Posted on December 14, 2001 at 10:37 a.m.
BIRMINGHAM, AL — Few people have ever heard of Mary Wollstonecraft. But before there was Gloria Steinam, Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, there was Wollstonecraft, an 18th century pioneering feminist author, intellectual, educator and social renegade who spoke out against a society that saw women as creatures “born only to propagate and rot.” Her life and political ideology is the focus of Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics (2001, Northern Illinois University Press) by University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) political scientist Wendy Gunther-Canada, Ph.D.
In her book, Gunther-Canada blends biography, gender theory and political analysis as she examines the life of the woman who in 1792 penned the path-breaking book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the first systematic argument for women’s rights. Wollstonecraft’s writings were in response to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief that women were dangerous coquettes and Edmund Burke’s vision of women as beautiful and apolitical weaklings.
“Wollstonecraft argued that in an enlightened age where reason gave men a right to rule themselves, women should also be given a rational education that would allow them to govern themselves and to manage their households,” Gunther-Canada said. “A century earlier, women had argued that their sex should be educated, but only in order to be better helpmates to their husbands. Wollstonecraft went further, making the case that women should be educated to help themselves first, and then to perform the duties of mothers, but only if they were allowed to exercise their rights as citizens.”
Gunther-Canada first became fascinated with Wollstonecraft and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in graduate school, making the book the focus of her first graduate seminar paper.
“I remember how problematic I found her argument because she did not utilize the traditional categories of political thought,” Gunther-Canada said. “This dismissal is often the way people respond the first time they read her writing. It is only after we begin to consider Wollstonecraft’s feminism that we understand why she found the traditional categories of political thought to be problematic for women as citizens. Once I realized that she was turning the tables on the fathers of political thought, her writing became exciting to me because I realized that it allowed us to ask new questions about politics and society.”
Wollstonecraft’s rebellion also spilled over into he personal life. The middle-class daughter of a domineering father, a passive mother, she would go on to have several scandalous affairs, bear a child out-of-wedlock and attempt suicide twice.“Wollstonecraft was determined to be independent even as a girl,” Gunther-Canada said. “Her writing is unique in expressing the desire of a girl to be free, free of the burdens of domestic service in her family, free from economic dependence as a working woman, free from marital servitude as a wife. There’s no doubt that her experiences within her family helped to shape her politics — it is this insistence that the personal is political that makes her a pioneering feminist theorist.”
Wollstonecraft tried to live out her revolutionary theories about the equality of the sexes and the relationship of independence to virtue, Gunther-Canada said. Her personal decisions were the focus of a public scandal after her death when her husband, the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, published the Memoir of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In this 18th century biography, Godwin tried to explain her actions as a consequence of her theory, revealing her affair with American writer Gilbert Imlay, the illegitimate birth of her daughter, Fanny, and her suicide attempts. Wollstonecraft had died tragically in 1797, shortly after giving birth to her second child, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
“In her letters [Wollstonecraft] reveals that she always felt at war with the world,” Gunther-Canada said, “searching for love and striving to create ideal relationships. Her efforts to live according to her beliefs, to combine theory and practice, put her at odds with the common practices of her day.”
All feminists owe an intellectual debt to Wollstonecraft,” Gunther-Canada said.
“In America during the early republic, the first tract on women's education by Benjamin Rush was influenced by A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Gunther-Canada said. “In the 19th century Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony dedicated their History of Woman Suffrage to her. Betty Friedan read Wollstonecraft as she struggled to identify ‘the problem with no name’ in writing The Feminine Mystique.”The women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s found in Wollstonecraft a rallying cry and a role model, Gunther-Canada said. In the 1980s and 1990s A Vindication of Rights of Woman has been one of the only works written by a woman to be included in the canon of political philosophy.
“My hope is that Rebel Writer will introduce Wollstonecraft’s writings to a new generation of readers interested in the history of political thought, the development of feminist theory and the conversation on democratic citizenship. In discussing the concerns of women she proved that there was indeed a lot more that could be said about enlightenment politics and civic education.”