A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft (book review)

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft

I read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman for the first time a few years ago, and I think the esteem it which it is now generally held as one of the founding texts of modern (white Western) feminism is deserved.  The initial arguments Mary Wollstonecraft made for the emancipation of (middle-class) women are still being repeated and developed by feminists today, and for me, is what makes Vindication such a stimulating and illuminating read.

I embrace Wollstonecraft’s text as an important one for feminism, because I embrace her central argument – that a woman’s personal happiness, humanity and freedom reside not in a preoccupation with feminine frivolities so as to become the sort of woman others expect us to be, but from being able to think for ourselves and determine our own lives, so as to be the woman we want to be.

Wollstonecraft argued that women should be socialised and educated so they can claim the same capacity for knowledge and independence of mind encouraged in men. She lambasts the way in which girls of the upper middle-class are encouraged towards nothing more than making themselves attractive to men, so as to secure a good marriage, and thereafter a life of material comforts and frivolous pleasures. Wollstonecraft asserted that it was this sort of lifestyle – and not anything in woman’s nature - which lead to the debasement of the female sex and made them inferior to men.

But give them free reign of their mental faculties, encourage them towards the improvement of their minds and not their graces, Wollstonecraft said, and not only would woman’s status be elevated, it would also secure her greater personal happiness and lead to the betterment of society overall. If a woman were given opportunities to comprehend a world beyond her own, her “heart” would be “opened” and she would become less focused on herself. If she were allowed to develop the “power of generalizing ideas, of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations”, she would have less tolerance for idle gossip and everyday trivialities and instead share wider concerns.

It’s this aspect to Wollstonecraft’s argument that particularly resonates with me. Whilst she couches her rhetoric in terms associated with the Enlightenment, insisting that allowing a woman her independence of mind would give her “virtue” and allow her to attain the capacity for “reason”, strip these context-ridden words away, and I find what Vindication argues still very prescient. 

After all, young women in the 21st-century are still encouraged to take more of an interest in boys than books; female office workers expend more energy on gossiping amongst themselves than they do organising for their rights; and it's the likes of Cheryl Cole contemporary popular culture deems the sort of woman we should aspire to be, despite her not really having much to say for herself. Women today are still expected to be sweet hearts, not strong minds.

And Wollstonecraft’s reference to the women who “pass their days, or at least their evenings, discontentedly” due to having “so few resources in themselves” with which to seek their own interests and secure their own happiness, as a result of being emotionally and financially dependent on their husbands, could also have been made today, when we consider the effects of full-time housewifery on women; or indeed any menial employment, in or outside the home, which encourage women to carry out tasks in the service of somebody else and from which they are meant to gain their esteem, and not through any pursuits of their own.  

Wollstonecraft also insists that allowing for the expansion of the female mind would lead a woman to experience greater fulfilment in her roles of wife and mother. This emphasis on woman as wife and mother maintained throughout Vindication could be deemed problematic when read from within a modern-day feminist context, and it’s this strand to Wollstonecraft’s argument I most deviate from. Whilst her justification for a woman’s right to a rigorous education partly resides in that this would ensure she could educate her own children properly, and therefore contribute to the betterment of society as a whole, the other uses – namely professional ones – towards which women could utilise their minds, and the important role fathers have to play in raising their children, were gaps left by Wollstonecraft for feminists a few more decades down the line to fill.

But going back to what I really like about Vindication – it’s not just Wollstonecraft’s attack on the power men assume over women I still find potent, but her attack on the broader structure of society too.

Wollstonecraft didn’t hold back in her disdain for the fact that a privileged few - the aristocracy, the political elites who constitute government - are able to reign over the mass of ordinary people merely by birth right and not on the basis of their ability or having worked to prove they are capable of doing so. Such arbitrary rights to power should be challenged, Wollstonecraft insisted, “for all power inebriates weak man” and with its overthrow “the more virtue and happiness will reign in society”. Whilst men and women are expected to submit to the dictates of a privileged few, they cannot claim to be equal and active citizens of society.

Therefore, Vindication calls not only for an expansion of the female mind so as to end women’s obedience to men, but for all citizens - male and female – to cultivate an independence of mind so they no longer merely submit to the mores and laws laid down by a small group of arbitrary elites, but can work towards the formation of a society built on a better, more just, set of values.

This argument is still so relevant. Here in the UK, we’re still expected to stand in thrall to a monarchy and cheer on the marriage of a Prince to his Princess; our ruling politicians largely come from the ranks of the upper middle-class, with little to no experience of the harsh economic realities of life, and yet are in the position of being able to determine how everyone else should deal with them; we’re just meant to accept the banks’ sway over our economy and that making a fortune from ripping everyone else off is somehow just; and the very existence of celebrity culture points to the way our society values riches and good looks over making a genuine contribution to society or being concerned with anyone other than yourself. Just swap the word “kings” for queens/Conservative MPs/bankers/celebrities in this passage from the Vindication and the relevance of the book to today’s political and social context stands clear:

For, is it not universally acknowledged that kings, viewed collectively, have ever been inferior, in abilities and virtue, to the same number of men taken from the common mass of mankind – yet, have they not, and are they not still treated with a degree of reverence that is an insult to reason?

When Wollstonecraft said: “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience” she didn’t just mean we should stop bowing down to the strictures of femininity or to the demands of our fathers and husbands, but to ‘man’ in the broadest sense of the word. She also wanted us to end our “slavery to monarchs and ministers […] whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind” so as to allow a re-visioning and re-structuring of society based on a more just set of principles.

It’s this broader and more radical aspect to Wollstonecraft’s argument which beats in time to the heart of my feminism and why I think Vindication is such an important text.

By Michelle Wright
(January 2011)