PRESENTATION WRITE-UP.

A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN(1792) By Mary Wollstonecraft.

Submitted by: Swati Kapil. IVth Semester 2009.

In 1789, Dr. Richard Price, a Unitarian minister in England, preached a sermon "On the Love of Country." In this sermon he congratulated the French National Assembly, for the Revolution had opened up new possibilities for religious and civil freedom. The French Assembly's "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" was, indeed, a landmark in world history, especially following the 1776 American Declaration of Independence. Price spoke of being a citizen of the world -- with the rights that citizenship implied. He fleshed out further his doctrine of perfectability -- that the world can be made better through human effort. This doctrine was the theological and philosophical justification for social reform, for striving in this world for social change. Not all English writers agreed with Dr. Price. The responses to the sermon are better known to history than the initial sermon itself. Edmund Burke, appalled at the substitution of the rights of man for the rights of kings, for the institution of liberty at the expense of traditional authority, responded with his Reflections on the French Revolution. Burke argued that the overthrow of authority in France would bring on chaos and disorder. His arguments answered and denied Price's assertions of natural rights and Price's doctrine of perfectibility. Thomas Paine's answer was The Rights of Man. Burke's and Paine's responses are today considered classics of political philosophy. Few have read Mary Wollstonecraft's initial answer to Burke: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, published in 1790. In this angry rebuttal of Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, a member of Price's congregation, argued for what she considered God-given rights of civil and religious liberty. She spoke of the aristocracy that was being displaced in France as decadent. She criticized Burke's sympathy for the women of the displaced aristocracy in France as selective, ignoring the many more thousands of women who suffered under the old regime: Mary Wollstonecraft followed this argument with another response in 1791, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The second edition in 1792, including her revisions, is the edition available today. Here Mary Wollstonecraft extended her arguments about the need and value of female emancipation. A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it, though it may excite a horse-laugh. I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behavior." 1 This wild wish - to confound, confuse the distinction between the sexes - is expressed in the A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), 'the founding text of Anglo-American feminism'.2 In case we think this wish is wild in another sense - that is, beyond the author's intentions or responsibility - let us move a little further along in the text: 'This desire of being always women, is the very consciousness which degrades the sex. Excepting with a lover, I must repeat with emphasis. . . It would be well if they were only agreeable or rational companions.'3 The chapters from which these quotations are drawn are respectively titled 'The State of Degradation to which Woman is Reduced' and 'Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity'. The state of degradation is the

feminine state, the position to which women are consigned through the designs and designations of male desire. The male writer whose objectifying desire is the principal target of Wollstonecraft's polemic is her mentor, Rousseau. Today A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a little over two hundred years old. It was on 3 January 1792 that Wollstonecraft handed the last pages of her manuscript to the printer. Her contribution was crucial, so crucial that for over two centuries the Vindication has been widely regarded as the intellectual manifesto of western feminism. Particularly in this century, the book has been constantly cited as the pioneer text; its author applauded/condemned as the first modern feminist theorist. Yet despite the almost legendary status which Wollstonecraft has acquired, the actual content of her feminism has, until recently, been curiously under- explored. The arguments of the Vindication itself - complex, fragmented, in part derivative and yet strikingly innovative - are only now coming under close scrutiny. As a political ideologue, Wollstonecraft's place was within what Franco Venturi has dubbed the 'utopian' wing of eighteenth-century progressivism - that visionary, worldregenerating brand of democratic radicalism which reached a highpoint in the 'Jacobin' circle to which Wollstonecraft belonged. Had we a place to stand upon, we might raise the world4 Paine quoted Archimedes in his Rights of Man,and for himself and his associates, including Wollstonecraft, revolutionary France seemed to be that place. The French revolution, Wollstonecraft wrote enthusiastically in 1793, is a strong proof how far things will govern men, when simple principles begin to act with one powerful spring against the complicated wheels of ignorance.5 The 'simple principles' which she had in mind were those which had inspired an entire generation of French and English radicals: the natural right of every individual to political and social self-determination; the evils of autocratic government, hereditary privilege, and unearned wealth; the perfectibility of human nature and human institutions; and - above all - egalite' as the foundation for a new morality within human relations. Virtue can only flourish among equals . . .6 she argued. The application of these principles to women was not entirely new. From the seventeenth century onward, libertarian opposition to the oligarchic state had provided a few women with a platform - albeit an extremely narrow one - from which to raise their own demands as rational members of the polis. When combined, as popular reformation in Britain almost invariably was, with radical Protestant claims for the equality of all true believers, such ideals laid the foundation for a concept of human nature as, in its essence, genderless. Both reason and soul had 'nothing of sex in them', as some leading progressive theorists argued. Furthermore, those differential capacities which did mark out the sexual distinction provided no legitimate foundation for differential power. 'Our souls are as perfect as theirs,' Wollstonecraft insisted. But in fact neither soulfulness nor reason was recognized as a criterion for equal rights outside the social contexts in which these attributes displayed themselves, that is, outside the authority relations of a society whose fundamental political units were not righteous individuals but patriarchal,

