The Vindications: The Rights of Men and The Rights of Woman

489 Pages·1997·24.19 MB·English

by  Mary Wollstonecraft, D.L. Macdonald, Kathleen Scherf

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A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MEN
and
A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN
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A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MEN,
IN A LETTER TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
EDMUND BURKE;
OCCASIONED BY HIS REFLECTIONS ON THE
REVOLUTION IN FRANCE
and
A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN:
WITH STRICTURES ON POLITICAL AND
MORAL SUBJECTS
by Mary Wollstonecraft
Edited by D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf
broadview literary texts
Revie©w1 9C97o Dp.Ly. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf
Reprinted 2001
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, trans-
mitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior writ-
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Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario, M5C 1H6 — is an infringement of
the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759-1797
A vindication of the rights of men ; A vindication of the rights of
woman
(Broadview Literary Texts)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-55111-088-1
1. Human rights. 2. Liberty. 3. Burke, Edmund, I729?-I797. Reflections
on the revolution in France. 4. France - History - Revolution, 1789-1799
— Causes. 5.Women's rights — Great Britain. 6.Women — Education —
Great Britain. 7. Women — History — 19th century. 8. Feminism.
I. Macdonald, David Lome, 1955- .
II. Scherf, Kathleen, 1960- . 111. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759-1797.
Vindication of the rights of woman. IV. Title. V. Series.
JC57I.W873 1997 323 c97-930849-6
Broadview Press
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Broadview Press is grateful to Professor Eugene Benson for advice on
editorial matters for the Broadview Literary Texts series.
Broadview Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada
Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ministry of Canadian Heritage.
Book design by George Kirkpatrick
PRINTED IN CANADA
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Contents
Acknowledgements • 6
Introduction • 7
1. The Writing of the Vindications • 7
2. A Reading of the Vindications • 15
3. A Note on the Texts • 23
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Brief Chronology • 29
A Vindication of the Rights of Men • 31
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • 99
Appendix A: The Revolutionary Moment • 345
1. The Life of Olaudah Equiano • 345
2. Declaration Of The Rights Of Men And Of Citizens • 353
3. Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country • 355
4. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France • 371
5. Gouges, The Rights of Woman • 378
Appendix B: The Education Debate • 393
1. Talleyrand, Rapport sur I'instruction publique • 393
2. Macaulay, Letters on Education • 400
Appendix C: Hints. [Chiefly designed to have been incorporated in the Sec-
ond Part of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.] • 409
Appendix D: Contemporary Reviews • 417
1. A Vindication of the Rights of Men • 417
2. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • 430
Works Cited/Recommended Reading • 451
Index • 458
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press for
permission to quote from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution
in France (Appendix A.4), edited by L.G. Mitchell and William B.
Todd, in volume 8 (1989) of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund
Burke, general editor Paul Langford.We are grateful to Wollstonecraft's
previous editors — Miriam Brody, Ulrich H. Hardt, Richard Holmes,
Gary Kelly, Carol Poston, Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, Sylvana
Tomaselli, and Ralph M. Wardle - for their readings and annotations,
which have often contributed to our own.
We would like to thank the many librarians who have assisted us,
especially at the University of Calgary and the British Library. Mical
Moser was of great assistance in collating texts, doing library searches,
reading documents in French, checking our translation of Olympe de
Gouges, and helping to compile the index. Roberta Jackson read the
introduction and helped to check the final copy. Greg Doran helped
to read proofs and checked the references. We are also grateful for the
assistance of Bruce Barker-Benfield, James A. Black, Helen Buss,
Michael Dewar, Paula Gaber, Bruce Graver, Miriam Y. Holden, Mary
Jacobus, Marie Loughlin, Anne Me Whir, Jeanne Moskal, Mitzi Myers,
David Oakleaf, Donald H. Reiman, Charles E. Robinson,Vivienne
Rundle, Goran Stanivukovic,Janis Svilpis, and Ted Underwood.
Our part in this book is dedicated to Roberta Jackson and Dan Silk:
"true voluptuousness must proceed from the mind - for what can
equal the sensations produced by mutul affection, supported by
mutual respect?" (340).
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Introduction
A few years ago, one of the editors of this book gave a lecture on
Mary Wollstonecraft at a community centre for senior citizens. Before
explaining her ideas, he gave a short sketch of her life, including the
well-known story of how, as a girl, she used to sleep on the landing
outside her parents' bedroom, so that, if her father flew into one of his
drunken rages during the night, she could come between them, and
receive on her own body the blows intended for her mother (God-
win 206). At this point, he was interrupted by a small, very elderly, and
frail-looking woman, who shouted — who knows from what depth of
feeling? —"She should have shot the bastard!"Another year, he taught
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in his undergraduate course in
Romantic literature. Some students find the book hard going (the
main purpose of this edition is to make it more accessible), but it
