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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Classic Thinkers
- Sprache: Englisch
Famous as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft was a wide-ranging and controversial moral and political philosopher. She engaged with many of the most polarising issues of her day: criticising social hierarchies, advocating for educational reform, analysing the French Revolution, and challenging men’s political dominance.
In this illuminating introduction, Alan Coffee argues that the originality of Wollstonecraft’s feminist arguments is best understood within the context of a systematic and comprehensive philosophical system built up from a set of ‘simple’ theological and moral principles. An effective way to approach this is through the concept of freedom as independence. Drawing on all of Wollstonecraft’s works, including her novels, reviews and letters, Coffee shows how the ideal of independence illuminates and unites many of her intellectual preoccupations and her contribution to contemporary debates, such as on the structural nature of social injustice and the republican notion of freedom as non-domination.
This gripping account of Wollstonecraft’s work sheds new light on one of the most important eighteenth-century thinkers.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Notes
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
1 An Amazon Stept Out
A philosopher and a moralist
Impulsive woman or rational thinker?
Style and substance
Plan of the book
Chapter outline
Notes
2 Life, Works, Interlocutors
Family
Limited employment prospects
Independence and usefulness
Newington Green
Cultural observations
First works
Self-education
Philosophical sources
Most active years
The Vindications
Paris
Scandinavia
Marriage and death
Notes
3 Religious Foundation
Religious attitudes
Fixed principles build an open mind
Practicality and optimism
Freedom, equality and social progress in virtue
Universalism
Notes
4 Independence
Independence as freedom from arbitrary power
A classical ideal
Composite structure: freedom, equality and virtue
Reason and virtue
Dependence corrupts virtue
Mutual corruption
Hierarchy and structures of domination
Slaves to ideas
Language of slavery
Notes
5 Mind
Rational and moral agency
Independence and freedom of the will
Rigour and error
Principles: fixed, immutable, simple
Prejudice and opinion
The passions
The imagination
Notes
6 Education
Locke, Rousseau, Macaulay
Developing minds
Independence of mind
National school system
Curriculum
Thinking with a purpose
Social education and women
Notes
7 Civil and Political Life
Justice
Equality
Public and private
Not just for the middle classes
Rights
Social status
Commercial society
Notes
8 Marriage and Family Life
Marriage laws
Marriage as friendship
Duties of motherhood
Raising children
Notes
9 Mere Dolls
A doll’s purpose to amuse
Made, not born, dolls
Appearance and substance
Humility and mutual improvement
Women are always women
As unphilosophical as impious
Reforming themselves to reform the world
Notes
10 Legacy
Early reception
Two other Wollstonecrafts: Nancy Kingsbury and Mary Shelley
Wollstonecraft today
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Classic Thinkers
Richard T. W. Arthur,
Leibniz
Ross Carroll,
Edmund Burke
Terrell Carver,
Marx
Alan M. S. J. Coffee,
Wollstonecraft
Daniel Davies,
Maimonides
Daniel E. Flage,
Berkeley
J. M. Fritzman,
Hegel
Bernard Gert,
Hobbes
Thomas Kemple,
Simmel
Ralph McInerny,
Aquinas
Dale E. Miller,
J. S. Mill
Joanne Paul,
Thomas More
William J. Prior,
Socrates
A. J. Pyle,
Locke
Michael Quinn,
Bentham
James T. Schleifer,
Tocqueville
Craig Smith,
Adam Smith
Céline Spector,
Rousseau
Justin Steinberg & Valtteri Viljanen,
Spinoza
Andrew Ward,
Kant
Wollstonecraft
Independent Woman
Alan M. S. J. Coffee
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Alan M. S. J. Coffee 2025
The right of Alan M. S. J. Coffee to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1907-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1908-8(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024946651
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
Much has been written and said about this wonderful champion of the eighteenth century, but the subject is too vast and still very far from being exhausted.
Emma Goldman, 1911
More than a century on, Goldman’s words still strike a chord. A great deal more has now been written about Wollstonecraft, but such is the nature of both her personality and her thought that her study remains fresh and stimulating, with ample scope for further enquiry. Although at different times, and amongst different audiences, attitudes have varied towards her work over the past two centuries, it is hard to think of any other philosopher who has consistently generated such a level of inspiration and devotion amongst students, activists and scholars alike. Wollstonecraft is also unusual in the degree to which she appeals to academics and students across university departments, rather than being primarily the ‘property’ of any specific faculty. The last fifty years, in particular, have seen a surge of interest in Wollstonecraft’s thought. In the 1970s and 1980s, much of the focus on Wollstonecraft came from feminists and literary scholars, with political theorists and intellectual historians picking up the scent in the 1990s. Philosophers, regrettably, came very late to the party, with sustained attention to Wollstonecraft only emerging as a force over the last decade. In that time, fortunately, some excellent philosophical treatments have been produced, such as Sandrine Bergès’s Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (2013), Lena Halldenius’s Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism (2015) and the contributions of several scholars to The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (2016).
With so much having been written, even very recently – the beginning of the 2020s alone has seen the publication of Nancy Johnson and Paul Keen’s collection of essays on Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, Eileen Hunt Botting’s two-volume set of Portraits of Wollstonecraft, and Sylvana Tomaselli’s Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, Politics, amongst others – readers could very reasonably ask what is to be gained from having another Wollstonecraft book, or at least what might in some way differentiate my offering sufficiently to warrant an investment of time and money.