property-holding households. There was, according to J. G. A. Pocock, a 'male bias' across the entire spectrum of progressive opinion which 'bordered on the absolute': To qualify for equality and citizenship, the individual must be master of his own household, proprietor along with his equals of the only arms permitted to be borne in wars which must be publicly undertaken, and possessor of property whose function was to bring him . . . independence . ..7 Ostensibly universal categories, in other words, were heavily invested with specific class and gender content; humanity was indeed mankind; and egalitarian demands were restricted to those who could display their civic virtue through virile activity. 'Is it not the good son, the good husband, the good father, who makes the good citizen?' Rousseau demanded. And thus the rights of humanity have been . . . confined to the male line from Adam downwards,8 as Wollstonecraft noted, a wry comment on the patrilineage of the political discourse into which feminists had somehow to intervene. So clearly gendered was the concept of the free citizen that Wollstonecraft's own attempts to employ it on women's behalf constantly drew her away from a discourse of humanity to one of masculine identification. Since 'the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character' had been largely confined to men, 'wish with me, that [women] may every day become more and more masculine', she demands of her readers, adding that rational men will excuse me for endeavoring to persuade [women] to become more masculine and respectable . . .9 The term 'masculine' was only a 'bug-bear' she later insisted, but in fact it was much more than that - as her own personal and political career testified. The relationship of middleclass women to the nascent bourgeois order, if not placing them in an oppositional position, certainly relegated them to a marginal one. Without property or political rights, barred from the academies of higher education and from most professions, lacking any independent legal identity, women could in fact be said, as Wollstonecraft has one of her fictional heroines say of herself, to be 'without a country'. Wollstonecraft's own struggles - to survive financially in a job market virtually closed to poor women of genteel backgrounds; to assert her personal independence in a middle-class culture which encouraged independent enterprise in its men folk and condemned it in women; to raise egalitarian political and social claims on behalf of other women - all these marked her out, not as a good British bourgeois, but as an alien, an importer of French Jacobinical ideals, a foreigner in her own land and - above all - a foreigner to her sex, to her womanhood. Men could be citizens, entrepreneurs, legislators, laborers; women were - in every area of life and law - the 'sex', and it was no accident that the title of one of the most popular of the many anti-Wollstonecraft texts published at the time was 'The UnSex'd Females'. It was impossible for women to speak as citizens without speaking against their womanhood - and thus it is against womanhood and for masculinity that Wollstonecraft is so often forced to speak. The argument thus keeps veering between idealizations of male virtue, enterprise and genius with a corresponding denigration of the feminine on one hand and on the other hand, an equally idealizing view of a certain kind of womanliness. And beyond both of these fantasized positions within and across the sexual divide, there is another - a wild

