A Vindication of the Rights of Men A Vindication of the Rights of Woman An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution

463 Pages·1993·6.33 MB·English

by  Mary Wollstonecraft

OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS
A VINDICATION O F THE RIGHTS
OF MEN
AND
A VINDICATION O F THE RIGHTS
OF WOMAN
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT was born in 1759 and suffered a peri-
patetic childhoo d followin g a n increasingl y impecuniou s an d
drunken father. Fuelled by indignation at the inequality of treat-
ment of herself and the eldest son, she left home to follow the
few occupations open to a lady: as companion, schoolteacher, and
governess. He r grea t brea k cam e when she wa s employed a s
assistant and reviewer for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson in
London through whom she met such thinkers as Thomas Paine,
Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, and William Blake. Excited by the
possibilities of the French Revolution, she entered the propaganda
war in England and within a short time wrote both A Vindication
of the Rights of Men an d A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
arguing the rights of all people to education and consideration.
Over the next years she struggled with the problems of trying to be
an independent woman despite a conditioning in dependence. I n
France she entered an ultimately unhappy relationship with Gilbert
Imlay and bore a daughter. During this time she wrote her history
of the early French Revolution trying to come to terms with the
violence and cruelty she had witnessed. In the last year of her life
she married Godwin; she died following childbirt h a few months
later.
Godwin's Memoirs of his wife was frank about Wollstonecraft's
illegitimate child and suicide attempts and in the public mind
welded he r emotiona l romanti c lif e ont o th e ster n nationalis t
philosophy of the two Vindications.
JANET TODD is a Professor of English at the University of East
Anglia. She is the author of several books on eighteenth-century
women including Women's Friendship i n Literature (1980) and The
Sign ofAngellica: women, writing, and fiction 1660-1800 (1989). Her
most recent work is Gender, Art and Death (1993) and the first three
volumes of the edition of Aphra Behn's works.
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OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
A Vindication of the Rights
of Men
A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman
An Historical and Moral View
of the French Revolution
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Editorial material © Janet Todd 1993
Hardback published by Pickering and Chatto Ltd. 1993
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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First published as a World's Classics paperback 1994
Reissued as an Oxford World's Classics paperback 1999
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Printed in Great Britain by
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CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Note on the Texts xxxi
Select Bibliography xxxii
A Chronology of Mary Wollstone craft XXXV
A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHT S OF MEN 1
A VINDICATIO N O F THE RIGHT S OF WOMAN 63
AN HISTORICA L AN D MORAL VIEW OF THE ORIGI N
AND PROGRES S O F THE FRENC H REVOLUTIO N 285
Explanatory Notes 372
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INTRODUCTION
The works published in this volume are all parts of a controversy
concerning the French Revolution. All were written between 1790
and 1794, a peculiar period in English culture which, in its richness
of theoretical writing and enthusiasm for political discussion, can be
compared only with the turbulent mid-seventeenth century. It was a
period in which neighbouring France followed seventeenth-centur y
England in trying to act out political and social theories. For its part,
the English government, noting the direction of those theories, tried
to limit the spread of activity by controlling the dissemination of
ideas. The men and women who wrote on socio-political issues in
such a context were not the sages of more peaceful period s bu t
engaged polemicists who believed that their ideas might soon be put
into practice; they also knew that their publishing might have politi-
cal and social consequences for their personal lives.
The two works printed here in full, A Vindication of the Rights of
Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and An Historical and
Moral View . . . of the French Revolution printed in part, were all
reactive and provocative, elements in a series by people who knew or
knew of each other; they make points in a debate about a single
phenomenon, the French Revolution. When this event had begun in
1789, most liberal-thinking people in England judged it comparable
with the English revolution of 1688. If the works here do not breathe
this moderate acceptance, it is mainly because, after the publication
in 1790 of Burke's vehement and emotional denunciation, Reflec-
tions on the Revolution in France, political alignments became both
more problematical and more positive. In certain fundamental re-
spects it is possible to see all Wollstonecraft's political works in
dialogue with Burke's ideas and rhetorical stance.
