MIA > Archive > Draper > Draper > Women & Class
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While the French Revolution was going through the paroxysms of 1793, and while the first militant women’s movement in world history was fighting for life, one of the foreigners then living in Paris in the midst of the events was none other than Mary Wollstonecraft.
Her Vindication of the Rights of Women had been published in England in early 1792, and it had already appeared in French translation when she arrived in Paris in December of that year. From the mansion in which she was staying, she could see the king brought past on his way to trial; at the end of October 1793 she read in the papers that the women’s societies were banned; and she was herself engaged in writing a history of the Revolution.
At this moment in history there was a confrontation, it would seem, between the Vindicator of women’s rights, who is regularly celebrated nowadays as the wellspring of feminism, and the militant women of Paris, who were in fact engaged in the first movement for women’s rights. It is the sort of confrontation that historians like to imagine: What would Lincoln have said about Reconstruction? What would Julius Caesar have thought of Napoleon’s campaigns?
What actually happened is something of an anticlimax: with one exception, Wollstonecraft paid no attention whatever to the women’s issues and movements of the Revolution, and appeared to be personally unconcerned. Of the remarkable women who were then fighting for and exercising women’s rights in France biographers have been unable to find any mention whatever in Wollstonecraft’s writings public or private, in articles or letters about the events swirling around her.
There was no mention by Wollstonecraft even of the notorious Olympe de Gouges; no mention of the women, like Etta Palm, who were collaborating with Wollstonecraft’s own Girondin friends; no mention of even the most respectable figures, like Mme. Robert-Keralio. Not that she was unconcerned about all aspects, if the level was high enough; for we find that when the Assembly’s education committee, on which Condorcet was active, invited her to contribute a paper on women’s education, she worked on it, though it seems it was never delivered. Her closest French friend was Mme. Roland, who, though opposed to feminist views, was as well-acquainted as anybody with everything going on. No one can believe that her silence was due to ignorance.
There was one exception, we said; and it proves the rule. The silence was broken in her book on the French Revolution itself, of which she wrote and published the first volume only. It goes up only to the time of the so-called Women’s March on Versailles, which we described in Chapter 1. What it shows is that Wollstonecraft was a savage, indeed bloodthirsty, enemy of the women’s movement.
It will not detract from the honor due to her as a pioneer of feminism if we tell the whole truth about her social views – for the first time.
This book appeared in 1794 as An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. It ends with the removal of the king and the Assembly from Versailles back to Paris (October 1789) as a consequence of the Women’s March, which is discussed at very great length. It is a thoroughly political-ideological work, not merely a narrative of events. The narrative, what there is of it, is often overwhelmed by her accompanying criticism of the historical actors, and by her exposition of what they should have done in accordance with her views.
There is no other work in which the sociopolitical views of the author are exposed half so clearly. It casts a fierce light backwards on the ideological context of the earlier book about women’s rights, the Vindication of 1792.
Her major biographers, Tomalin and Flexner, are frankly puzzled by the book on the Revolution, and therefore give it scant attention. Both of these biographers are naturally taken aback by the blatant passage that savagely condemns the Women’s March on Versailles in October, but they solve the problem of explaining it to the reader by refraining from presenting it to the reader in the first place. Here, for example, is some of what Wollstonecraft wrote:
[The march] consisted mostly of market women, and the lowest refuse of the streets, women who had thrown off the virtues of one sex without having power to assume more than the vices of the other ... [T]hey were strictly speaking a mob, affixing all the odium to the appellation it can possibly import; and not to be confounded with the honest multitude, who took the Bastille. – In fact, such a rabble has seldom been gathered together ...
They were “a gang of thieves,” “a set of monsters,” “criminals,” senseless “brutes,” “assassins,” and so on – for several pages. In other words, they were “hyenas in petticoats”: the edifying epithet that Horace Walpole notoriously applied to Wollstonecraft herself. (One can set up a socio-mathematical proportion: if we designate the Versailles women as VW , then VW : MW = MW : HW.)
Flexner quotes only the first sentence given above, and calls it “incredible” and “unperceptive.” Tomalin, who quotes none of it, says the condemnation is “inexplicably ferocious.” Inexplicable? Both biographers plainly assume that Wollstonecraft should have been sympathetic with the women demonstrators, and that her venomous hostility to their enterprise is a mystery. They also imply that the “incredible” and “inexplicable” opinion constitutes an isolated remark by Wollstonecraft. This is completely false, as even a fast reading of the history would show.