wish to refuse the division itself, to see the 'distinction of sex confounded' except, as she 'repeats with emphasis', 'where love animates the behavior'. But the qualification is in fact little more than a politic gesture toward romantic sensibilities, for love, it seems, is at the heart of the problem. 'To speak disrespectfully of love is, I know, high treason against sentiment and fine feelings . . .' an early passage in the Vindication defiantly opens, and thereafter, page after page of the book provides a shockingly harsh critique of sexual love as a source and site of female oppression. Lust and love, Wollstonecraft argues, have deformed and depraved relations between the sexes to the point where all human integrity is sacrificed. Women are made 'systematically voluptuous' in order to become contentedly the slaves of casual lust . . . standing dishes to which every glutton may have access.10 'I cannot discover why . . . females should always be degraded by being made subservient to love or lust.'11 This anti-eroticism is present in all of Wollstonecraft's writings, but is most fiercely and systematically expressed in the Vindication - a text which, in Cora Kaplan's words, offers the readers a puritan sexual ethic with such passionate conviction that self-denial seems a libidinised activity.12The language in which this ethic is articulated, however, is simultaneously dogmatic, tentative, haranguing, hesitant; in other words, deeply contradictory, as reflected particularly in the multiplicity of terms - appetite, instinct, passion, lust, desire, sensation, love, voluptuousness - which she uses sometimes interchangeably, sometimes in direct opposition to each other. As a biological instinct, the sexual urge is proclaimed to be both depraved and yet wholly natural: this apparent contradiction is partially resolved, however, in classical puritan fashion. Sex is a natural and legitimate drive, Wollstonecraft argues, when - and only when - its aim is reproduction. How are we to understand this sharply censorious tone? Why is A Vindication so suffused with the sexual, and so severe about it? Throughout the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there had emerged within British genteel culture a concept of the feminine which was wholly sexualized. Anatomy was not merely female destiny, it set all the boundaries of feminine duty; virtue in a woman had only one meaning. 'The business of a woman's life is sex,' Rousseau wrote. If women had an identity at all, it seemed to be located in their genitals: certainly everything else about a woman, even her capacity to think, was determined by her sex. At the opening of the Vindication Wollstonecraft indicated that her book was written against this background chorus of prescriptive writings on women's conduct, authored mostly by men who considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers', or 'to render them the insignificant objects of male desire . . .13 The chapters which follow contain an extended quarrel with these men - Drs Gregory and Fordyce, Lord Chesterfield, but above all with Wollstonecraft's erstwhile mentor, Rousseau, whose voice is almost as prominent at many points in the text as Wollstonecraft's own. The aim of all these moralists, Wollstonecraft indicates, was to educate their female readers into a code of conduct which they deemed 'modest' - a term

which when examined closely can be seen to imply acute sexual self-consciousness conveyed through a display of sexual ignorance so excessive that it served both as advertisement and provocation. The classic account of the modest female was provided by Rousseau, in his fictional portrayal of the young Sophie - bride-to-be of the exemplary boy-citizen, Emile. Sophie, as Rousseau unnecessarily adds, has 'the art of pleasing men' - the art to which all other aspects of her life are subordinated. She treads, in fact, that fine line between overt erotic enticement and propriety which was the essence of feminine 'sensibility'. Viewing herself through the male gaze, Sophie produces herself only as an object of carnal scrutiny, never as the active subject of her own desires. Yet that these desires were at least present, if inactive, Rousseau - in common with other moralists of the period - had no doubt. The idea that women were the more carnal sex, the inveterate nibblers at forbidden apples, had of course been a central feature of Christian dogma, and it remained entrenched within eighteenth century social theory. Women's 'first propensities', Rousseau insists, reveal an excess of 'sensibility' which is 'easily corrupted or perverted by too much indulgence'. In savage society this immoderate carnality is of little consequence, but in civil society it must be restrained lest it lead to an amoral anarchy destructive of family life, patrilineage and ultimately the polis itself. Rousseau acknowledges that The life of a good woman is reduced, by our absurd institutions, to a perpetual conflict with herself: but it is just that this sex should partake of the sufferings which arise from those evils it hath caused us.14 These typical passages of Rousseauite sexual philosophizing are quoted, in a growing crescendo of rage, by Wollstonecraft. 'And why is the life of a modest woman a perpetual conflict?' she finally demands, and then goes on to answer that it is the 'very system of education' which Rousseau advocated for women that makes it so: when sensibility is nurtured at the expense of the understanding, such weak beings must be restrained by arbitrary means, and be subjected to continual conflicts; but give (women's) activity of mind a wider range, and nobler passions and motives will govern their appetites and sentiments . . .15 All the self-indulgent sensualism, the mindless love of pleasure and the narcissism with which Rousseau invests Sophie are, Wollstonecraft agrees, characteristic of most women (particularly women of the leisured landed class) but against his naturalist explanation she insists that this version of femininity is the 'effect of habit' rather than 'an undoubted indication of nature.' I have, probably,' she goes on, 'had an opportunity of observing more girls in their infancy than Jean-Jacques Rousseau' - including, she adds, herself.16 On this basis she later offers her own account of how, in her words, 'females are made women of when they are mere children': Everything that they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind. False notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of their limbs and produce a sickly soreness, rather than delicacy.-of organs; and thus weakened ... how can they attain the vigor necessary to enable them to throw off their factitious character? . . . This cruel association of ideas, which everything conspires to twist into all their habits of thinking, or, to speak with more precision, of feeling, receives new force when they begin to act a little for