My answer is that I present Wollstonecraft’s philosophical framework as a systematic whole built up from a small set of underlying axioms, principles and premises. Starting with a conception of a benevolent and rational God, she derives a set of values clustered around the ideals of freedom, equality and virtue that drive her moral and political thinking and which permeate her entire body of work. These values, which are brought together within the concept of freedom as independence, remain remarkably constant throughout her career and across the many genres within which she wrote. While her thought deepened and grew more subtle as she matured, the fundamental principles with which she worked remained very stable, giving an overall coherence to her corpus taken as a whole.
Not everyone agrees with this conclusion, or indeed the approach that underlies it. Barbara Taylor, for example, believes that ‘Wollstonecraft’s corpus is riddled with inconsistencies and paradoxes’, arguing that we should acknowledge and appreciate this, rather than seeking to ‘reconcile competing positions whenever possible’ (2020). Taylor’s position is that Wollstonecraft is ‘often best understood through these tensions, which highlight both the novelty and complexity of the issues with which she was struggling, and the creative energy that she brought to them, shifting tack as she learned more, thought harder’, concluding that, Wollstonecraft ‘was not an academic but a revolutionary: what did mere consistency mean to her?’ I accept much of what Taylor says. There is great value in encountering Wollstonecraft through her life, biographically and in her social context. But this is not the only approach that can bear fruit.
We learn different things about Wollstonecraft when we approach her theoretically, making sense of the internal logic that she saw herself as bringing to her work across its many genres and by seeing how groundbreaking her conceptual innovations were, both in her time and when we bring her into dialogue with scholars working on the kinds of problem we face today. We can undoubtedly find inconsistencies, tensions and contradictions in the work of any major historical philosopher – such as John Locke or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with whom Wollstonecraft engaged, or Immanuel Kant, who was her contemporary – but rarely will we conclude that this aspect characterizes their thought. The salient difference between them and Wollstonecraft, I suggest, is not that her work is especially inconsistent (certainly, it is not my view that it is ‘riddled’ with inconsistencies) but that there have been centuries of academic focus dedicated to the analysis of these other thinkers’ work that builds their perceived credentials as bona fide philosophers. Wollstonecraft has not had that benefit – no historical woman philosopher has – though the tide is beginning to turn on this.
In resisting the move to systematize Wollstonecraft, Taylor places two approaches in tension. ‘Ought we’, she asks, to commemorate Wollstonecraft, ‘the bold Enlightenment philosopher, rather than Wollstonecraft the trailblazing feminist?’, answering in favour of the latter. It would, I believe, be a mistake to lose sight of either. On the one hand, Wollstonecraft was unflinching in her commitment to the central importance of reason and logical argument and the imperative to rise above one’s circumstances and upbringing in an effort to shed one’s prejudices. On the other, she lived in a patriarchal society whose culture and institutions had developed over millennia around the core principle that women were not fully rational and should not be permitted to attempt to become so. These two aspects do not sit comfortably together. Wollstonecraft identified the basic contradiction at work, that women were human beings who were expected to live up to certain aspects of human virtue while at the same time having one of the most fundamental elements of their human nature denied to them. Wollstonecraft the philosopher applied rational argument with great insight and skill, while Wollstonecraft the woman and the revolutionary had to live her life and bring her fight in the messy, contradictory real world. To overlook either aspect would be both a loss to Wollstonecraft scholarship and an injustice to Wollstonecraft herself.
In any case, it would likely be impossible for Wollstonecraft the woman and philosopher to please everyone. Where Taylor applauds the writer who lived unconventionally and ‘openly defended illicit female sexual pleasure’ in her final, unfinished work, Harriet Martineau, speaking of Wollstonecraft some century and a half earlier, finds that she must ‘decline all fellowship and co-operation with women of genius or otherwise favourable position, who injure the cause by their personal tendencies’ (1877: 302). Nevertheless, that we need not choose between Wollstonecraft as philosopher and as feminist does not mean that every book should attempt to examine both.
There is great value in understanding what the driving principles are in any thinker and in analysing how these are brought together within a unified framework since this can make a considerable difference to how we understand their thought. Beginning in the 1970s, for example, it was common to interpret Wollstonecraft’s use of such key terms as ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ in a classically liberal sense that owed more to prevailing assumptions about the ideas of Locke and John Stuart Mill than to a detailed analysis of Wollstonecraft herself, and which sat awkwardly with the development of feminism at that time. This led many feminists to label Wollstonecraft as an individualistic writer, one who had unreflectively imbibed masculine and patriarchal concepts from her environment, even as she struggled for women’s equality. Where she was acknowledged as reacting against these concepts, Wollstonecraft was often regarded as either being confused in her liberalism or lacking the conceptual resources to develop an alternative.1
That individualistic interpretation is no longer the dominant view. In our own time, we have seen the benefit of different disciplinary approaches working together to advance Wollstonecraft studies. Intellectual historians have shown that Wollstonecraft operated within something closer to the republican tradition on the basis of her social context and the circle in which she moved, while philosophers have demonstrated that this orientation makes better sense of the balance and integration of the ideas that she makes central. Understood from this perspective, freedom is not a stand-alone concept that is in tension with community but a composite term that entails a number of relational values, such as equality, civic virtue, interdependence and the common good. Neither did Wollstonecraft simply or naively and uncritically adopt an alternative but equally masculine and patriarchal set of principles and attitudes. Rather, this concept of freedom furnished Wollstonecraft with a conceptual baseline from which she challenged received assumptions and made innovative theoretical developments as she conducted her social criticism and pursued her political activism. Viewed in this way, in addition to being a trailblazing feminist, Wollstonecraft is also seen to be a subtle and original political theorist whose contribution can be felt today in areas such as the study of human rights, citizenship, democratic theory, relational autonomy, public reason, non-domination, capability theory and critical theory, to name only a few.