Wollstonecraft’s “ferocious” condemnation would have been less inexplicable if one understood the frame of mind in which she went to France. To be sure, she went as a “radical” (that is, liberal) sympathizer with the Revolution, exuding praises and phrases about its “philosophical” ideals, which reappear in the 1794 book by the bushel. She certainly would have been delighted with the Revolution if it had limited itself to orations on ideals; what she could not handle was the reality of a social struggle to realize ideals by means of unseating Her Kind of People, that is, the classes whose God-given mission to rule she never questioned. After all, the Vindication never gave the slightest countenance to subversive conduct on the part of exploited women or anyone else; on the contrary it squarely directed its appeal to the clemency of the male powers-that-be. Her biographers had no right to expect sympathy for subversives and seditionists. She had never expressed sympathy for revolutionary action, and if she reacted to a real revolution with antirevolutionary hostility, it is not she but her biographers who are being “unperceptive.”
But Wollstonecraft’s book went beyond mere anti-revolutionary malice. We must fill out our description by noting contents which the biographers do not even hint at.
In the first place, her condemnations of “incredible” ferocity apply to much more than revolutionary action. For example, take her condemnations of the French nation in toto. The “complete depravity” of the French people is not only repeated dozens of times, it is her basic explanation for everything that happens. There is a passage condemning the whole nation for “disgusting conceit and wretched egotism ... [and] imbecility” that is almost raving in its intensity. The chauvinism of her constant smug comparisons with the English is obsessive. And not only the French are systematically derogated: “we are compelled to remark, that flagrant follies and atrocious crimes have been more common under the governments of modern Europe, than in any of the ancient nations, if we except the Jews.”
If the French as a whole are depraved imbeciles, the women are the worst. Almost every reference to women is a slap. ‘Effeminate’ and ‘effeminacy’ are repeatedly used as standard cusswords for the depraved French or the aristocracy; indeed, “a variety of causes have so effeminated reason, that the French may be considered as a nation of women.” Invective can go no further.
The obloquy she heaps on the French is not limited to the workingwomen of the October march on Versailles. The lower classes in general are routinely blackguarded, often in brackets with the aristocracy: “All lived by plunder ... Thus the rich necessarily became robbers, and the poor, thieves” – and so on. It is the city poor that she execrates particularly; in comparison, the peasant mobs are virtually excused: Paris mobs “lift up their reptile heads,” but rioting villagers are merely driven by “rich exuberance.” She points with special horror to the “associations of men” arising due to “large work-shops.”
The class conception of society which produces this red-eyed view of France is not left to conjecture; Wollstonecraft spells it out for us. The trouble is that in France the nobility formed an aloof caste “whilst in England they intermingled with the commercial men” who were just as rich. “This monied interest, from which political improvement first emanates, was not yet formed in France” – hence the unrelieved depravity. She states the underlying theory: “It is the nature of man, either in a savage state or living in society, to protect his property; and it is wise in a government to encourage this spirit.” Everything depends on the interests of the propertied classes.
The trouble in France, then, is that the “commercial” propertied classes are not dominant; or as later pens would put it, the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie is not in power. Wollstonecraft’s concerns about women are entirely within the framework of this all-compassing issue, and subordinate to it.
Not that Wollstonecraft, in Paris, found herself completely insensible to the discreet charms of the nobility. Despite her bitter condemnations of the (as yet unbourgeoisified) aristocracy, we eventually discover, in her book, that “Yet some few really learned the true art of living.” These words introduce a dithyramb on the idyllic family life of a certain “rational few” (whom Tomalin justly identifies as meaning Mme. Roland’s circle). “In the summer, when they retired to their mansion houses, they spread gladness around, and partook of the amusements of the peasantry, whom they visited with paternal solicitude.” Happy masters, happy hinds! She wrote this in the Paris mansion house which friends (no peasants they) had put at her disposal together with its servant staff, whose spirit of obedience she found wanting. To continue with her musings: “It is, perhaps, in a state of comparative idleness – pursuing employments not absolutely necessary to support life, that the finest polish is given to the mind, and those personal graces, which are instantly felt, but cannot be described.”
It is worth mentioning that there is a similar remark in her subsequently written (and unfinished) novel The Wrongs of Women, put in the mouth of a not unsympathetic character. He says he did not like the large towns in America, where wealth was used only for the pleasure of ostentatious display – “for the cultivation of the fine arts, or literature, had not introduced into the first circles that polish of manners which renders the rich so essentially superior to the poor in Europe.”
