The Wollstonecraftian Mind

Sandrine Bergès, Eileen Hunt Botting, Alan Coffee, Sandrine Bergès, Eileen Hunt Botting, Alan Coffee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351738132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

There has been a rising interest in the study of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in philosophy, political theory, literary studies and the history of political thought in recent decades. The Wollstonecraftian Mind seeks to provide a comprehensive survey of her work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Comprising 38 chapters by a team of international contributors this handbook covers:

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• the background to Wollstonecraft's work
• Wollstonecraft's major works
• the relationship between Wollstonecraft and other major philosophers
• Wollstonecraftian philosophy
• Wollstonecraft's legacy

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, Wollstonecraft's work is central to the study of political philosophy, literature, French studies, political thought, and feminism.

PART 1

Background

1

THE DEFENCE OF WOMEN, 1400–1700

Karen Green

In the year preceding Mary Wollstonecraft’s birth, an anonymous book was published with the title, Female Rights Vindicated; or the equality of the sexes morally and physically proved. By a Lady (1758; Clarke 2013, 12). The book was not as original as its title suggests, for it was, in fact, a translation and adaptation of François Poullain de la Barre’s De l’égalité des deux sexes (1673), but it serves as a reminder that by the mid-eighteenth century there already existed a significant tradition of defences of women’s rights and equality with men. Whether Wollstonecraft was aware of this earlier anticipation of the title of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman is not known. Neither it nor the French work that it translates are mentioned in her published works, and she probably did not know them, for although she excerpted a number of eighteenth-century women writers, who were her near contemporaries, in the Female Reader, she did not include in it selections from any earlier women’s works.

This should not surprise us. It has, until recently, been a consequence of the male domination of the academy that there has been little systematic study of women’s intellectual history, and although Wollstonecraft was born into a century when women’s literary activities were proliferating, she was almost certainly largely unaware of the earlier history of defences of women by women. One gets no sense, from reading her, of an appreciation of the existence of individuals who had written in support of women’s rights before the eighteenth century, or even of those from earlier in the century, and since, during her lifetime, many of the works to be discussed in this chapter only existed in manuscript, or as rare, old books, they were difficult to access. It is, nevertheless, important to recognize that a rich history already existed in which various kinds of women’s rights were defended, in order to guard against a simplistic view, according to which, ‘the first major feminist voice belongs to Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman marks an epoch in the cause [of the struggle for women’s rights]’ (Grayling 2007, 204). In fact, her work is just as much the culmination of, and reaction to, earlier phases of an existing tradition, as a source for modern feminism.

This assessment might be challenged. Because Wollstonecraft penned the Vindication of the Rights of Woman after having written her Vindication of the Rights of Men and after the French declaration of the rights of man, it has appeared to some that ‘The idea of inalienable human rights in the secular realm came before the idea of women’s rights, and the idea that all men were equal came before the idea that men and women were equal’ (Gottlieb 1997, 294–5). Equally, in regard to earlier women, who wrote in women’s defence, it has been said,

They challenged the tyranny of men but not the tyranny of class or potentate. Within the structures their critique left undisturbed there was no place for women: no role for women in cities where only men could be citizens or kings. Until those ancient structures fell to male assault in the name of civil rights and natural law in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, no truly modern feminist claims could be made.

(King 1991, 237)

This chapter, and the next (Broad), will argue by contrast, that the case for the equality of women and men as spiritual beings and rational, moral agents preceded, or at the very least, arose in tandem with, the development of ideas of universal human rights. Ideas of sexual equality were initiated by arguments for the status of women as citizens, their right to an education and to exercise their liberty free of the domination of husbands, their capacity to rule as queens, their right to equal friendship with men, and perhaps, most generally, their duty to act as autonomous moral agents, in order to deserve salvation (Broad and Green 2009; Green 2014).

