Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Mary Wollstonecraft was a British philosopher and writer. She’s maybe most famous for her seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which was published in 1792. In that work she argues, among other things, that women aren’t naturally inferior to men, and what they need to be given are equal opportunities in education. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was groundbreaking and one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy.  

So one of the central themes or principles that run through Wollstonecraft’s book is this idea of independence. But the thing is,  I think she has a pretty nuanced and multi-layered conception of it. So, maybe the best way to proceed is by first saying something about what Wollstonecraft doesn’t mean by independence. That might help us to clear the ground for a better understanding of what it is she does mean. 

Ok so when she talks about women and the goal of independence, I think it’s crucial to notice that she doesn’t have in mind some highly individualistic ideal. That’s to say, independence for her isn’t about this popular idea of staying away from dependency on others and instead being, you know, a completely rugged ‘self-made person’. So really in this way, independence shouldn’t be associated with any sort of negative freedom, you know, this idea of complete absence of interference from others. Actually, it’s interesting, it turns out that independence as she understands it, isn’t completely incompatible with assistance or help from others!

Well, ok so that out of the way, what does Wollstonecraft mean by independence then? Well, for starters, and most fundamentally, it seems to have something to do with simply not being at the mercy of someone else for your needs, or not depending on someone’s grace to ensure life’s essentials, or, not being under the sway of some unconstrained and arbitrary power.  All crucially important things obviously. And a huge part of Wollstonecraft’s message. So that’s one layer of it. 

But there’s more. 

Independence for her also has something to do with, well, rationality. That’s to say, we gain in independence when we’re guided by reason rather than by both passion and conformist opinion. As Wollstonecraft says herself, It is the right use of reason alone which makes us independent of everything. So what does she mean by this exactly? Well, just like we’re free when we’re not under the sway of some arbitrary power, we’re also free and independent when we’re not under the sway of our passions and blindly following the opinions of others. To be led by our passions and conformist opinions is to be led by not only prejudices but also by external forces not under our control. This is why exercising our capacity to reason is so important and why it’s connected to freedom and independence. It’s because when we’re guided by reason we reflect on our beliefs, we think for ourselves, we both discern and put aside prejudices, and we do what’s really in our best interest. Actually Plato over 2000 years earlier argued for something very similar. He said that the rational part of us determines what is best and what is right and what is truly in our genuine interests. Reason, he believed, just won’t lead us astray like following the other, less reliable, parts of our psyche would. Anyway, the general point is that for Wollstonecraft independence is something that begins when, in this case, women, start to question custom and so-called received wisdom, and so stop allowing others to make decisions for them and determine their life patterns. 

Ok, now I mentioned earlier that for Wollstonecraft independence didn’t amount to a kind of negative freedom and so it wasn’t incompatible with some degree of mutual reliance between people. In other words, we’re not doing it alone all the time. 

Actually, you know, to this point, there’s something I wanted to mention earlier that I forgot to. It has to do with this idea of the totally self-created person thing. I think it’s worth pausing for a moment to be reminded of a sort of bigger picture point here. And it’s this: as much as we might believe in this, let’s face it, mostly American, idea of the completely self-created person or self-made man, it just ultimately doesn’t ring true. The fact of the matter is that we’re just not isolated self-sufficient atomistic beings! No, we’re all connected. Being human fundamentally means being dependent and relational. We all got help from someone somewhere along the line, whether it was by our parents, or our friends, or our teachers or our co-workers. We’re all the product of being dependent on others in some form or another. Without others, without our families and our communities and our society, our development is just not possible. The conditions of our success lie both within and outside of us. I don’t think Wollstonecraft would disagree with this.  

Anyway, as much as Wollstonecraft’s notion of independence allows for some degree of assistance or aid from others, she does still want to argue that by and large dependency on another isn’t good. It’s not good because what it does, she says, is it prevents individuals from growing and from becoming morally better people. Now what does she mean by this exactly? 

Well, one the one hand, she says that if a woman finds herself subservient to a man, and so dependent on him, then she’ll resort to all  sorts of harmful coping strategies, for example, she’ll be cunning, or she’ll try to render herself alluring, or she’ll act in a frivolous manner and so on. But the bottom line is that by having to resort to such things she’s made herself weaker in virtue. And this is a consequence of the unequal and so dependent relationship she’s in. 