In revolutionary France, Wollstonecraft was also willing to exempt the king from her wholesale condemnations. In letters she drips sympathy for the sad lot of the poor king and queen, hustled about by the rabble. In her book we are invited to be overcome with “compassion” for Louis, for “we sympathize with the man in adversity, whose prosperity was pestiferous.” There is an extensive passage about the king’s “courage,” “sagacity,” “instinct of propriety,” and good will for the people, and much suggestion that his misfortunes were due to the sinister “cabal” of advisors despite his virtues.
This is how Wollstonecraft orients with respect to the social forces of the Revolution. It gives us the first step toward explaining the “inexplicable.”
Wollstonecraft’s political views, expressed at very great length, are of a piece with her social orientation.
On the personal level, the unbridled hatred she feels for the majority of the revolutionary Assembly breaks out in constant imprecations, in “ferocious” language: for example, “a race of monsters, the most flagitious that ever alarmed the world by the murder of the innocents” (the innocents are not identified but are presumably the nobles). They are “sanguinary brutes,” “those monsters who are meditating the violation of the sacred ties of honour and humanity...” These pleasantries dot her “reflections” on the Assembly majority of 1789 (which, remember, was still far from being Jacobin-dominated). But it is not always easy to know who or what she is cursing at, in a given passage. When she refers clearly to the leftists, they are “the popular promoters of anarchy, to serve their private interest,” and so on (as distinct from her friend Mme. Roland’s circle, who are interested only in the Good of Humanity).
Her serious view is that the Revolution already went to a monstrously ultraradical extreme early in 1789, and that the October march on Versailles by the women turned the revolution into “anarchy.” The basic mistake was this: after the fall of the Bastille, the course should have been very slow, slowly effecting gradual reforms that took away a minimum of power from the throne.
This position is repeated over and over (the repetitive style is characteristic of the book). She especially condemns any wish to attack the system at the roots: “instead of looking for gradual improvement, letting one reform calmly produce another, they [the people] seemed determined to strike at the root of all their misery at once,” with “hasty measures.” Anyway, the aristocratic system was “rapidly wearing itself out” by itself. “But ... the misery of France has originated from the folly or art of men, who have spurred the people on too fast; tearing up prejudices by the root, which they should have permitted to die gradually away.” The evil was that the people were demagogically led to “expect the most unbridled freedom, detesting all wholesome restraints.” The terms ‘citoyen,’ ‘égalité,’ ‘sans-culottes’ were devised “in order to cajole the minds of the vulgar.”
Now it is obvious that many others shared this predilection for reforms that changed as little as possible, as if France could remain stuck in a half-way position; but we must stress that Wollstonecraft attacks most of the French political spectrum that started from precisely that premise. She has a very lengthy denunciation of the Assembly for depriving the king of too much power in the proposed constitution. If the king had been allowed an absolute veto, not merely a suspensive veto, he would have been willing to “submit patiently.” The political simple-mindedness of this position is not the point at issue; rather, it must be understood that Wollstonecraft thus separated herself even from the pro-royalist moderates of the Assembly. Even Mirabeau, who supported the absolute veto, is later criticized by Wollstonecraft for being too radical.
Another long polemic by Wollstonecraft advocates an upper chamber (Senate) to check the lower, and thus enforce only gradual change. Violent change favors measures that are not wise but merely popular, “being adapted to the foibles of the great body of the community.” The aim that Wollstonecraft sets, in effect, is how best to frustrate the great body of the people. Leaders of “popular governments” mislead men most easily by dwelling on “the equality of man”; they take advantage of “this infirmity of our nature” and prove destructive to society or “end in the most dreadful anarchy.” Indeed, freedom of the press grows “licentious,” that is, the Assembly was unwise in not curbing it. The trouble with the Assembly majority is that, with overweening arrogance, it wants to institute a better system than the English or Americans have done:
And this self-sufficiency has produced those dreadful outrages, and attacks, made by the anarchists of that country, on personal liberty, property, and whatever else society holds sacred.
Now, perhaps, we can better appreciate Wollstonecraft’s horror at the Women’s March to Versailles, and why she devotes the last three chapters of her book to this monstrous event and its fearful consequences. (Yes, three chapters, and not merely an “inexplicable” sentence or two!)
These three chapters are filled with warnings against revolutionary changes such as we have already quoted. Another element is introduced: the whole episode was a sinister conspiracy by the Duke of Orleans to get the king and queen killed by herding the women-monsters to Versailles together with “hired assassins.” The fact that these women were “famished” is only mentioned incidentally in connection with the plot. (Eventually she remarks: true, there is no evidence for this theory of conspiracy, which proves what evil intriguers these French are!) One can easily imagine who stuffed this mishmash into her head.