themselves; for they then perceive that it is only through their address to excite emotions in men, that pleasure and power are to be obtained.17 Left to herself, she goes on to say, a small girl will always be a romp, uninterested in dolls or small boys ('girls and boys . . . would play harmlessly together, if the distinction of sex was not inculcated long before nature makes any difference'). There is 'no sex to her mind', nor is her mind on sex unless 'improper education . . . by heating the imagination' calls forth 'the desire connected with the impulse of nature to propagate the species' prematurely. And it is precisely this which happens all the time, through false ideas and false habits, transforming female children of nature into little 'coquettes', 'the insignicant objects of male desire.18 It is important here to understand the scale of Wollstonecraft's achievement: what she has produced is an account of female sexuality based on a clear distinction between gender as a biological fact (when 'nature makes (the) difference') and the inculcated eroticism which she identifies as contemporary feminine subjectivity. It is the latter, this sexed selfidentity, which Wollstonecraft declares, again and again, to be artificial, cultural, transmutable. The capacity to breed and mother is a fact of nature; the eroticized woman, however, is a product of culture; she is, in Wollstonecraft's term, 'factitious', a creature of cultural fictions. Moreover, not only is she herself a corrupt artifact of 'civilization' but she is also responsible for spreading the contaminating influence of sexual vice throughout society. Steeped in inauthenticity, trained to be the objects of male desire, women learn to 'glory in their subjection' and to make of it a phony empire of sexual conquest. Plunged into endemic 'sexual warfare', they wield the only weapons available to them their talents in seduction: women are made systematically voluptuous, and though they may not all carry their libertinism to the same height, yet this heartless intercourse with the sex, which they allow themselves, depraves both sexes, because the taste of men is vitiated; and women, of all classes, naturally square their behavior to gratify the taste by which they obtain pleasure and power.19 Elsewhere Wollstonecraft lays the blame for this situation squarely on the shoulders of men, whose greater susceptibility to 'the appetites' leads them to enslave women to their carnal needs. But the rhetorical weight of her condemnatory language lies heaviest on women themselves, on their depraved sensuality. There were many reasons for this. Envious antagonism toward the leisured ladies who had employed her as a companion or governess was one; writing from within the terms of her male opponents, with their overweening emphasis on the feminine erotic, was another. In addition, the harsh tone in which Wollstonecraft criticized sexualized femininity owed at least some of its severity to other discourses of social criticism. The fundamental opposition in the Vindication is between men and women, but this division is mapped onto others - the 'unnatural distinctions' of wealth and rank - which stood condemned within a large body of radical social theory. Wollstonecraft uses these theories (particularly those of Rousseau and Adam Smith) to produce a sociology of gender in which the position of women is seen as analogous to that of the idle rich, as she argues: Women, in general, as well as the rich of both sexes, have acquired all the follies and vices of civilisation, and missed the useful fruit. Like the rich, women are granted