The political significance of early defences of women, which make up the pro-woman part of the debates called the querelle des femmes, has been minimized by those who have seen the querelle as a mere academic intellectual exercise conducted by men, or generated by publishers’ desire to stimulate the sale of books, by confecting an entertaining controversy (Blamires 1997; Benson 2008, ix–xi). These characterizations are to an extent true of male authored defences, but it should be noted that even these were often produced at the behest of ruling women, or in order to gain their patronage, and one of the most famous, Of the nobility and excellence of the feminine sex by Cornelius Agrippa, was dedicated to Marguerite of Navarre herself an important player in the history of the defence of women (Le Moyne 1647; Bouchet 1992; Agrippa 1996; Le Franc 1999; Vives 2000; Viennot 2006; James 2011). It is not so easy to dismiss works penned by women, as not seriously intended to change women’s status, so in what follows our attention will be restricted to them.

There is no doubt that Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies (1405) was written at a time when the right of a queen to govern as regent was a genuine, pressing, political issue (Pizan 1983, 1997; Violett 1893; Hanley 1994; Green 2006, 2011; Adams 2014). Her defence of women was produced against the background of the exclusion of women from the right to inherit the crown of France, and the Hundred Years War that followed it, and it challenged fundamental Aristotelian claims about the nature of women, using arguments that would reverberate down the centuries. Aristotle had argued that women are naturally subject to men because their reason is not authoritative, a claim captured in the thought that they lacked practical rationality, or prudence, the fundamental overarching virtue, and one particularly necessary in a monarch (Deslauriers 1998). In order to justify the claim that women have the capacity to govern, if only in exceptional circumstances, Christine used historical examples of queens, princesses and duchesses, who had governed countries and duchies with prudence and justice, thus refuting by example the Aristotelian claim that women lack prudence. More directly, in the first chapters of her City of Ladies, and in Christine’s Vision, written at the same time, she attacked head on the idea, derived from Aristotle, that women are, in some sense, defective males, arguing that God does not make defective things, so that the forms of male and female bodies must be equally perfect and intended by him (Pizan 2001, 1993, I.iii). She claimed, as well, that both sexes are equally endowed, by God, with immaterial souls, and so equally made in God’s image. Following Galen, she accepted that the bodily differences between the sexes are accompanied by different characteristic predominant humours, appropriate to different social roles, but she proclaimed these bodily differences to be equally compatible with virtue. Thus, although Christine accepted a hierarchical society, the subjection of citizens to their monarch, the subjection of children to parents and the subjection of wives to husbands, she defended the spiritual, moral and intellectual equality of the sexes, and this had important implications for future developments in the understanding of marriage.

Christine also assumed that women are citizens. Since she lived in a hierarchical feudal order, in which all were subject to the monarch, from whom there extended a branching system of allegiance, subjection and vassalage, she could treat the subjection of women to their husbands as no different from that of any other feudal relationship of subjection to a lord. Within her hierarchical image of the body politic, according to which the monarch is the head, the knights the arms, and the people the belly and the legs, hierarchical families fill in the structure of the body, and the virtues of loyalty, love, faithfulness and obedience are as relevant to the state as to the family (Pizan 1998, 1994). Indeed, the image of the state generally accepted was that of a large family constructed out of smaller familial units. Christine was opposed to the rebellion of the people, even against a tyrant, for she argued that rebellion merely opened up countries to invasion and to new, potentially more tyrannical rulers (Pizan 2008). She was equally opposed to wifely revolt, which she saw as equally ineffectual. Yet, within this hierarchical structure Christine could claim that the good of women was as much part of the common good as that of men, since women were not another species from men and were equally part of the body politic. In her Book of the Three Virtues she turned to the teachings of prudence in order to show women, from all the levels of society, how to play their roles as good citizens (Pizan 1989, 1985). In making her anti-Aristotelian case for the equal prudence and virtue of women and men, Christine also staked a claim for women’s epistemological authority, for the three allegorical ladies who come to advise her, Reason, Righteousness and Justice, assured her that she only had to consult her own reason and experience to see that the slanders of the misogynists and philosophers were merely faulty opinions and lies.¹