In her book, Sylvana Tomaselli counsels against attempting to label Wollstonecraft’s ideas as an ‘ism’ (2021: 11). I believe this to be sound advice when considering historical thinkers in general, as well as in relation to Wollstonecraft. Labels tend to be retrospective attributions by scholars seeking to bring clarity to diffuse, shifting and emerging contexts involving complex and eclectic individuals. While these have their place, such as in tracing the contours of a movement, for projects such as mine in this book I believe it is best to examine a thinker’s positions on their own terms and merit. Accordingly, I shall make minimal use of labels and isms in what follows. Instead, I shall present a reconstruction of Wollstonecraft’s philosophical framework from across the diversity of her work, including her novels, personal letters and anonymous reviews, as well as her more explicitly political treatments. This much said, labels can also be useful – after all, I have already used three in this preface – particularly for contemporary scholars working within an acknowledged tradition or approach and entering into dialogue with others of a like mind. In my work elsewhere, I often treat Wollstonecraft in specifically republican terms. I do not do this rigidly, or with any sense of doctrinal proprietorship, but from the perspective of a republican theorist who finds in Wollstonecraft a relevant source of inspiration and a kindred spirit who sheds light on how this tradition should be developed today. From this perspective, it is beyond doubt that Wollstonecraft should be counted amongst the significant writers upon whom republicans may draw. And so, while this book is written for anyone with an interest in Wollstonecraft’s thought, I hope that republicans will find it to be of value.
Wollstonecraft is an exciting philosopher to read. The fervour with which she writes reflects the importance and urgency of her chosen subjects, and the elegance of her prose complements the innovation she brought to her ideas. In my experience, students almost always take to her work quickly since her analysis and diagnosis, though written for the problems she encountered in her own time, find their resonance with the issues we confront today.
Although many people are first attracted to Wollstonecraft for her reputation as a trailblazing feminist, her quality as a thinker of breadth and substance encourages them to probe her work more deeply. To adapt Bernard Gert’s remark in his preface to a volume in this series on Thomas Hobbes, ‘There are many philosophers who are very impressive upon first reading, but who become somewhat less impressive with each successive reading.’ Wollstonecraft, ‘on the other hand, is one of those few philosophers who become more impressive on each successive reading’ (2010: xi). I hope my account here will both show something of this impressive nature and convey a sense of excitement.
Notes
1
Weiss 2009: 81–90.
Acknowledgements
Most of this book was written at my father’s house during the final two years of his life. I am grateful to have had the chance to spend extended periods of time with two people dear to me at the same time, Dad and Mary Wollstonecraft. Dad never lived to see the completion of the book. It is to him, first of all, that it is dedicated.
I could never have completed the project during this difficult period without the patience and support of my wife, Maria, and my son, Alino. I also dedicate the book to them.
I am indebted for both friendship and insights to a great many Wollstonecraft scholars. Though it is difficult to single out just a few, I should start with Lena Halldenius who organized a workshop on ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophy and Enlightenment’ at Lund University in 2012, attended by Sandrine Bergès and Martina Reuter. All three have been constant sources of inspiration and wisdom in the intervening thirteen years. Both Bergès and Halldenius provided me with helpful written comments on my manuscript.
I am grateful to Eileen Hunt for her scholarship and support. Hunt was the driving force behind the three (so far) Wollapalooza! conferences held at the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) annual conference between 2017 and 2020, which Bergès and I co-organized with her. The conferences grew out of an earlier panel organized by Hunt at APSA. At that panel, Hunt’s newborn son and Madeline Ahmed Cronin’s husband doubled the size of the audience. From this humble start, it was a great encouragement to witness the steady rise in the level of interest in Wollstonecraft at political science events, with Wollapalooza! bringing emerging and established Wollstonecraft scholars together with a general audience. I am thankful to all those who attended. With Bergès and Hunt, I was lucky to be part of a ‘writers’ coven’, in which drafts of our ongoing projects were shared and critiqued during the lockdown periods of the Covid-19 pandemic. Though the manuscript for this book had not yet been written, the general insights I gleaned were invaluable. I was also fortunate to co-edit two volumes on Wollstonecraft’s philosophy, first with Bergès (2016) and then with Bergès and Hunt (writing as Eileen Hunt Botting at the time) (2019). I am immensely grateful to each of the contributors to those books.
