Women, Resistance and Revolution (6 page)

But a woman Napoleon disliked with a special intensity, who combined everything he most detested in revolutionary intellectual women, survived with exuberant persistence. Mme de Staël lived through the various regimes of revolution to wage a personal literary guerrilla war against Bonaparte. She glibly claimed to be non-political, but in her salons young men laughed at him, and in such novels as
Delphine
and
Corinne
women with a high opinion of their own superiority conflicted with a society that would not allow them self-expression. She twisted natural sensibility into an argument for women’s rights. Mme de Staël used Rousseau just as she used everyone else – to effect. She extracted what was convenient and ignored the rest. But Napoleon’s Civil Code established the rest. The emperor must have felt he’d put women firmly back in their place.

However, in the context of this same revolution a remarkable woman produced a remarkable book. Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication
was one of those books which provides such an intense synthesis of the past, such a brilliant condensation and expression of the experience of the moment, that it changes permanently the bases of people’s thinking in the future. Written in six weeks it is frequently discursive. She advances sometimes by means of great circular detours. Sometimes you can feel almost physically the painful difficulty she had in clearing a path and seeing straight. It is not so much
that the ideas had never been put before but the particular way she combines them together. This new way of seeing was made possible by a peculiar interaction of personal and political events: her own painful experience in childhood, pity and identification with her mother forced into poverty by a violent and drunken father; her rejection by her lover, the father of her child, Imlay, who left her to survive as she could; her pride despite her desperate wanting for him: ‘You may render me unhappy; but you cannot make me contemptible in my own eyes.’
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Social disgrace, a suicide attempt, yet her amazing emergence unbroken. In her writing warmth and emotional sensuality – ‘I cannot live without loving, and loving leads to madness’
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– mingle with a new kind of dignity in a woman, self-respect despite society, lack of illusion from a group surrounded by mystification. ‘I long for a little peace and independence.… I am not fond of grovelling.’
⁴

She belonged to the generation that exulted in 1789. She didn’t live to share the agony of disillusionment. But she experienced an apprehension which was to become familiar for later revolutionaries, even in ’93. ‘I can look beyond the evils of the moment, and do not expect muddied water to become clear before it has had time to stand; yet, even for the moment, it is the most terrific of sights, to see men vicious without warmth.’
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Like Wordsworth she recoiled from ‘the hissing factionalists’, but the new language and the new consciousness were deep inside her. Revolutionary thinking was not some new authority held by, for, or on behalf of others, sitting high on the tribune, to be curtseyed to. It was a means by which the oppressed themselves broke out of the system in which they were dominated. And being a woman, Mary Wollstonecraft applied the ideas of revolutionary men to the situation of women. In the
Vindication
she asked how a woman could reasonably be expected to co-operate unless she knew why she ought to be virtuous, and observed that, if men contended for their freedom and wanted to be allowed to judge for themselves respecting their own happiness, wasn’t it at once inconsistent and unjust of them to continue to subjugate women, even though they believed that they were thus acting in the women’s best interest. The assumption that the subordinated must themselves be judges of their own interest was accompanied with the assertion that arguments about their inadequacy for the task were merely the superior people’s justification
and defence. These ideas were common currency in the radical movement. So too was the ambition for the full development and growth of each individual. Mary Wollstonecraft in claiming for women ‘the virtues of humanity’
⁶
and protesting against a society which allowed them only ‘to procreate and rot’,
⁷
was simply extending radical ideas to the situation of women.

There is a crucial break though with earlier feminism. The French Revolution had taught her to think in terms of actual social movements. There is a new note in the
Vindication
: ‘I plead for my sex – not for myself.’
⁸
The conscious identification with women as a group is described by Godwin:

She considered herself as standing forth in defence of one half of the human species, labouring under a yoke which through all the records of time, had degraded them from the station of rational beings, and almost sunk them to the level of the brutes. She saw indeed that they were often attempted to be held in silken fetters, and bribed into the love of slavery; but the disguise and the treachery served only the more fully to confirm her opposition.
⁹

Wollstonecraft located the origin of women’s subordination in physical weakness. This was reinforced by culture and education. Men had used women ‘as alluring objects for a moment’
¹⁰
and women had acquiesced in this. She understands very well the process through which women of her class became accomplices in their own subordination. Taught by their mothers to practice cunning and show ‘outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety’,
¹¹
their privilege rested on complicity in an oppressive system. They had no memory of any alternative. Their history disclosed only marks of inferiority. She knew how strong the silken fetter of pleasing was. But what was to become of the woman when she ceased to be a source of pleasure for man, when she found her charms were ‘oblique sunbeams’ and ‘the summer’ had ‘passed and gone’.
¹²
She could only grow languid or look for other men. Gallantry was the man’s part. Mary hated gallantry. She knew the contempt it concealed. She could see so clearly the way in which women were ‘insulated’ and thus contained. ‘Stripped of the virtues that should clothe humanity they are decked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-lived tyranny.’