Among the powerful women who are described by Christine, one finds ancient figures such as Semiramus, Zenobia, the Amazons and Dido, examples from the Bible, such as Judith and Deborah, Christian saints, and more recent French queens. The Amazons play an important role in her history of women’s rule, since she believes them to have governed themselves over many centuries, and she is assured by her allegorical visitors that the city that she has built to defend women will survive for even longer than did their realm. Many later defences of women, up to Le Moyne’s Gallery of Strong Women (1647) will repeat the same exempla, defending women as capable of demonstrating prudence, courage and strength (Le Moyne 1647). The lasting significance of Christine’s work as a defence of women’s right and capacity to rule, in certain circumstances, is attested by the fact that it was translated into English, by Brian Anslay, a master of the cellar in Henry VIII’s court, who had been specifically assigned to serve Henry’s wife Catharine of Aragon (Downes 2006; Pizan 1521a, 2014). This translation was published in 1521, as was, by coincidence, an English translation of her Book of the Body Politic (Pizan 1521b). There is also evidence of the influence of its iconography in tapestries produced for queens and princesses across Europe, while duchesses and queens from Louise of Savoy to Elizabeth I subsequently had themselves painted with the emblems of the virtue of prudence, in order to underline their wisdom and capacity to rule (Bell 1995, 2004; Green 2007).

The defence of a few privileged women’s right and capacity to rule may appear to be irrelevant to the general status of women, but in fact, arguments in favour of women’s prudence, and the existence of successful, female monarchs, undermined standard justifications for women’s subjection in marriage, for women’s lack of prudence and discernment, their inconstancy and duplicity were standard justifications for their subordination to husbands. This is recognized by Jean Bodin in his Six Books of the Republic where he argues against women’s right to rule a state, by claiming that men’s being subject to a woman in the state will undermine men’s rule of wives in the family (Bodin 1583, 1001–3).

It could be argued that in the 400 years that separated Christine from Mary Wollstonecraft little progress was made with regard to arguments for women’s equal status. Many later works repeat many of the same examples of notable women she had used, or update them by adding contemporary exceptional women, and claim women’s moral equality with men, and capacity to rule in exceptional circumstances, without challenging the assumption that women’s normal duty is to fulfil a domestic role, and to obey their husbands. Evidence for this could be deduced from the attitude of Louise Félicité Keralio-Robert (1758–1821) to Christine. A mere six years before Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her French contemporary began producing a major overview of French women’s literary achievements, a Collection of the Best French Works Written by Women of which she completed 14 volumes (Keralio-Robert 1786–1789). In this ambitious compilation and commentary, she set out to write a history of French literature, using as her examples only works written by women. Her father was associated with the royal French library, which gave her access to manuscripts and printed editions of Christine’s works, some of which she transcribed, thus allowing her to publish the first new editions of Christine’s works since the seventeenth century. Keralio-Robert approved of Christine’s moral prescriptions, as set out in the Book of the Three Virtues, for although she was a supporter of the French revolution, and claimed that men are created free and equal, she, like Christine, believed that women should be sexually modest, and in general, should confine themselves to pursuits compatible with their domestic duties (Keralio-Robert 1786–1789, 2.467; Keralio-Robert et al. 1789–1790, 2 (May 16) 314; Green 2017). Nevertheless, the continuities in their attitudes mask the progress that had already been made in women’s status, for, as Keralio-Robert asserted in the first volume of her collection, women’s right to an education, and her right to devote herself to literary pursuits were widely recognized by the mid-eighteenth century (Keralio-Robert 1786–1789, 1.xii–xiii). Moreover, although she did not mention it, since Christine’s time, there had been a fundamental transformation in the understanding of the marriage relation, as well as in the way in which the relationship between marriage and the state was conceived. These transformations can be traced through the history of women’s literary productions, as memorialised by Keralio-Robert.

During the fifteenth century, the appropriateness of women engaging in literary disputes, outside a convent setting, was vigorously disputed (King 1980, 1976; Nogarola 2004). A literary educati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on texts used
• Editors’ introduction to The Wollstonecraftian Mind
• PART 1: Background
• PART 2: Major works
• PART 3: Interlocutors
• PART 4: Philosophy
• PART 5: Legacies
• Index