privileges based not on what they do but simply on what they are; deprived of genuine rights and responsibilities, they make do instead with the temporary power of sexual conquest which earns them lives of 'false refinement', 'luxurious indolence' and 'enervating pleasure.20 The language is redolent of republican disdain for the vices of the aristocracy. Luxury, eroticism and a narcissistic femininity are linguistically aligned: Confined . .. in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch. It is true they are provided with food and raiment, for which they neither toil nor spin; but health, liberty, and virtue are given in exchange.21 The vivid portrait clearly refers to women of wealthy backgrounds. But by Wollstonecraft's day the ideal it portrayed, the cult of the leisured lady, had moved downward into her own class, with - in her view - corrosive effects on traditional middleclass virtues of private respectability and public service. At one level the Vindication can be seen as a protest against this development - a rearguard defence of the eighteenthcentury bourgeois 'goodwife' against the encroaching figure of the idle woman. From another direction it can be viewed as contributing to the development of the particular form of strident sexual Puritanism which blossomed fully in the Victorian age. Both interpretations are certainly partially correct, since the late eighteenth century was a period of contestation over gender definitions within the middle class. The Vindication firmly placed itself within that contest. Since the instruction which has hitherto been addressed to women, has rather been applicable to ladies . .. I pay particular attention to those in the middle class, because they appear to be in the most natural state.22 In fact, however, it is 'ladies' who still dominate the text, with ordinary middle-class women appearing infrequently and working-class women only as servants or 'the poor'. Nonetheless, Wollstonecraft's analysis certainly appears to be - class-based. Most readings of the Vindication assume this, and then draw a direct connection between her class orientation and her sexual politics. According to Cora Kaplan, for example, the Vindication is arguably as interested in developing a class sexuality for a radical, reformed bourgeoisie as in producing an analysis of women's subordination.23 In her influential essay Kaplan argues that Wollstonecraft's refusal of the erotic had its roots in the revolutionary class ideology of the bourgeoisie, in which was centrally inscribed an opposition between reason and passion, social order and sexual anarchy. The key figure here, as Kaplan notes, was: Rousseau whose radical project for the education and adult gender relations of an enlightened bourgeoisie . . . depended for its success on the location of affection and sexuality in the family: The struggle between reason and passion has an internal and external expression in Rousseau, and the triumph of reason is ensured by the social nature of passion. Since male desire needs an object, and women are that infinitely provocative object, the social subordination of women to the will of men ensures the containment of