I must also thank Susan James and Quentin Skinner who introduced me to the republican concept of independence and to Wollstonecraft herself. Surprisingly, given their respective reputations, it was James who taught me republicanism and Skinner who suggested that I look at Wollstonecraft, my first exposure to her thought. I have been fortunate to have participated in several conferences, workshops and panels alongside so many impressive scholars. I benefited from the ‘celebrations’ of Wollstonecraft’s thought organized by Emma Clery in 2019 and 2022. In the intervening years, I was glad to have been able to host at King’s College London the Wollstonecraft reading group she convened. Finally, and more briefly, I would like to acknowledge valuable conversations and exchanges with Laura Brace, Jacqueline Broad, Isabelle Bour, Hannah Dawson, Mary Fairclough, Federica Falchi, Elizabeth Frazer, Karen Green, Wendy Gunther-Canada, Catherine Packham, Barbara Taylor and Sylvana Tomaselli.
The production team at Polity have been exceptional. For personal reasons, a lengthy period elapsed between my being first engaged to write this book and finally delivering it. This meant that I managed to see off several editors during that time. My thanks go to George Owers, Pascal Porcheron, Ian Malcolm and, especially, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer. I must also extend a special thanks to Gail Ferguson and Glynis Baguley for their meticulous and dedicated copy-editing and proofing respectively, which both prevented several howlers and identified more subtle considerations.
Abbreviations
Thoughts
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life
Mary
Mary, A Fiction
Stories
Original Stories from Real Life: with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness
(3rd edn)
Reader
The Female Reader: or Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse: Selected from the Best Writers, and Disposed under Proper Heads: for the Improvement of Young Women
Rights of Men
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke
VRM
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke
Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
(2nd edn)
VRW
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
(2nd edn)
Revolution
An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect it has produced in Europe
Residence
Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
Cave
Extract of the Cave of Fancy, a Tale
Character
Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation
Hints
Hints
Lessons
Lessons
Management
Fragment of Letters on the Management of Infants
(posthumous work)
Poetry
On Poetry and Our Relish of the Beauties of Nature
Wrongs
The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria
Review
Reviews written for the
Analytical Review
(volume 7 of
The Works
, edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler)
Letters
Collected Letters
(edited by Janet Todd)
Works
The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft
(edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler)
Memoirs
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(in
Godwin on Wollstonecraft
, edited by Richard Holmes)
1An Amazon Stept Out
The doctrine she inculcated if received, must overturn the basis of every civilized state.
The Monthly Visitor, 1798: 242
In her essay on Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf observed that great wars are strangely intermittent in their effects.1 Those living in one generation, she argued, may be completely consumed by the causes and consequences of a conflict, while people living only a few decades later may seem not to pay the same events much attention at all. We might, perhaps, apply the same principle to the impact made by great philosophers. In Wollstonecraft’s case, this would certainly fit. Her public profile rose during her own time only to fall into relative, though never complete, obscurity after her death. Over the next two and a quarter centuries, her influence would ebb and flow, gaining particular attention during periods of sustained feminist activity, such as the suffrage movements of the late nineteenth century and the demands for social and civil equality of the 1960s and 1970s – often referred to as the first and second waves of feminism.
In addition to her fluctuating fortunes, Wollstonecraft has also been a polarizing thinker, one who has at various times been celebrated and condemned with equal fervour. The epigraph introducing this chapter captures just what was at stake for her – the moral, social and political foundations upon which the state was constructed. If this sounds like an exaggeration to readers today, it was by no means so to many of those with whom Wollstonecraft engaged during her lifetime. Though Wollstonecraft held views on many subjects which were considered politically sensitive or socially subversive – supporting the French Revolution, opposing aristocratic privilege, condemning the excesses of capitalism – the anonymous writer of the quotation has in mind specifically Wollstonecraft’s arguments for women’s rights.2 This demand may seem tame today – perhaps even representing an obvious extension and application of the fundamental principle of human moral equality – but to readers at the time it struck at the bedrock, not just of their ideas of British or European society but of civilization itself. The distinction between the sexes, and the gender hierarchy that it implied, was held to be so integral that to undermine it was seen as jeopardizing the very basis of human society – or even, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, the continuation of the species.3
Wollstonecraft was under no illusions about the nature and scale of the struggle that lay ahead. If women were to enjoy an equal social and political freedom with men, simply securing political rights or access to education – important as these are – would be nowhere near sufficient. So thoroughly had gendered differences in beliefs, customs, practices, norms and values pervaded society that there could be no simple remedies. What was called for was a revolution, one every bit as comprehensive and consequential as the French Revolution that was taking place as she was writing and which had gripped the imagination – and stoked the fears – of the British public. Wollstonecraft’s revolution would not be violent, however, but conceptual. It entailed the complete reimagining of what it was to be a woman and the subsequent wholesale reconstruction of the set of social, political, economic and moral relations in which women were involved. Wollstonecraft refers to this as a ‘revolution in female manners’ (where ‘manners’ is used in a far broader sense than mere etiquette or behavioural expectations, referring instead to a mode of social existence).4 Though conceptual rather than violent, the outcome of the women’s revolution was to be the same as that of the French Revolution, at least in principle: an entire oppressive way of life would be cast off to be replaced by a new and egalitarian society that acts in the interests of all sections of the population.
Although Wollstonecraft is often referred to as ‘the mother’, or sometimes foremother, ‘of feminism’ – both ascriptions were widely applied in the media coverage of Maggi Hambling’s 2020 statue for Wollstonecraft in Newington Green, London – she was by no means the first to argue for the equality of the sexes. This was a question that stretched back through the Middle Ages to ancient times.5 Though not ‘the first feminist’, Wollstonecraft is no less significant and original a thinker for that. Her claim to a place in the history of philosophy, and to her continuing relevance today, does not lie in having initiated a movement but in the depth and richness of her thought, and the intricacy and subtlety of her social criticism.
