and equality as they enjoy.

But Wollstonecraft is nothing but fair. She is equally as annoyed at women of her class and above, who go along with such pretences, too. She writes: ‘The conversations of French women, who are not so rigidly nailed to their chairs to twist lappets, and knot ribands, is frequently superficial, but I contend that it is not half so insipid as that of those English women whose time is spent in making caps, bonnets and the whole mischief of trimmings, not to mention shopping.’ Ouch.

But, crucially, Wollstonecraft recognises how the odds are stacked against women. There are two choices - the frilly madonna who makes good marriage choices to ‘better herself’ - a phrase Wollstonecraft spits out - or the whore. And, rather bitterly, she notes that ‘necessity never makes prostitution the business of men’s lives’. 

We can imagine why A Vindication was revolutionary in the late 1700s, challenging women to become independent thinkers and men to take them seriously. Though the book does not explicitly reference arguments for votes or practical rights, Wollstonecraft’s demands for freedom of conscience and responsibility have inspired many women’s liberation movements, including the Suffragette Movement, which often held up banners with Wollstonecraft’s name. 

So why is she relevant today - when legally women are afforded almost all the same freedoms as men? When discrimination is both socially frowned upon and legally impermissible? When most people when polled agree with the idea that women should be allowed to do what they want?

Wollstonecraft’s thesis on women’s freedom is still as necessary today as it was centuries ago because the central tenet of her great work is this: that women’s inequality stems from a notion that we are naturally weaker, naturally more fragile and therefore naturally in need of greater protection than men.

This does not mean that she denies the reality of nature in some elements of life: ‘I will allow that bodily strength seems to give man a natural superiority over woman, and this is the only solid basis on which the superiority of the sex can be built. But I still insist, that not only the virtue, but the knowledge of the two sexes should be the same in nature, if not in degree, and that women, considered not only as moral, but rational creatures, ought to endeavour to acquire human virtues or perfections by the same means as men, instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half being.’

‘Women’, she says, ‘I allow may have different duties to fulfil, but they are human duties and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same’.

Biological sex cannot - contrary to contemporary notions of trans ideology - be changed. And, in most cases, men will be able to jump higher, run faster and hit harder. But what Wollstonecraft is arguing is that this biological obstacle is irrelevant to women’s mental strengths, and that the unwillingness to let them flex their intellectual muscles or act on their conscience and agency, is rendering a false inequality between the sexes.

She says: ‘For only by the jostling of equality can we form a just opinion of ourselves.’ Men, she argues, are being degraded by the lack of female self-actualisation, as well as women.

This view - that women are inherently weaker, nicer in politics, more caring, better at watching the baby, more in need of time off at work, requiring protective policies against nasty language - stems from the same, visceral sexism that Wollstonecraft turned her pen against. 

Here we are in beautiful rooms like these, women and men sat next to each other in the pursuit of intellectual rigour and freedom. And yet, the view that women are different and in need of special treatment prevails. In many ways, we as women remain defined by our relationship to men - in need of protection because men are harmful, in need of leg-ups because men are more forceful, more in touch with our emotions, to counteract the brutality of men.

For me, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a championing of female agency - a demand for independence, that women’s characters no longer be shaped and defined in relation to the other sex. Wollstonecraft writes: ‘It is time to effect a revolution in female manners’ - not the table kind, I add - ‘time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world’. Free women will make free men, will make a free society,

‘I think the female world oppressed, yet the gangrene which the vices engendered by oppression have produced, is not confined to the morbid part, but pervades society at large; so that when I wish to see my sex become more like moral agents, my heart bounds with the anticipation of the general diffusion of that sublime contentment which only morality can diffuse’, she argues.

Wollstonecraft’s vision of freedom has never been fully realised. The traps of women’s gilded cages have not been smashed, but merely rebranded as safe spaces. And many men today who purport to be defenders of freedom cling on to the idea that women and men are not just physically different, but politically, socially and philosophically different, too - therefore denying us the freedom they seek to celebrate. 

The blazing demands and tragic life and death of Mary Wollstonecraft matter for our understanding not just of women’s freedom in the twenty first century, but of liberty itself.

Read Ella Whelan’s review of Rachel Hewitt’s book on Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment thinkers - A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind - on spiked.