Flesh in the Age of Reason (40 page)

The privatization of women as exclusive personal belongings thus accorded them a role, however passive, in social progress; for as wives they could inspire the ripening of male sentiments and passions, even if they hardly developed into higher beings themselves. The sex was thus instrumental in bringing about the ends of progress. Feminine affection and maternal love were typically treated by Kames, Millar and Robertson as biological constants: womankind had been quasi-civilized all along, naturally possessing as she did a soft and docile sensibility, esteem for which grew with the refinement of males. Thanks to the woman, it was thus the male who truly rose from savagery to civility.

In proceeding to trace the ‘gradual progress of women from their low state in savage life to their elevated station in civilized nations’, Kames too made it clear that he believed that women’s ‘progress’ consisted not primarily in any (self-)improvement of their own faculties and prospects but rather in the increased regard for their qualities entertained by men. In the Scottish conjectural scheme of history, women were thus credited as essential, but passive, bearers of civilization.

Two factors were particularly singled out in such accounts of ‘improvements’ in the standing of women: the role of material enrichment, and the impact of chivalry. To Millar, it was only with the later (feudal) stages of material development, accompanied by advances in property law and inequalities of property and rank, that there emerged a true enhancement of women’s status, and sufficient peace and leisure to permit warm imaginations to focus on those charming objects of desire. The triumph of chivalric ideals with their cult of love had further brought that ‘great respect and veneration for the female sex’ which had so transformed European manners.

Not until the emergence of commercial society, however, did ‘women become, neither the slaves, nor the idols of the other sex’, but ‘friends and companions’ in the blossoming of the modern,
domesticated family, when the sexes, while differentiated by a division of labour, were united by ‘esteem and affection’. Only in modern refined society, Kames emphasized, had women achieved – that is, been granted – the regard which assured them enhanced status. ‘One will not be surprised’, he commented, ‘that women in Greece were treated with no great respect by their husbands. A woman cannot have much attraction who passes all her time in solitude: to be admired, she must receive the polish of society.’ Modern times had carved out influential public spaces and roles for them. All such analyses may be read as the cynical Mandeville’s fable history of the prizing of women seen through rose-coloured spectacles.

In his elaboration of such themes, Alexander essentially concurred. Among primitives, woman was a work slave: sexual slavery followed. Early women were also objects of sexual trading. Becoming the property of males, they had no rights of their own but acted as an improving ferment. With the general progress of society, he explained, women gradually acquired influence and status in developments facilitated by changing manners and morals, new cultural ideals and, through a complicated symbiosis, legal arrangements. In a series of chapters titled ‘Of the Treatment, Condition, Advantages and Disadvantages of Women, in Savage and Civil Life’, Alexander drew upon the materialism of the ‘four stages’ theory of social development common to Millar, Smith and others, to chart the progress of the sex ‘from slavery to freedom’.

Like Millar, he made much of the impact of courtly love. By idealizing the maiden, making her inaccessible, and requiring honour and valour on the part of the male suitor, medieval minstrelsy produced a cult of pure love – as distinct from gross possession or gratification – which idealized the female. Chastity commanded greater respect, and the love object was less to be enjoyed than worshipped – a development paralleling the cult of the Virgin in medieval Catholicism.

In his own century, Alexander pointed out, important changes were afoot. The softening of manners inherent in the transition from a warrior to a polite urban society exalted the role of woman as
hostess, home-maker, mother and educator. Heightened domesticity gave her, if not the whip-hand, at least greater sway. Women polished society, and society, in return, granted them higher status. Only in Europe (as opposed to primitive societies) were women neither ‘abject slaves’ nor ‘perpetual prisoners’, but rather ‘intelligent beings’. Refinements in the treatment of women were thus benchmarks of progress.

Such developments, so complacently applauded by magnanimous male theorists, might be experienced by women not as progress, however, but at best as a mixed blessing and, at worst, highly deleterious: new refinement was just old slavery writ large. The implication grated that the sex’s nature and destiny were subordinate to pleasing males and improving society. All too readily did such views sanction doctrines of the complementarity of the sexes which were barely disguised justifications for enduring male supremacy – ‘You must lay it down for a Foundation in general’, taught Viscount Halifax in his
Advice to a Daughter
(1688), ‘that there is
Inequality
in the
Sexes
, and that for the better Oeconomy of the World, the
Men
, who were to be the Lawgivers, had the larger share of
Reason
bestow’d upon them.’ Such naked expression of male superiority ceased to be politically correct in the eighteenth century, but the Scottish physician John Gregory, the English writer James Fordyce and other authors of influential advice books for women continued to insist that the finest contribution women could make to society was to grace it by their superior sensibilities: through their placidity and compliance, the fair sex should be a softening agent.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential educational manual,
Émile
, was comparable in its drift. The boy Émile was to be brought up as active, rational and assertive; complementing him, his sister Sophie should be yielding, loving and nurturing – indeed, specifically childlike: it was for men to exercise their reason, women to feel. It was through such accommodation of opposites that the wisdom of sexual difference would best be fulfilled.

Resenting and resisting such blatant sexism or rationalizations of gender difference, many women turned to Locke’s model of the mind
as a
tabula rasa
– the mind had no sex – and the view expressed in his
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
of the essential mental identity of boys and girls – by consequence of which there should be ‘no great difference’ in the training of the sexes. Calling on parents to reject ‘the absurd notion, that the education of females should be of an opposite kind to that of males’, the Whig Catharine Macaulay out-Locked her hero by arguing unambiguously for unisex education. ‘Let your children be brought up together,’ she declared, ‘let their sports and studies be the same; let them enjoy, in the constant presence of those who are set over them, all that freedom which innocence renders harmless, and in which Nature rejoices.’ Girls should receive a no less intellectual education than boys was also the view of Richard and Maria Edgeworth’s
Practical Education
(1802).

