"Those who are bold enough to advance before
the age they live in, and to throw off, by the force of their own minds,
the prejudices which the maturing reason of the world will in time disavow,
must learn to brave censure.
"We ought not to be too anxious respecting
the opinions of other -- I am not fond of vindications. -- Those who know
me sill suppose that I acted from principle. -- Nay, as we in general give
others credit for worth, in proportion as we possess it -- I am easy with
regard to the opinions of the best part of mankind. I rest
on my own."
-- Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797.
Horace Walpole called Mary Wollstonecraft "a
hyena in petticoats."
Robert Southey, Poet
Laureate of England, was reluctant to admire anybody and said quite
frankly that he had praise for no living being except Mary Wollstonecraft.
Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for her famed A
Vindication on the Rights of Women that was an answer to the so-called
reforms in France; so-called because the reforms only affected men. Women's
legal rights, in fact, were lessened in France and in most European countries
by the reform movements of the late 18th and early 19th century.
Even the fledgling United States took away some women's
rights when its Constitution was adopted by specifying men's rights instead
of the neutral "person."
Although many "authorities" would have you
believe that women in the "olden" days wrote out of boredom,
the fact is that Mary Wollstonecraft (and most of the early women writers)
wrote because she needed the money to live... her subjects, however,
were of her choosing.
She was so admired that while in London she was part
of the highest literary gatherings of the liberal activists of the 18th
century England. She learned French and German and traveled to France a
number of times.
"...I wish to persuade women to endeavor
to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the
soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement
of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness...[dismiss] then
those pretty feminine phrases...supposed to be the sexual characteristics
of the weaker vessel..."
-- Mary Wollstonecraft, A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
"Taught from infancy
that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and
roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison."
Mary Wollstonecraft was an honored and influential
part of the London radicals which included Thomas Paine. Her works presented
argument after argument for women's equality, legally, politically, economically,
and socially. Her best known work Vindication of the Rights of Women
(1792) was written in an attempt to offset the ideas of Rousseau about
women's inferiority that was gaining ground in France.
Within a short period of time, regressive laws were
being written in France and Germany as well as other European countries
that gave men more rights and that took away rights from women. Laws were
penned that gave men the right to determine how long a baby could be breast
fed (boys longer than girls), women were forbidden to own property, etc.
As a child Mary Wollstonecraft witnessed her drunken,
vicious father openly beat her mother. She left to be a type of servant
for others but returned home to nurse her dying mother and then, according
to Margaret Olipant in her Literary History of England, 1790-1825,
"When in 1787...nearly
thirty...she made a home for her brothers and sisters, supported her father
in his village, and was the head of all family concerns...."
MW had a daughter, Fanny, without marrying the
father. She married a man other than the father of her child, became pregnant,
and died after giving birth 09-10-1797 to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
author of Frankenstein. She was a passionate,
all-embracing cosmopolitan woman, anything but a hyena.
"She whose sense of her own existence was
so intense, who had cried out even in her misery, 'I cannot bear to think
of being no more -- of losing myself -- nay it appears to me impossible
that I should cease to exist,' died at the age of 38. But she has her revenge.
Many millions have died and been forgotten in the 130 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 relations with Goodwin, and realize 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."
-- Virginia Woolf in her epitaph
on Mary Wollstonecraft.
Some Wollstonecraft quotes:
"Taught from infancy
that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and
roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison."
"Besides, if women be
educated for dependence, that is, to act according to the will of another
fallible being, and submit right or wrong to power where are we to stop?...
"Women, I allow, may have different duties to
fulfill; but they are HUMAN DUTIES, and the principles that should regulate
the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same."
"From the tyranny of man, I firmly believe
the greater number of female follies proceed. I lament that women are systematically
degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to
pay to the sex, when in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own
superiority...I am scarcely able to govern my muscles when I see a man
start with eager and serious solicitude to lift a handkerchief or shut
a door, when the lady could have done it herself... The lordly caresses
of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for and deserves
to be respected...
| "Make them free... or the injustice
which one half of the human race are obliged to submit to, retorting on
their oppressors, the virtue of men will be worm-eaten by the insects whom
he keeps under his feet."
"If women be not prepared by education to
be the comapanion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge, for
truth must be common to all."
"Do women not notice how eager men are to
degrade the sex from whom they pretend to receive the chief pleasure in
life?"
In a letter to her mother
Voltaraine de Cleyre (1866-1912) wrote, "Every
individual should have room or rooms for himself[sic] exclusively..a 'closet'
where each could 'pray in secret' without some persons who love him assuming
the right to walk in and do as they please. And do you know how I was pleased
beyond measure the other day to find that William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft
taught and as far as possible practiced the same thing, just 100 years
ago."
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"Swift
as a light and as cheering was the ideas that broke in upon me. I have
found it! What terrified me till terrify others; and I need only describe
the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow. On the morrow I announced
that I had thought of a story."
-- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly, creator of
one of the most original stories in the annals of fiction: Frankenstein.
She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. A revisionist movement to
discredit Mary Shelly's authorship of Frankenstein attempt to give credit
to her lover, the poet Shelley. There is absolutely no proof of such a
thing except the "historian's" opinion that she had no background
for authorship.
|
"I never expect men
to GIVE us liberty. No, women, we are not WORTH it, until we TAKE it."
--Voltaraine de Cleyre (1866-1912).
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