passion. In this way Rousseau links the potential and freedom of the new middle class to the simultaneous suppression and exploitation of women's nature.24 The control and containment of sexuality in the family was essential not only to the maintenance of a patrilineal system of property inheritance but - of more fundamental importance for Rousseau - to the nurturance of those public sentiments and social virtues which made an orderly political existence possible. In the construction of the civic personality, sexuality had no legitimate place except in the carefully regulated production of new little citizens - all else, in Rousseau's words, was 'unredeemable chaos'. Wollstonecraft was indeed deeply influenced by this position, as her reiterated evocation of the ideal citizen-mother (rational, industrious, and - above all - a companion to her husband rather than a lover) demonstrates. Yet there is more at stake in her sexual theorising than this. 'A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head . . .' she writes, 'I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behavior.' To confound the sexual distinction: here is the impulse, and far from exempting sexual love from her ambitions it is in fact there - in the realm of the erotic - that the impulse operates with greatest force. Commentators who view Wollstonecraft's feminism merely as an offshoot of a class-based democratic radicalism, and her sexual theory as essentially in service of bourgeois reformism, have forgotten that feminism has its own wild wishes, its complex agenda which Wollstonecraft helped to shape. 'It is the desire of being always women that degrades the sex', she tells us - and this above all with a lover, for it as the subjects and objects of libidinal love that women find themselves trapped within the feminine. Read through her anti-eroticism, Wollstonecraft's wish for a 'revolution in female manners' becomes the wild hope for a revolution of sexual subjectivity which will transform - at times she even hints supersede - gender as a psychological reality as well as a cultural force. Penny A. Weiss argues that Wollstonecraft's feminist contributions have overshadowed her additions to post-French revolutionary political theory. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's political influence, on the other hand, has been privileged by virtue of his sex. Weiss's observation reminded me that just as eighteenth and nineteenth-century women writers were silenced by literary canon formations that valued male-produced texts, Wollstonecraft has been marginalized in political theory, a condition that Virginia Sapiro calls "being Bastilled"25 The political theme of most importance for my purposes is Wollstonecraft's critiques of domination in the family and its relation to war. Wollstonecraft claim that private life, its attachments and tyrannies, affects public life. Private tyranny provides an example or, perhaps, an unconscious paradigm for the domination and greed which lead to war. In addition, these private tyrannies reflect patriarchy and the cultural valuation of heroic virtues and war. Patriarchal families teach these virtues, and hence, create the psychological conditions that encourage war. Women must act out femininity differently for families to change. Wollstonecraft argues that femininity is socially constructed, and she sees one's class as a determining factor in the construction of femininity. She perceives her audience to be middle-class women and men. she hopes to convince middle-class women to change, and argue that middle-class women are responsible for

furthering their own liberation and capable of reversing the destructiveness of patriarchal society. Wollstonecraft refers to her audience as "women of the middle classes." She desired a "revolution in female manners" from the women of her own class but undoubtedly wanted the men of her class to read her treatise as well. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is often characterized as a response to the reformation of the French educational system after the Revolution, or as a critique and expansion of liberal political arguments of the time. Wollstonecraft positions herself as Antigone in the sense that she addresses her essay to men and demands that these male authority figures rethink their laws, proclamations, and customs. Conversely it might be argued that in addressing her text to men she is asking for a fathers permission to argue, instead of criticizing him. Wollstonecraft begins her essay with a letter to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand- Perigord, who successfully convinced the French Assembly to create a com- pulsory, free system of national education for men. However she seems closer to demanding change rather than a permission to voice her dissent. Like Antigone she is assured that she is right. In the end I would like to conclude by saying that Wollstonecraft saw the width of the phenomena called vaguely the 'woman's movement', its connection with the general social movements with regard to class, its connection with economics; she saw what is not often seen to-day by the defenders of sex-equality, that the smallest change with regard to the position of woman in relation to man must entirely revolutionize society and modify the entire course of human existence on the globe.

Notes.
1. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), 1978, p. 147. 2. Cora Kaplan, 'Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism' in her Sea Changes, 1986, p.34. 3. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 199. 4. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791-2), 1977, p. 181. 5. Mary Wollstonecraft,An Historical and Moral View ofthe French Revolution, 1795, p.20. 6. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 85 7. J. G. A. Pocock, 'Cambridge Paradigms and ScotchPhilosophers: a studyofthe relations between the civic humanist and the civil jurisprudential interpretation of eighteenth-century social thought', in E. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue: the Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, 1983, pp. 235-6. 8. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 185. 9. ibid., pp. 80-3. 10. ibid., p. 248. 11. ibid., p. 110. 12. Kaplan, 'Wild Nights', p. 36. 13. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, pp. 79, 83. 14. These passages from Emile are quoted by Wollstonecraft in chapter 5 of the Vindication (titled 'Writers who have rendered women objects of pity'). 15.Wollstonecraft, Vindication, pp. 178-9. 16. ibid., pp. 127-8. 17. ibid., pp. 220-1.

18. ibid., p. 129 19. ibid., p. 249. 20. ibid., p. 151. 21. ibid., p. 146. 22. ibid., p. 81. 23. Kaplan, 'Wild Nights', p. 35 24. ibid., p. 40 25. Sapiro, Virginia. A vindication of political virtue: The political theory of Mary Wollstonecraft.1992.