filled one young woman with delight. "This is the best book I ever
read!" she exclaimed. "It says that men and women should love each
other for their mmd5/"Wollstonecraft is an author whose life and work
still speak powerfully to women and men today.
i. The Writing of the Vindications
Mary Wollstonecraft's two great vindications of human rights were
inspired by what seemed to many at the time a moment of unprece-
dented human possibility (Myers, "Politics" 119). As William
Wordsworth would recall in 1805:
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole Earth,
The beauty wore of promise — that which sets
(To take an image which was felt, no doubt,
Among the bowers of Paradise itself)
The budding rose above the rose full blown.
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? (The Prelude 10.702-8)'
Even contemporaries whose tempers did not wake to unthought-of
INTRODUCTION 7
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happiness at the prospect agreed about its global significance. In 1790,
Edmund Burke reflected: "It looks to me as if I were in a great crisis,
not of the affairs of France alone but of all Europe, perhaps of more
than Europe. All circumstances taken together, the French revolution
is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world"
(Writings 8: 60; see below, 8211).
For British radicals, this moment of opportunity seems to have
begun in earnest with the campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade.
(The American Revolution, though inspiring, does not seem to have
had quite the same impact: it was a revolution of which even Edmund
Burke could approve.) The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the
Slave Trade was founded in 1787; its famous slogan — "Am I not a man
and a brother?" — emphasized the universality of its claims. As a
writer, Wollstonecraft lent the campaign her support; for example, she
wrote a favourable review of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789; see Appendix
A.I) for the Analytical Review, pointing out that Equiano's account of
"the treatment of male and female slaves, on the voyage, and in the
West Indies,... make[s] the blood turn its course" (Works j: ioo-i).2 In
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, she repeatedly denounced the slave
trade as an abuse of the property rights that conservatives like Burke
were anxious to protect (44, 86), vividly described the sufferings it
entailed — "Hell stalks abroad; — the lash resounds on the slave's naked
sides; and the sick wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of
unremitting labour, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good
night" (95-96,) - and called on Parliament to abolish it (86-87). She
returned to the subject in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, extend-
ing the concept boldly to the relations between men and women (see
Macdonald), and arguing that "slavery will have its constant effect,
degrading the master and the abject dependent" (104).
The apogee of the moment of opportunity - the inspiration of
Wordsworth's rhapsody and Burke's diatribe — was the early phase of
the French Revolution. British radicals welcomed this event both as a
belated equivalent of Britain's own Glorious Revolution, almost
exactly one hundred years earlier, and as an unprecedented new
beginning.3 Radical thinking about the new beginning tended to
focus on the Declaration Of The Rights Of Men And Of Citizens pro-
8 INTRODUCTION
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mulgated by the National Assembly in 1789 (Appendix A.2). When
Wollstonecraft's mentor, the Presbyterian minister and scientist
Richard Price, composed a sermon for the Revolution Society - that
is, the society dedicated to commemorating the Glorious Revolution
of 1688 - on 4 November 1789, he clearly had the French Revolu-
tion in mind. Although he published his sermon as A Discourse on the
Love of Our Country (Appendix A.3), he argued that this love should
be tempered with the "UNIVERSAL BENEVOLENCE" taught by
Christ, "which is an unspeakably nobler principle than any partial
affections" such as patriotism (358). Like Wordsworth and Burke, he
saw the Revolution as an event of global significance; in a passage that
gave great offense to Burke, he compared himself, an aging radical
contemplating the nascent Revolution, to the aged Simeon contem-
plating the infant Christ: "What an eventful period is this! I am
thankful that I have lived to it; and I could almost say, Lord, now lettest
thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation' (370;
Luke 2: 29-30). Wollstonecraft praised Price's sermon, in the Analytical
Review, for "breath [ing] the animated sentiments of ardent virtue in a
simple, unaffected, nay, even negligent style" (Works 7: 185-87).
Price received a more famous, and more critical, review on i
November 1790. Burke's magisterial Reflections on the Revolution in
France (Appendix A.4) is, in part, a critique of A Discourse on the Love
of Our Country. Wollstonecraft's reply, A Vindication of the Rights of Men,
is, in part, a vindication of Richard Price.
Wollstonecraft read the Reflections upon its publication; she was
infuriated by this attack on the principles she had so fervently
embraced. Encouraged by her publisher, Joseph Johnson (another
mentor), she immediately sat down to compose a reply to Burke. She
wrote quickly and passionately, stalled only by a "temporary fit of tor-
por and indolence" (Godwin 230), during which she entertained
doubts about publishing her reply. She confessed these doubts to
Johnson, who did not press her to finish if it would cause her discom-
fort, even though half the sheets were already printed. Johnson was
acutely aware of the topicality of Wollstonecraft's reply to Burke, and
he was eager to have it in print as soon as possible (as individual man-
uscript sheets were completed, he had them set, printed, and correct-
ed), so that his indulgence was a generous one. Wollstonecraft, buoyed
INTRODUCTION 9