Like any philosopher, Wollstonecraft stood on the shoulders of those who had gone before her. She drew on the ideas and concepts of her intellectual context, engaging both with writers of the past and with her contemporaries. In actual fact, many of the arguments that Wollstonecraft made in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman had already been published over half a century earlier in an anonymous tract entitled Woman not Inferior to Man (1739), the tract itself being a development of an even earlier book published in France on the equality of the two sexes by François Poulain de la Barre (De l’égalité des deux sexes, 1676). Over in Paris, Olympe de Gouges published a response to the French revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen’ in 1791. It is not clear how many of these works Wollstonecraft had read, though she does make specific reference to Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790a), which she reviewed for a literary journal with great enthusiasm.6 Whether or not she had read any given particular tract or treatise, however, she would not have been able to escape the cumulative impact of literature grappling with questions concerning women’s nature, duties and status on the intellectual climate of her day.
Wollstonecraft was by no means only, or even principally, concerned with abstract theory. She was above all an advocate for change, a writer whose sense of urgency concerning the issues she addressed can be felt on every page. Wollstonecraft also achieved a level of celebrity and notoriety during her lifetime and shortly afterwards that contributed to her becoming seen as the vanguard of the early feminist movement and establishing her as something of a cult figure even today.7 Indeed, the title of this chapter is taken from a line in a poem by the abolitionist William Roscoe heralding Wollstonecraft as a champion taking on one of history’s most formidable political opponents, Edmund Burke:
And lo! an Amazon stept out,
One WOLSTONECRAFT her name,
Resolv’d to stop his mad career,
Whatever chance became.
An oaken sapling in her hand,
Full on the foe she fell,
Nor could his coat of rusty steel
Her vig’rous strokes repel.8
Beyond her intellectual arguments, the combination of Wollstonecraft’s strident, elegant prose and her colourful, scandalous life seems to have been enough to both capture and divide public opinion, and so generate an enduring image that helped propagate and perpetuate her ideas.
With these points in mind, Millicent Fawcett strikes a balance between acknowledging the social forces which propelled Wollstonecraft’s ideas and recognizing her undeniable ability and energy, arguing that Wollstonecraft was ‘as much the product of the women’s rights movement as its earliest confessor’. When it comes to ‘the great movements of thought which change the social history of the world,’ Fawcett observes, ‘no individual is indispensable to their growth’. Just as there would have been a Reformation even if Martin Luther or Henry VIII had never lived, so
the change which nearly the whole of civilized society throughout the world is conscious of in its estimation of the duties, rights, occupations, and sphere of women in a like manner is not due to any individual or set of individuals. The vastness of the change, its appearance, almost simultaneously, in various ways in different parts of the world, indicates that it proceeds from causes too powerful and too universal to be attributed to any particular individual.9
This is, as we shall see, a very Wollstonecraftian argument concerning the role that social conditions play in people’s receptivity. Individual thinkers had emerged in earlier periods, Fawcett continues, expressing ‘what we should now consider modern ideas concerning the duties and rights of women’, but the social and cultural conditions were not yet right for them to gain any traction. ‘The hour’, she argues, ‘had to come as well as the man’ – referring of course to the woman – ‘and till the hour was favorable the most conclusive arguments, the most patent facts, fell on deaf ears and on blind eyes, and had no practical result in modifying the conduct of men and women, or in ameliorating the laws and customs concerning their relation to one another.’ Viewed from this perspective, Fawcett concludes that ‘it was Mary Wollstonecraft’s good fortune that when she spoke the ears of men had been prepared to hear and their minds to assimilate what she had to say.’
Accepting the role played by broader sociological factors in propelling Wollstonecraft’s ideas should not detract in any way from what she achieved. After all, Wollstonecraft still had to write the books that she did and develop the arguments and models. Without the intellectual depth and innovation that she brought to her work, her celebrity would have been hollow, rendering her a mere figurehead rather than a substantial intellectual worthy of serious study. In the terms that Fawcett uses, in the chapters that follow, we will be principally concerned with ‘what she had to say’ (her philosophy) rather than how people’s ears and minds had been prepared to hear and assimilate it (how her thought was received). By ‘what she had to say’, I mean not only Wollstonecraft’s substantive ideas but the principles and premises that underpin them and the systems and frameworks within which they operate.