Few women went so far as Macaulay, however, in seemingly collapsing male and female identities. Many favoured some version of the division of sexual labour as envisaged by the Lockean
Spectator
, which conferred a civilizing mission upon the sex. Urging improved female education, Addison and Steele called upon the fair to comport themselves more rationally, so as to be true companions to their husbands and proper examples to their children. Girls should be brought up as rational creatures, not to qualify them for professional careers or the senate, but because reasonable women made the best wives and mothers. If Swift mocked Addison for ‘fair sexing it’, prominent ladies applauded his stand. ‘The Women have infinite obligation to him,’ the bluestocking Mrs Elizabeth Montagu complimented Addison:

before his time, they used
to nickname Gods creatures, & make their ignorance their pride
, as Hamlet says. Mr. Addison has shown them, ignorance, false delicacy, affectation & childish fears, are disgraces to a female character… He does all he can to cure our sex of their feminalities without making them masculine.

From the pious Mary Astell onwards, whose
Some Reflections upon Marriage
(1697) exposed women’s continuing marital ‘slavery’, a succession of articulate women voiced an idea of female identity in
which women should be esteemed primarily for their minds. Astell’s prime call was for better education, to ensure women’s maturity as moral and spiritual agents: cultivation of the mind was a God-given right and duty.

Elizabeth Carter and the other vocal bluestockings of the Georgian century presented women as polite, genteel and inherently no less intelligent than men. Preferring the life of the mind, piety and sociability, they had no ambitions for professional and political emancipation. And sexuality needed to be treated with extreme caution, since all too often sexual reputation had proved the sex’s weak spot. When, for example, Catharine Macaulay married a man half her age, most of her circle cut her: yielding to such irrational infatuation was perceived as letting the side down.

It is in the light of such diverse options that Mary Wollstonecraft’s profound dissatisfaction with the available female personas is best assessed. Born in 1759, the second of seven children, Wollstonecraft might have enjoyed the prospects of a comfortable existence, as her paternal grandfather was an affluent silk-master. But his will made provision only for her elder brother and her father, a tyrant who squandered his share of the inheritance. The rank injustice of this – and of so many of her other formative experiences – was not lost on her.

In her late teens she became a lady’s companion in Bath – a humiliating experience – returning home in the latter part of 1781 to nurse her ailing but self-pitying mother. The following spring she lived with the Bloods, the impoverished family of her dearest friend, Fanny, leaving them in the winter of 1783 to assist her sister Eliza and her new-born daughter. Hatching a plan to establish a school, the two sisters moved to Newington Green, just north of London, where Mary met the Revd Richard Price, head of the thriving local Dissenting community.

In November 1785 Wollstonecraft set sail on what was to be a wretched trip to Lisbon, where Fanny was expecting her first child. On board she struck up a friendship with a consumptive man whom she nursed day and night for nearly two weeks. All such experiences
gave the settings and much of the content for her first novel,
Mary, a Fiction
(1788) – loaded title!

Mary
, a piece of self-analysis and fantasy, offers a portrait of a heroine possessed of impressive intelligence and social graces despite a defective upbringing. She feels that life owes her something better than the trials she has to endure: she is at odds with her parents, with her status as a newly-wed, and even with the friend (modelled on Fanny) to whom she devotes herself until her death (like Fanny) from consumption.

Attractive to men, the fictional Mary (barely veiled if somewhat wishful autobiography) enters into flirtatious relationships with several – despatched abroad immediately after the wedding, her husband’s only role in the story is to permit (or stymie) other romantic possibilities. She relishes the unvarnished manners of literary men ‘past the meridian of life, and of a philosophic turn’; and is moved by an unprepossessing but sensitive invalid, Henry, and his passionate embraces. ‘Have I desires implanted in me only to make me miserable?’ she asks: ‘can I listen to the cold dictates of prudence, and bid my tumultuous passions cease to vex me?’ Nowhere is adultery defended in so many words, but the implication is that feeling rather than convention is the honest guide to conduct. Sensibility, ‘the most exquisite feeling of which the human soul is capable’, is not to be tarnished by the slur of gross sensuality. Published three years after it was written,
Mary
was Wollstonecraft’s first attempt to debate out loud the ambiguities of female identity, its perils and possibilities. Her later didactic writings suggest that she drew back from this endorsement of passion as a potential solution or course of action.

On her return from Lisbon, Mary found her school in complete disarray, and her financial difficulties parlous; and, partly to relieve her financial plight, she penned
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life
(1787). Covering such topics as ‘Moral Discipline’, ‘Artificial Manners’, ‘Boarding-Schools’ and ‘On the Treatment of Servants’, this short book reveals the profound influence of Locke’s educational thinking
on her conception of moral discipline and how to inculcate it. Parents had to ensure that ‘reason should cultivate and govern those instincts which are implanted in us to render the path of duty pleasant – for if they are not governed they will run wild; and strengthen the passions which are ever endeavouring to obtain dominion – I mean
vanity and self-love
’. Girls must be made resilient in the face of life’s inevitable vicissitudes: there would be no shortage of them. Her later anthology,
The Female Reader; Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse; Selected from the Best Writers and Disposed under Proper Heads; For the Improvement of Young Women
(1789), taught similar sternly improving lessons.

Until then, Wollstonecraft’s writings had mostly been of a moral hue, but Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790) infuriated her, and her rapidly penned rejoinder,
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
, exposed it as a self-serving parade of rhetoric from a man blighted with a ‘mortal antipathy to reason’. Wollstonecraft’s Burke was infatuated with Marie-Antoinette (whom she considered devoid equally of virtue and sense), besotted with rank, contemptuous of the people and silent about the oppressive laws which compounded their misery.