Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘Hyena in a petticoat’

One of the great Mothers of Feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, wasn't burnt on a bonfire like the estimated 80,000 women burnt as witches only a couple of hundred years before her, but boys o boys did she pay for her brilliance, for her daring to joust with the big male hitters of her day, for daring to say women were being kept in a state of perpetual childhood and dependency on men by their lack of education, that "from their earliest childhood" women were trained to be weak and frivolous, "short-lived queens", but most of all she was downed for daring to live the kind of life she wanted to live.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born during the Enlightenment, that period when Reason and the Rights of Man were being set out by an emergent middle class, a rationalism in vivid contrast to the fevered insanities of the Middle Ages but also a time that represented the apex of powerlessness, and double standards, foisted on women. Posh ladies were trained to sit on a pedestal and represent beauty, helplessness, dependency, fragility, modesty. For most women, the ideal was of course not possible, and for those for whom it was it rendered them weak, simpering dolls.

In roared Mary Wollstonecraft, announcing the ideal was hideous to begin with, imprisoning women inside a state of permanent helplessness and dependence on men, and that the only way forward was independence and education.

Helpless dependence was something she knew a bit about. She was born in Spitalfields in London, to parents of Irish heritage. Her father was a drunk, a waster and a bully. Many nights she slept in the doorway of her mother’s bedroom in an attempt to stave off or at least blunt the drunken furies.

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She left home at 16 to work as a "paid companion" and help support the family, but returned to nurse her dying mother. She left again to set up a school with two of her sisters and her bosom pal Fanny Blood. When Fanny married, became pregnant and fell ill, Mary travelled to her side and stayed with her till she died. While away the school failed and she took up work as governess to a massively wealthy Anglo-Irish family, Lord and Lady Kingsborough, and their daughters, then aged 14, 12 and 6. "Wild, Irish and unformed" was Mary's crisp appraisal. All three children grew to love her, the eldest proclaiming, "she freed my mind of all superstitions". The best accolade a teacher could have?

Her views on wealthy aristocratic women sharpened. They were lisping, silly dolls who cared more for their lapdogs than for their children and sat around all day involved in frivolous pastimes such as embroidery, endlessly talking about marriage. On a family trip to London Lady Kingsborough let her go, allegedly because her daughters had begun to love Mary more than her.

For Mary it was a life-changing moment. Self-educated, with no money, certainly no dowry, she met Joseph Johnson, a leading radical publisher, and immediately began working as a reader, reviewer, editorial assistant and translator. Her first book was Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. (Take that, Lord and Lady Kingsborough).

Independent since her teens, often her family’s sole breadwinner, she was determined to lead an independent life, become a writer and support herself. In the late 1700s this was fantastic stuff: difficult for a man; for a woman not even to be dreamed of.

As Virginia Woolf wrote in The Common Reader, for Wollstonecraft, "Independence was the first necessity for a woman; not grace or charm, but energy and courage and the power to put her will into effect".

Still in her twenties and now part of Johnson's literary circle, Mary translated, wrote a novel as well as her treatise on education of children, produced a book of stories for children, plus numerous short pieces. In 1790, in response to Edmund Burke's conservative treatise on the French Revolution then in full swing, Johnson published her Vindication of the Rights of Man, upholding the rights of the poor and the oppressed. Two years later her sensational and seminal A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published to acclaim, to cheers, and to boos.

What drove her to write A Vindication was the new Constitution in France in which the post-revolutionary government offered citizenship only to men, and domestic education only for women.

The prevailing ethos insisted women were too “emotional” to be fully educated, too incapable of rational thought, too “hysterical” to learn science or maths.

No, no and No! said Mary. Education was the way women could be strengthened in mind, and in body, and become independent beings, not conveniently dependent “sexual slaves”.

Further, she attributed the problem of uneducated women squarely to men, and “a false system of education, gathered from the books written by men who consider females as women rather than human creatures”.

Provocatively she dedicated A Vindication to Talleyrand, the brilliant celebrity politician and diplomat of the day.

Here he is on women: “Men are destined to live on the stage of the world. A public education suits them: it early places before their eyes all the scenes of life…. The paternal home is better for the education of women; they have less need to learn to deal with the interests of others, than to accustom themselves to a calm and secluded life.”

Rubbish! said Wollstonecraft: “Until women are given the tools of reason, their minds valued as well as their bodies, they cannot be free, or even fully human’.”

Rousseau, the great papa and philosopher of the French Revolution, believed women should be educated for the pleasure of men. Or, “the whole education of women ought to be relative to men, to please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honoured by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel and console them and to make life agreeable and sweet to them, these are the duties of women at all times and it should be taught to them from infancy.”

In other words be a skivvy at the bottom of the pile, or at the top stay quiet, look good in a corset and look after your man.