A philosopher and a moralist
So far, I have discussed Wollstonecraft as a feminist. This is, I think, a sensible way to approach her work – with the caveat that ‘feminism’ in its modern sense was a later intellectual development – since this is overwhelmingly how she is regarded and why she has become so celebrated. The need to improve women’s social and political subordination also provided a powerful motivation for Wollstonecraft’s work. ‘Never did any author enter into a cause’, her husband William Godwin recalled,
with a more ardent desire to be found, not a flourishing and empty declaimer, but an effectual champion. She considered herself as standing forth in defence of one half of the human species, labouring under a yoke which, through all the records of time, had degraded them from the station of rational beings, and almost sunk them to the level of the brutes.10
In seeking to be an effectual champion, Wollstonecraft did not rely on passion or commitment – although these qualities are clearly evident – but instead approached her subject intellectually, drawing on both theology and philosophy to make her case. To her often patronizing critics, she makes clear the kind of rigorous argument she expects: ‘as a philosopher, I read with indignation the plausible epithets which men use to soften their insults; and, as a moralist, I ask what is meant by such heterogeneous associations, as fair defects, amiable weaknesses, &c.?’11
While it may be natural to approach the study of Wollstonecraft’s thought through her arguments for the advancement of women’s social and political condition, this was by no means the sole focus of her work. Indeed, I would not myself single this out as her main intellectual preoccupation. Wollstonecraft was a writer with wide-ranging moral, social and political interests, for whom her feminism was only one part – albeit an integral part – of an overall system of ideas and concepts. Saying that feminism was only a part of her broader framework is not to suggest that we can separate the two. Wollstonecraft the feminist and Wollstonecraft the philosopher are inextricably bound together. Though her arguments for women’s equality and rights derive from her more general moral, political and theological commitments, at the same time her experiences as a woman inform the manner in which she understands those commitments and so builds her theoretical position. So, for example, because of her theological beliefs, Wollstonecraft holds that all human beings are both equal and rational. This leads her to call for an equal access to adequate education for women. At the same time, she can see all around her that ideas about the nature and proper place of women are distorted by the norms and cultural practices of her society, and that these ideas are stubbornly resistant to rational scrutiny and change. In response, she refines her account of the operation of human rationality, developing what we might describe as a social moral epistemology (an account of how social, cultural and political processes and structures combine to influence the acquisition and dissemination of moral beliefs). These insights then influence how she constructs her overall political model.
It would, however, be a disservice to Wollstonecraft to think that her only enduring relevance directly concerns matters connected to women’s equal rights. In the last decade, there has been a surge of interest in applying Wollstonecraft’s work to a wide range of topics in contemporary moral and political philosophy. These include children’s rights and animal ethics (Botting 2016b), human rights (Botting 2016a; Lefebvre 2019), citizenship (White 2019), democracy (Frazer 2019), freedom (Hirschmann and Regier 2019), relational autonomy (Mackenzie 2016; Coffee 2018, 2022), capability theory (Sen 2009; Bergès 2019a), liberal theory (Weiss 2019; Coffee 2021), republican theory (Coffee 2013; Halldenius 2015; Pettit 2016), and structural domination (Coffee 2013), amongst many others.
In spite of these credentials, it is only comparatively recently that Wollstonecraft has become widely recognized as a philosopher by contemporary academics, in the sense of being taught in philosophy degree courses and discussed in philosophical journals. Wollstonecraft did not write formal philosophical texts or treatises. Even Rights of Woman reads more as a political tract than as a scholarly analysis. The bulk of her other writing consists of personal letters, book reviews, educational and conduct books, novels, travelogues and historical works. It might be said that the forms in which she wrote were as diverse as her interests. This does not mean that her work is not philosophical or that it lacks philosophical merit; it only means that greater care must be taken in approaching these works to ensure that the appropriate messages are extracted. The philosophical process entails identifying or reconstructing underlying principles, examining their implications, testing basic arguments and clarifying key concepts. This approach can be applied to almost any genre of writing so long as due allowance is made for the context and purpose.
In my own case, I noticed the change in Wollstonecraft’s standing as a philosopher in the early 2000s when I returned to university after an absence of over a decade, having graduated at the end of the 1980s and subsequently pursued a non-academic career. When a fellow postgraduate student showed me a copy of the Rights of Woman, arguing that we should be reading it on our degree course, I had a great deal of difficulty believing that there could possibly have been a woman philosopher of any note – how could I have completed my studies successfully at a credible university in this subject and not only not have heard of Wollstonecraft herself but not even have entertained the idea that women historically had written philosophy of the highest calibre? I was by no means alone amongst my peers, and even at that time Wollstonecraft was not represented in any of the philosophy modules that I was aware of. Even as recently as a decade ago when I was preparing a proposal for a volume of collected essays on Wollstonecraft’s social and moral philosophy, the publishers wanted to know which university courses included her on reading lists as an indication of the book’s potential marketability. It was hard to find more than a handful at the time. In a relatively short space of time, that has changed, and Wollstonecraft’s profile in the discipline has grown rapidly, with her work being both a common fixture in university courses and the subject of a steadily growing body of scholarly research. Inevitably, of course, there is still a long way to go. While I was writing this book, I visited the largest university bookshop in central London to see what material might have been readily available for students of Wollstonecraft. When I wasn’t able to find anything on the philosophy shelves, I asked at the front desk where books on Wollstonecraft were kept, only to be told that her work was filed in the women’s studies and literature sections rather than philosophy, even, as it turned out, where ‘philosophy’ was in the book’s title.12
Wollstonecraft is by no means the only woman to have been overlooked in the history of philosophy. That women have always been capable of writing high-quality philosophy should come as no surprise. What does come as a revelation to many people is that they did so in such numbers and for such an extended period of time, from antiquity. Uncovering and recovering their writings is now the subject of intense and growing academic focus. Books such as Mary Ellen Waithe’s four-volume A History of Women Philosophers give an indication of the extent and scope of women’s historical engagement with and contribution to ongoing philosophical discourse throughout history.13 As a sign of how the profile of women philosophers has changed, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy now has numerous entries on historical women, almost all written in the last decade, though Wollstonecraft was possibly the first to be included, in 2008.