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
Wollstonecraft was ready to enter the political fray with her first
Vindication in 1790 because her life had provided a preparation for
it. She was born in 1759 just before George III came to the throne
and his emphasis on domestic policies must have highlighted the
vii
viii Introduction
irregular nature of her unstable home, headed by a dissipated and
unthrifty father. As her family fell down the social scale, losing all
hopes of remaining gentlemen-farmers, Wollstonecraft seethed less
at the social embarrassment than at the injustice of concentrating
dwindling resources on the eldest son of a large family in which she
was the eldest daughter. Consequently, at 19 she left home to take a
position as a paid companion, returning in 1781 to care for her dying
mother. After her mother's death she moved in with Fanny Blood,
a dear friend from whom she claimed to have derived some of her
education. Soon she fashioned a plan for keeping herself, Fanny,
and her sisters, by establishing a small school.
Wollstonecraft ha d littl e pedagogica l preparatio n fo r thi s
enterprise although for a short time in Yorkshire she had received
lessons from the intellectual father of her first close friend, Jane
Arden. Later Jane Arden founded a school with her sisters, and
her action probably encouraged Wollstonecraft, with whom she still
corresponded. The very fact that Wollstonecraft could set up an
establishment wit h so little preparation suggests th e sort of in-
stitutions most middle-class girl s would enter. In Th e Rights of
Woman Wollstonecraf t recommende d tha t communitie s regulat e
their schools.
The lack of kindly parental authority seems to have haunted
Wollstonecraft throughout her life. She railed against all forms of
patriarchal power, whether of father over children, king over coun-
try, or of public schoolboy over fag, a form of tyranny she saw briefly
at Eton. In the place of the father she seems to have idealized a
substitute father-figure, an unthreatening, desexualized, and intel-
lectually admirable figure, portrayed in her final fiction The Wrongs
of Woman in the kindly, generous, and uncontrolling uncle. In her
life the role seems to have been played at one time by Richard Price,
who nurtured her ideas in Newington Green, where her school was
established. The minister of a Dissenting Chapel, a liberal intellec-
tual, and fellow of the Royal Society, honoured in Scotland and the
new United States, Price was a staunch advocate of political and
economic reforms and he was in contact with many leading philoso-
phers of the time such as Franklin and Condorcet (whose views on
women's rights would be close to Wollstonecraft's). Through Price
and others living in Newington Green, she came to consider Locke's
theories about the basic nature of sensory experience and the power
Introduction ix
of environment in education, which went some way to explaining
her own character and gave her a language with which to begin to
express her long-held sense of discrimination.
Because o f her backgroun d an d influences , it i s fittin g tha t
Wollstonecraft's first work Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
should be on education and partially follow Locke in stressing the
power of environment; it differs from her later educational works
primarily in its allowance for innate qualities and in its strain of
compensatory piety. The book was published by the liberal London
publisher Joseph Johnson, with whom one of her Newington Green
friends had put her in touch.
In the light of such a past, Wollstonecraft hardly seems best fitted
for service to the aristocracy. But, following her trip to Portugal,
where the now-married Fanny had died in childbirth, she aban-
doned her ailing school and became a governess to the children of
Lord and Lady Kingsborough in Ireland. Predictably it was a short-
term employment , durin g which the most usefu l event s for her
intellectual development wer e the writing of her first and most
sentimental novel, Mary: A Fiction (in which she allowed her hero-
ine to find solace from life's miseries in an assumption of superior
sensibility), and the reading of Rousseau's educational work Emile,
which, she was pleased to find, chose 'a common capacity to educate'
and gave 'as a reason, that a genius will educate itself; she much
admired its description of a system of natural education suited to the
capacities of the child.1 Later, however, she would deplore th e
contents of book v, which confined the admirable system, outlined
in the early books, to the boy: the girl Sophie was left to suffe r
a contingen t upbringin g fittin g he r mor e fo r marriag e an d
childbearing than for independent adulthood.
Dismissed b y Lady Kingsborough , Wollstonecraf t settle d i n
London i n 178 7 to work for Johnson, another of her nurturing
avuncular figures. In May 1788 he began his new journal, the Ana-
lytical Review, for which she was speedily reviewing, frequently on
educational and fictional works, sometimes o n political and aes -
thetic. She also translated Salzmann, who, grounding his views on
Locke and Rousseau, insisted that education be related to the imme-
1 Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed . Ralph Wardle (Ithaca, NY: Cornel l
University Press, 1979), 145.