Believing with other radicals that human character was mainly
formed from environment, she not unreasonably extended this idea to women. The conclusion was the necessity of changing women’s environment. Rousseau’s ideas about the natural proclivities of little girls receive short shrift. ‘I have probably had an opportunity of observing more girls in their infancy than J.-J. Rousseau – and can recollect my own feelings and I have looked steadily around me.’ She concludes that the girl whose spirits ‘have not been damped by inactivity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always be a romp’.
¹³

Despite this, though, Mary Wollstonecraft, like Mme de Staël, owed a debt to Rousseau. She was greatly influenced by his ideas on naturalness and simplicity in child-rearing and education of the young. She believed in coeducation, exercise, gymnastics in the open air, botany, mechanics, astronomy, natural history, philosophy, history of religion and man, politics taught by conversation in the Socratic manner. These were radical proposals in the 1790s; they are radical still. There was, however, an important reservation. She introduced a separate education for the lower classes. At nine, boys and girls were steered off. These girls would learn plainwork and millinery rather than politics in the Socratic manner. The popular revolutionary implications of her thought cannot extend beyond her own class. In fact she is demanding an education to equip the bourgeois woman for an active part in industrial capitalism.

To do everything in an orderly manner is a most important precept, which women, who, generally speaking, receive only a disorderly kind of education, seldom attend to with that degree of exactness that men, who from their infancy are broken into method, observe. This negligent kind of guess-work, for what other epithet can be used to point out the random exertions of a sort of instinctive common sense, never brought to the test of reason, prevents their generalizing matters of fact – so they do today, what they did yesterday, merely because they did it yesterday.
¹⁴

Ironically, it is only by acquiring a bourgeois state of mind, submitting to the discipline of methodical and regular work, the exact and synchronized time-spirit, the rejection of custom, the delight in innovation, technological and intellectual, that women can cast off their traditional fetters. At this point Mary Wollstonecraft’s thinking locks. There are many aspects of her radicalism which are quite hostile to the way capitalism was already breaking humanity into
method. But she can only catch vague glimpses of an alternative, though she can cut right through Clarissa Harlowe’s dilemma, scoffing at the hypocritical morality of the world that criticized her, as if honour meant a woman was degraded merely because she lost her chastity. But she is fastened in her own dilemma: how to shatter a whole system of domination with no social basis for a movement of the oppressed. She knew education alone could not end the oppression of women because it could not be of a really different kind until ‘society be differently constituted’. She attempts an economic connection. The system of dividing property produced the corrupting dependence and tyranny of which the subjugation of women was only a part. She very tentatively claims for women a say in government. Not only is it inconceivable to her that the women of the people would demand democratic rights and emancipation, she is even cut off from women of her own kind. Mankind has claimed dignity – not woman. It is hard for Mary Wollstonecraft to feel proud of women despite her passionate longing to speak as part of a group. She mentions the occasional radical women like Catherine Macaulay who she wishes she had known. There were isolated clusters of her friends too, independent and courageous women, discussing revolutionary ideas. Again there was the circle of dissenting and progressive people who shared her hopes for a new society. But the loneliness comes through. To have an illegitimate child, to be a revolutionary, to write the
Vindication
, was in England in the 1790s to be desperately alone and cut off, socially, politically and emotionally.

Irony is frequently the weapon of isolated people facing impossible odds. Mary Wollstonecraft throws out peculiarly delicate and nonchalant ironies. From Sweden she wrote in a letter, ‘At supper my host told me bluntly that I was a woman of observation for I asked him men’s questions.’
¹⁵
Thus while Mary Wollstonecraft could observe so acutely the distress of bourgeois women, describing their nervous complaints, their faded wasted lives, be contemptuous of ameliorative measures, asylums and magdalens as remedies – ‘It is justice not charity that is wanting in the world’
¹⁶
– she falters when she tries to find the means of effecting the social change her analysis demands. Though she felt most female ‘follies’ came from the tyranny of men, she cannot conceive of women becoming the agents of their own liberation. She can only hope to convince reasonable men to assist in the emancipation of their companions. ‘Would men but
generously snap our chains and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience.’
¹⁷

The
Vindication
, often taken as the beginnings of feminism, was rather the important theoretical summation of bourgeois radical feminism still in the phase of moral exhortation, before there was either the possibility of a radical and socialist movement from below, to which the revolutionary feminist could relate, or a movement like that of suffragettes, of privileged women for equal rights with bourgeois man. If the man with revolutionary ideals in Britain felt painfully isolated when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, the woman who at once loved freedom and sympathized with revolution was doubly so. Old Corruption, grown big and fat in the period of reaction following the French Revolution, hated Mary Wollstonecraft. Characteristically she was attacked sexually as well as politically. An anonymous rhyme after her death remarked on Godwin’s biography of his wife:

William has penned a wagonload of stuff

And Mary’s life at last he needs must write,

Thinking her whoredoms were not known enough.
¹⁸

Her son-in-law Shelley, one who sought rational fellowship most earnestly, paid her a better tribute in
Queen Mab.
‘Can man be free, if woman be a slave?’ In
Prometheus Unbound
he imagined women ‘changed to all they dared not be’, able to ‘speak the wisdom once they could not think’.
¹⁹

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century small groups of radical men and women called into question not only political corruption but the economic basis of the society of mills, factories, steam-power, industry, competition and money-making they saw growing up around them in Britain. Their criticism was essentially moral. Society was evil because it denied the possibility of truly human social relations. It allowed only for distortion, destruction and deceit in the meetings of man with man, man with woman. Along with the ideas of freedom in government and freedom in work arose ideas of freedom in love.

Blake imagined the disappearance of:

A Religion of Chastity, forming a Commerce to sell Loves and with it,