The reasons why women have been overlooked as philosophers are too diverse and complex to discuss here.14 In addition to the lack of educational, institutional and career opportunities for women and the hostile social conditions mentioned above, there is the sexist and arbitrary manner in which the discipline of philosophy has been created and maintained. These are general conditions that affected women, Wollstonecraft included. There is, however, also a particular reason that has dogged Wollstonecraft’s reception since her own time and amongst those close to her. This concerns her writing style, which is often passionate and intense and can appear to be haphazard and disorganized.
Impulsive woman or rational thinker?
Although from the time of its publication Rights of Woman was recognized as a significant book, it was also criticized for its style and lack of structure, even by those who endorsed its message. Writing shortly after her death, Godwin captures both sentiments in his Memoir, describing the book as
undoubtedly a very unequal performance, and eminently deficient in method and arrangement. When tried by the hoary and long-established laws of literary composition, it can scarcely maintain its claim to be placed in the first class of human productions. But when we consider the importance of its doctrines, and the eminence of genius it displays, it seems not very improbable that it will be read as long as the English language endures.15
This assessment – that Rights of Woman is poorly written and structured but nevertheless remains a classic for the importance of what it represents – has endured to our own time. It has been reinforced by another perennial belief that, being a woman, its author was driven more by passion and intuition than by considered reflection and logical insight. Again, we can see this in Godwin’s closing remarks to his memoir.
The strength of her mind lay in intuition. She was often right, by this means only, in matters of mere speculation. Her religion, her philosophy, (in both of which the errors were comparatively few, and the strain dignified and generous) were . . . the pure result of feeling and taste. She adopted one opinion, and rejected another, spontaneously, by a sort of tact, and the force of a cultivated imagination; and yet, though perhaps, in the strict sense of the term, she reasoned little, it is surprising what a degree of soundness is to be found in her determinations. But, if this quality was of use to her in topics that seem the proper province of reasoning, it was much more so in matters directly appealing to the intellectual taste. In a robust and unwavering judgment of this sort, there is a kind of witchcraft; when it decides justly, it produces a responsive vibration in every ingenuous mind.16
Although generous in spirit, and not entirely wrong in the sense that intuition, feeling and taste rather than impartial reasoning probably drive every philosopher’s arguments far more than they care to admit, Godwin’s remarks seem to be underpinned by a belief that Wollstonecraft herself was highly critical of and which she placed at the centre of her analysis of the social oppression of women, namely ‘the prevailing opinion, that they were created rather to feel than reason’.17
A century later, Elizabeth Robins Pennell arrived at a similar overall conclusion. ‘Though she was treating a subject which was eminently one of reason and logic,’ she said of Rights of Woman, ‘her whole book . . . is rhetorical rather than speculative. It is without system, without method. It is full of useless repetitions, and is for ever neglecting the main argument for trifling side issues’, adding that nevertheless,
with all its faults, perhaps because of them, it is a book of unusual power. Its virtues far outweigh its defects. Sincerity is stamped upon it; passion breathes through every sentence, and its very earnestness and intensity are convincing, where the well-balanced arguments of the man who knows, but does not feel, the injustice he exposes, fail to carry conviction with them.18
Pennell goes on to compare Wollstonecraft with her French contemporary, the Marquis de Condorcet, in just the terms that Wollstonecraft objected to so strongly. ‘The contrast between their respective treatment of the subject is great’, Pennell argues. ‘Condorcet argued with all the logic of the thoughtful student, Mary Wollstonecraft with all the fire of the impulsive woman.’19 Like Godwin, she concludes that this is part of what gives the work its enduring appeal: ‘And yet, the Frenchman’s essays, though in them he was far the more revolutionary of the two, are practically forgotten, while the Englishwoman’s volume still lives as the text-book of the new generation of believers in women’s rights.’
Almost another century on, Claire Tomalin closely echoes Pennell’s arguments. ‘The Vindication’, she claims, ‘is a book without any logical structure. It is more in the nature of an extravaganza. What it lacks in method it makes up for in élan, and it is better to dip into than to read through at a sitting.’20 Although Tomalin acknowledges that Wollstonecraft ‘thought of herself as a philosopher, and to some extent as a political theorist’, she considers Wollstonecraft’s strength to lie not in the soundness of her arguments but rather in her personal experience.21 Like Pennell, Tomalin contrasts Wollstonecraft’s approach with Condorcet’s, arguing that, unlike the latter, Wollstonecraft ‘knew the subject from inside’. ‘There is no doubt’, Tomalin adds, ‘that Condorcet’s ten pages pack more logic than Mary’s three hundred: but on the other hand she hit the exact tone of righteous indignation that is still effective.’ Her book is ‘still read’, she concludes, while ‘his essay has never been reprinted’.
Unlike Godwin, Pennell and Tomalin were biographers rather than philosophers. Nevertheless, from their different perspectives all three capture a persistent sentiment about Wollstonecraft and her work which, I believe, rests on a false dichotomy. Although none says explicitly that writing from experience or with passion is by itself incompatible with careful reasoning – this would be absurd since experience provides valuable insight and people who have suffered wrong should rightly be moved to fight hard to address it – the clear suggestion is that it is as a woman that Wollstonecraft’s writing lacks system and method, and that she argues in a feminized manner that draws more on practical experience and emotion than on logic and a considered and balanced appraisal of the salient facts and principles. This implication comes out especially strongly in the contrast with Condorcet.