But, here’s the thing, Wollstonecraft says that the same goes for the dominant man in this relationship, he too is being hurt by it, even if he doesn’t think he is. And the reason for this is because his position of superiority makes him complacent. In other words, because he gets used to all the adulation thrown upon him by his subordinates, he gets full of himself and he gets lazy. So he too loses his virtue. 

So the bottom line is that inequality between two people creates dependence and dependence inhibits moral growth. 

So what’s the answer? Well, it’s not that hard to see. It’s that real virtue, genuine moral growth, is only possible within relationships securely grounded in equality where both people are to a large degree independent!  

So before I get into things, I want to first address an outlook or attitude that’s sometimes associated with feminism. So we often hear the kind of view that feminism is all about encouraging individual women to rise to the top of the social or corporate ladder in competition with men. Now there’s obviously some validity in that, to be sure. But I think that what Wollstonecraft would say is that there’s also something individualistic and self-serving about this sort of outlook. In a way, what such a view does is it continues to promote the values of domination. In other words, what it does is it fosters a kind of ruthless individualism that’s in tension with the most important of values. 

And what are the most important values? Well, for Wollstonecraft what’s really important, what’s most essential to feminism in fact, are things like community and a holistic view of society and being concerned for future generations of people. Feminism for her promotes love and fraternity and equality not individual gain and domination. And actually this is partly why education was so important to her. Because she viewed education not just as the catalyst for social change but also as essential for the cultivation of the moral life. Education should teach honourable and meaningful things, not superficialities. Education for girls shouldn’t be about trinkets! 

And by the way, for Wollstonecraft, education was ultimately the key to female liberation. And the reason she believed this is because of the particular conception of education she held, a conception she basically got from the philosopher John Locke. That’s to say, she followed Locke in believing that we’re all blank slates at birth, something that  makes the power of education for all extremely promising. I mean, if we have no inherent qualities and there are no innate hierarchies, because we’re all just blank slates, then really it’s all a matter of exposing children, and in this case girls, to the right ideas early in life.

Anyway, I was saying something about teaching superficialities a second ago, and I want to get back to that because in fact a large part of Wollstonecraft’s attention in her book is focused on just this, namely, that girls are taught niceties, and manners and propriety, and they’re taught to focus on appearance and beauty, all of which of she thinks reflects an idealized male construction. 

In fact, you know what, now that I think about it, the philosopher Rousseau who was living during this time, was very influential here. I mean he famously writes, in his book on education, Emile, that girls should follow male dictated patterns; that’s to say, they should have cultivated in them a fondness for jewelry and mirrors and they should learn to be submissive and basically they should only be educated in womanly things. Actually it’s pretty remarkable that given the overall message in his philosophy on the importance of such things like equality, self-sufficiency and freedom that Rousseau at the same time argues for traditional sex roles like this. I don’t know, maybe, as some have speculated, Rousseau’s sexist position here is explained by his deep seated fear of women’s power over men!  

Anyway, well ok so Wollstonecraft was reacting to all of this. She demands that we stop teaching girls to focus on empty-headed things like appearance and niceties, and instead point them in the direction of higher and more substantial aims, like morality and philosophy. The bottom line is that for her we don’t do girls, and so women, any favors by educating them in this way, it actually makes them worse as people. In her own words, women are weakened by this false refinement. Actually she says a lot of interesting things in this regard, but one, in particular, stands out to me. Namely, she tries to remind her women readers that at the end of the day beauty is not an accomplishment. A solid skill is much more admirable. As she herself says, How much more respectable is the woman who earns her own bread, rather than just being beautiful.

Now, I don’t know, but it seems to me that a lot of this is still relevant today, no. 

I mean we’re a culture obsessed with beauty, and, speaking of accomplishment, you could argue that this obsession distracts many people from more important goals in life. To be overly concerned with beauty and with brand is to take our time, and our attention, and our emotional resources away from things that deep down we all know we should be spending those resources on. Do we really want a society where strength and usefulness and genuine accomplishment are sacrificed to beauty? Do we really want to be like the mythological Narcissus? 

That’s to say, do we want to waste away gazing at our own image in a pool reduced in the end to a frivolous withering flower!