A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN

 

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN

 

Mary Wollstonecraft belonged to a circle of intellectuals in London who were supporters of revolutionary ideals and fervour. They upheld the secession of the American colonies under the leadership of Richard Price. They also supported the ideals of the French Revolution. John Locke’s ideals influenced this group.

She was born in 1759 into a family fraught with financial and other difficulties. Her mother was submissive to her husband, and after receiving his inheritance, her father led the family down the social scale through a series of failed farming ventures. He became a drunkard, and got brutal and abusive at home.

Mary was helper and protector for her mother and siblings. She then went on to become a governess, founder of a day school, and joined a publishing house. She married William Godwin and became a mother of a baby girl, Mary, who later grew up to marry P.B. Shelley and write the famous novel “Frankenstein”. Wollstonecraft died of purple fever in 1795, and Godwin published a memoir of her and edited her posthumous work.

She is best known for “A Vindication of the Rights to Women” and “A Vindication of the Rights to Men”. She also wrote fiction for children and adults, travel letters, reviews, and advice on the education of daughters. Her second work is a work of fiction followed by a book of stories “Original Stories from Real Life”, another work of fiction “Cave of Fancy”(unfinished), reviews for the Analytical Review, The Female Reader, two major other publications, A Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and an uncompleted novel, “The Wrongs of Woman or Maria”.

She offers clear, well argued theories concerning human nature, the nature of society and the right forms of education, and these theories are significantly different from those of Rousseau and other philosophers. All her writings are marked by spirited prose and careful observations. Several authors employ strong criticism and rigorous logic. What is most remarkable is that their author was without significant schooling, which was only for men in those times and whatever she knew came from reading, conversation with people she met, and by careful attention to sound criticism of her own work. Her philosophical essays are representations of these modalities.

At the core of her philosophy is a theory about human nature. Reason is the distinguishing characteristic of humans. If humans do not exhibit cultivated reason, it is due to neglect or wrongful socialization perpetrated by society and its institutions. But she subjected every idea to the test of everyday experience. Wollstonecraft claims that neither sex nor class are relevant to the initial birthright of humans as reasonable. To believe otherwise would be to believe either those human beings are not made in the image of God or that God is unreasonable.

She claims that if women do not think for themselves, they are weak-willed and vacillating, or if they are preoccupied by externals of clothing and manners, this is solely the result of their training.

Her moral philosophy is based on the equality of women and men, and that women ought to strive for the same human virtues as men. These virtues are to act reasonably, to use one’s own freedom, and respect the freedom of others, to do productive work, and to parent wisely. To fail in these virtues is to fail one’s duty as a human being.

Her social and political philosophy favours an egalitarian society like Virginia Woolf, “whose constitution is founded on the nature of man”. She criticises the army, upper classes, and all other non-egalitarian social form.

Her philosophy of education is based on proposals for widespread social reforms, grounded in a clear philosophical psychology, ethics, and social philosophy and her own experience. She is a sharp critic of British and European schools.

Her unique contribution of substance and style is better appreciated when she is seen in the context of 18^th century thought. She was influenced by Catherine Macaulay. Her contributions can be fully appreciated when the style and ideas that influenced her are recognized. She utilized ideas about God, human nature, and the start gained from feminism must be seen against the rising critique of society’s partiality. Her genius was to juxtaposition the oppression of men (class oppression) and the oppression of women. Yet her insight was more profound, for she recognized that the liberation of women would engender the liberation of all humankind.

Catherine Villanueva Gardner in Rediscovering Women Philosophers : Philosophical Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy challenges the “foundational assumption” that a sustained philosophical thesis or argument can take place within certain types of form such as the treatise or essay. Gardner’s unique perspective on Wollstonecraft, a woman written about widely, is to offer an analysis about both the breadth of her philosophical thought and the “narrowness of dominant views of what is to count as philosophical argument”, and what is to count as a philosophical point in a work. It requires that her work be read as “a whole corpus”.

On the model Gardner proposes, a philosophical point is not conceptualised on this model of the Enlightenment rationalist treatise. Rather it is one where sensibility plays a key philosophical role in blurring the distinctions between philosophy and literature. For Wollstonecraft, morality is intimately connected with sensibility.

Gardner argues for two main theses:

a) First, one must pay attention to her other works (including A Vindication) to understand her moral philosophy because they do not fit in the dominant form of philosophy; they thereby challenge Enlightenment Rationalism assumptions (eg the reason, passion dualism), they thereby challenge critics who comment on the “failings of Wollstonecraft’s second Vindication by showing that they are “failures” only when that work is located within the model of the Enlightenment treatise.

b) Second, Wollstonecraft has a notion of philosophical argument – one that “forces us outside the boundaries of the philosophical” on the dominant model of moral philosophy” that is not based so much on a specially identifiable argumentative structure but a particular style or way of writing with its own criteria. This style is what Gardner calls “the notion of a genuine sensitivity” one that incorporates genuine feelings, simply, and honestly expressed. This sensibility is not just a part or piece of her argument for the equality of women; it is a way she blurs the boundaries between creative or imaginative writing, and reason or philosophical writing.

Although, typically dismissed as “immature” or a “derivative” work, Gardner argues that “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters” is a precursor to her later work, especially Vindication of the Rights of Women insofar as it makes “truth the foundation of virtue” love is important but secondary to the “primary duty of universal benevolence”, and women’s failures as oppressions that are a product of the social system ex., the humiliating situation of the governess as a symbol of the oppression of women. She accepted Locke’s notion of the Tabula Rosa, the Enlightenment dichotomy of reason and emotion, and the supremacy of reason, the originality of the work lies with her argument for the rights of women.

An Enlightenment treatise has two key features: an argument for the authority of reason over the passions, and the adoption of a certain “masculine” style. But of Vindication is an Enlightenment treatise, then, for a modern feminist critic Wollstonecraft’s apparent approval of the subordination of passion to reason is problematic, not only for the ensuing difficulties it creates for her arguments, but in itself she cannot be interpreted as having attempted to legitimize her arguments for the rights of women by utilising the authority of a masculine discourse style.

Gardner argues that A Vindication is not an Enlightenment treatise. Catriona Mackenzie argues that Wollstonecraft does not make a clear-cut distinction between superior reason controlling inferior emotion but rather offers a subtler notion of “self governance”. Gardner draws on Mackenzie and Susan Khin Zaw’s views to argue that feeling plays an important part in Wollstonecraft’s moral philosophy, that the form of Vindication is important as Zaw argues, “it is less a philosophical treatise than an attempt to spark a change in public opinion. Wollstonecraft recognizes and utilises a structural connection between writing style and sincerity. Her flights of imagination, dramatic use of hyperbole, and rejection of “empty rhetorical flourishes” are not flaws but another way to show that reason and emotion are not in opposition as long as both are genuine. She explicitly connects themes of taste and morality. Expression or style is connected to morality, through the role that passions play in moral philosophy as long as the passions are sincere and sensible; it is “artificial” feelings and “flowery” diction that is insincere and not sensible.

It is writing from her heart directed by faithfulness to her Christian principles that is the foundation of moral philosophy. It is sentiment that is used as an instrument of oppression or gross sensualism that she rejects. As such an understanding of Wollstonecraft’s concept of sensibility is pivotal to the comprehension of her arguments for both the rights and the virtues of women.