This comparison is, however, misleading and misguided. Pennell and Tomalin are referring to Condorcet’s 1789 essay entitled, ‘On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship’. We should note, first of all, that this tract has in fact been reprinted both in French and in English translation. Condorcet’s writings on women’s rights are recognized as having a significant place in the history of feminist thinking, even if they do remain relatively underappreciated beyond a specialist readership.22 It is also true that Wollstonecraft and Condorcet do address a similar general topic in the rights of women, and that they share certain basic principles in common, rooted in ideas of natural law and the central values of equality and virtue. Indeed, a number of Condorcet’s arguments anticipate those made by Wollstonecraft, though these do not originate with Condorcet but are drawn from the broader developing, if still nascent, discourse on women’s social and political position of the time. This said, however, Condorcet’s and Wollstonecraft’s overall projects are not the same. Wollstonecraft’s is far more ambitious, and she gives hers a far richer and deeper treatment, which could by no means be reduced to only ten pages. I can testify to this personally, having initially intended to include a ten-page overview of one important theme within Rights of Woman as part of this introduction. Compressing this theme proved so futile that not only did I conclude that the material warranted an entire chapter, but that this would have to be the final substantive chapter – chapter 9 – since it would rely on all the material that preceded it.
Condorcet addresses the specific question of whether women could and ought to receive citizenship rights, writing in the early days of the French Revolution, when this seemed to be a realistic – and possibly imminent – prospect. Condorcet sets himself a clear but limited brief, asking what factors could in principle stop women from being accorded the rights of citizens. He starts from the basic premise that ‘the rights of men’, which give rise to those citizenship rights, simply derive from men’s status as rational and sentient beings who are capable of moral behaviour. Accordingly, he concludes, the only acceptable reason for denying those rights to women would be that they lacked the capacity to develop the appropriate level of moral reasoning.23 He then conducts a succinct examination of what he considers to be the available grounds one might have for believing women to be incapable in this way, arguing that none stands up to scrutiny. Condorcet then declares the onus to be on the opponents of women’s equality, rather than the advocates, demanding of his critics that they should ‘refute these propositions by other methods than by pleasantries and declamations’ and, above all, that they should provide evidence of ‘any natural difference between men and women which may legitimately serve as foundation for the deprivation of a right’.24
Wollstonecraft sets herself a far broader scope. Rather than focusing on the narrow question of whether women should be accorded the rights of citizens directly, she addresses the social, cultural and psychological factors that combine to keep women entrapped, and which would have to be overcome before any effective programme of extending rights could be sustained. So, while Condorcet tackles one particular logical argument, Wollstonecraft offers a comprehensive social analysis and criticism of the patriarchal cultural practices and political institutions within which Condorcet’s logical argument must be situated.
Style and substance
Even if we grant that Wollstonecraft’s writing contains important and even insightful ideas, the second part of Pennell’s and Tomalin’s claim was that her writing nevertheless lacks method and structure. There is something to this charge, though by no means as much as might first appear. In any case, disorganized writing does not preclude sustained and serious philosophical analysis, either on her part or on ours.
One reason why Wollstonecraft’s writing often has the appearance of being scatty and haphazard is that she did not write as a professional academic. Wollstonecraft had no formal education, no philosophical or university training (this latter would not even be available to women for almost another century). She was, rather, a self-educated woman who wrote for a general rather than an academic audience, adopting a variety of genres. Initially, Wollstonecraft wrote while working in poorly paid and precarious jobs, such as a governess and a schoolteacher, and even when she was able to publish for a living, this was often to pressing deadlines. Possibly as a result, although it may also have been in her personality, Wollstonecraft often wrote very quickly, something to which Godwin testifies (‘she was in the habit of composing with rapidity’).25 Her first overtly political work, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, written as a reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, was published only three weeks after the appearance of Burke’s book – faster than anyone else had managed. The speed with which her next book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was written, left her feeling ‘dissatisfied’ with its quality, complaining, in a letter to a friend, ‘had I allowed myself more time I could have written a better book, in every sense of the word’.26 Wollstonecraft initially intended to publish Rights of Woman in two volumes, promising herself that, after rushing the first volume, she would leave herself more time for the sequel.
Wollstonecraft wrote to her friend, ‘I intend to finish the next volume before I begin to print, for it is not pleasant to have the Devil coming for the conclusion of a sheet before it is written’ (referring to what Godwin describes as the ‘general practice when the early publication of a piece is deemed a matter of importance, [to send completed pages to the publisher] before the composition was finished’).27 She never did write the second volume, although her final, unfinished novel contains a lot of material that can be seen to build on her earlier thoughts on this subject. For whatever reason – whether because of her circumstances, personality or a combination of both – Wollstonecraft frequently abandoned projects during her career as necessity and opportunity presented themselves, and as her interests developed. Her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), for example, was published as ‘Volume I’, although, once again, there were no subsequent volumes.
It is undoubtedly true that Wollstonecraft’s writing is not clearly structured in the manner we normally associate with professional or academic philosophy. As we examine her thought, I propose that we neither excuse nor condemn her for this, but only analyse and judge her ideas, insights and arguments as we find them. On the best way to approach reading Wollstonecraft, however, I must disagree with Tomalin’s suggestion above that