For God’s sakes, countered Mary, “I have profound conviction that women are rendered weak and wretched especially by a false system of education fathered from books written by men who have been more anxious to make women alluring mistresses than rational wives.”

A Vindication sold out three printings in quick succession and Mary from Spitalfields was the talk of London town.

Brickbats hurled her way were pretty vicious, “a hyena in a petticoat”, as well as the usual whore, vixen, emasculator of men.

Now living in France, specifically in Paris, in the thick of the French Revolution, from her room she saw Louis XV1 being taken to his execution, to her surprise “surprisingly dignified”. Later that night she wrote her sister, “for the first time in my life I cannot put out my candle”.

While in Paris she met and fell passionately in love with an American businessman and love rat, Gordon Imlay. They moved in together. She became pregnant, was abandoned by him, briefly reconciled, gave birth to her daughter Fanny, was abandoned again. Finally, after months of prevarication on Imlay’s part, she followed the rat to London where she found he was having a scene with an actress. Distraught, Mary made two suicide attempts. The first time Imlay arrived in time to save her; the second time, she walked up and down the bridge at Putney in pouring rain to soak her skirts so she would sink faster when she threw herself into the river, but a fisherman saw her and hauled her out. Slowly, she recovered, cut off all ties with Imlay, and set out again to make a life for herself and Fanny. Imlay never contributed a cent .

Back in London, Mary met the radical philosopher William Godwin, with whom she had spent “the entire evening” arguing at a soiree years before; this time, in his words, “friendship melting into love”. In keeping with their rationalist and radical principles, they maintained separate lives and separate houses. “The arrangement combined,” wrote Woolf, “the novelty and lively sensation of a visit with the more delicious and heart-felt pleasures of domestic life”. They did marry when Mary became pregnant again. Now tongues did begin to wag – was she not already married to Imlay? Is Imlay not still around? How can she marry another? Tongues wagged even more vigorously when it was revealed she had never been officially married to Imlay, that it was just a convenience to shelter her during the Revolution.

No matter, full of hope and health and plans for the future, Mary gave birth to her second daughter, also a Mary and destined to become equally if not more famous than her mum, Mary Shelley, author of one of the great novels of European literature, Frankenstein. There were "complications", the placenta didn't fully disengage, doctors were called in, probably too many interventions were made in those pre-antibiotic days and an infection or septicemia set in. Attended by her distraught husband, three physicians and a midwife, Mary Wollstonecraft died an agonising 10-day death.

A year later a broken-hearted Godwin published Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and all hell broke loose. Unwittingly, probably in the fog of grief that followed his wife's awful death, and being an egg head and possibly unaware of the power of vicious gossip, Godwin wrote openly of his wife's relationship and illegitimate child with Imlay, her premarital relationship with him. It was bad enough that Mary did these things, writing about them was too much.

What was done with love was received with poison, and as a brilliant excuse for dismantling this “hyena in a petticoat”. The vultures circled. Mary’s reputation was trashed so thoroughly that for more than 100 years her work disappeared. It wasn’t until feminism kicked off again with the late 19th-century suffragette struggles, and women went back to her extraordinary life and work, that it was rescued.

She was beautiful (romantic poet Robert Southey said her eyes were the “most lustrous” and “expressive” he’d ever seen), revolutionary, radical and principled. “I never yet resolved to do anything of consequence that I did not adhere readily to it.” A thinker who went to the root of the problem of 18th-century women – education, education, education – she wrote: “I do not wish for women to have power over men, I wish them to have power over themselves.”

She was not well served by most of the men in her life, beginning with her useless and abusive alcoholic father, or Imlay the American love rat, or even Godwin, her last love, who “with the implacable innocence of a Philosopher of the Truth” (Emily Sunstein), penned the famous memoirs, never thinking he might be offering her reputation as a gift to the mean-spirited. The political mood had changed. The French Revolution had gone sour. We Irish were up in arms. Apart from a tiny and mostly silenced group still in favour of Liberté, Fraternité, Égalité, the revolution of Radicals and Utopians was over. The viciously anti-Jacobin British press had a field day with Godwin and his “lascivious whore”.

Still as Virginia Woolf wrote in her wonderful 1920s Common Reader series: “she (Mary) has had her revenge. Many millions have died and been forgotten in the hundred and thirty years that have passed since she was buried; and yet as we read her letters and listen to her arguments and consider her experiments, above all, that most fruitful experiment, her relation with Godwin, and realise the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.”

She died on September 10th, 1797. She was just 38 years old.
This is an extract from Feminism Backwards, a memoir by Rosita Sweetman, founding member of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement, which looks at feminism and some of the amazing women who have contributed to the ongoing struggle for women's rights. It will be published by the Lilliput Press next year