In these chapters Wollstonecraft goes from mere invective to new heights of vituperation against the women-monsters; but, without repeating, there are four new points that can be usefully made.
(1) Part of the “proof” that the whole affair was whipped up by “designing persons” is her argument that independent movement by women is unthinkable:
That a body of women should put themselves in motion to demand relief of the king, or to remonstrate with the assembly respecting their tardy manner of forming a constitution, is scarcely probable ...
A “body of women ... in motion”: this is the women’s movement, and if Wollstonecraft argues that it cannot exist, she means it cannot exist within the framework of her views. Whatever her feminism is, it is in fundamental opposition to a women’s movement.
(2) When Wollstonecraft relates how Marie Antoinette was actually forced to flee from her bedroom when the women-monsters invaded the palace, her solicitude for the poor queen reaches such supernal heights that pure poetry results (perhaps explaining the odd syntax):
The sanctuary of repose, the asylum of care and fatigue, the chaste temple of a woman, I consider the queen only as one, the apartment where she consigns her senses to the bosom of sleep, folded in its arms forgetful of the world, was violated with murderous fury ... Yet these brutes were permitted triumphantly to escape ...
She regards the queen as only another woman, our author says, while she curses at the women of the people who disturbed “the chaste temple of a woman.” It would be hard to find a passage in political literature that more blatantly reflects internalized class hypocrisy.
(3) Wollstonecraft lengthily laments that the soldiers allowed the “criminals” to escape, since impunity will encourage their evil souls to commit “still more atrocious crimes” and encourage “the brutality of their sanguinary dispositions.” And the Assembly was just as remiss: it should “have smothered in embryo that spirit of rebellion and licentiousness, which [was] beginning to appear in the metropolis ...” whereas they “permitted that gang of assassins to regain their dens ...” She plainly thinks there should have been a blood-bath of repression directed against the women.
(4) Most important is Wollstonecraft’s denunciation of the Assembly for acquiescing in the transfer of the king to Paris as a result of the women’s march. By yielding to the mob it furthered the coming anarchy.
It is in reality from this epoch ... that the commencement of the reign of anarchy may be fairly dated.
The Assembly “surrendered their authority” and went “into the heart of a city, which could be suddenly agitated” by “any desperate or factious leader of the multitude.” It “almost surpasses belief,” she cries. The volume ends soon after.
Wollstonecraft’s cry of incredulity is, as we have seen, matched by her biographers’ opinion that it is “incredible” that she should have held opinions like this. If Wollstonecraft not surprisingly understood little about the Revolution, her biographers clearly understand little about the workings of her mind, social consciousness, and political views. There is a reason for this.
To begin with Wollstonecraft in France, as we have just done, is to begin with her limitations. This would be unfair if her pioneer contribution to feminist consciousness were less celebrated; but there is little danger in that direction. Especially in the last two decades there has been a flood of biographical and historical literature, from full-length biographies to articles; whereas the revolutionary women she contemned have been pushed into the shadows. In part it is a question of turning the helm the other way. In any case what concerns us is not the fact of her limitations but their nature and source. This too has been pushed into the shadows.
Mary Wollstonecraft was brought up in a social limbo which has no established sociological tag because it is seldom distinguished from the basic counterposition of bourgeoisie and working class, with the old ruling class of the landed gentry in process of fusing into the former. This limbo is the uneasy twilight zone between two societal worlds – the shining world of the affluent bourgeoisie with its aristocratic partners and allies, on the one hand, and on the other the dark abyss of the working poor. This zone of betweeners is alien to both worlds. Its inhabitants fear the abyss above all – the slide down into the hopeless world of propertyless labor; they fear it like sin. They long for the upper regions above them with a longing that is the very hope of salvation. It is no use muttering the label “petty-bourgeoisie,” which is too restricted, for reasons not germane here; the limbo is a junkyard of social fragments, one of them called the shabby-genteel.
Naturally the limbo took shape as the bourgeoisie itself came to term; and so Mary Wollstonecraft’s case, coming at the threshold of the nineteenth century, was one of the earlier prominent examples. It is a very clear case.
Her paternal grandfather, whose will overshadowed the family for two generations, was a successful capitalist who rose from among the master weavers, one of the few to make his way up from that decaying trade. He left a third of his estate to Mary’s father, and another third to her brother, who eventually became a lawyer and moved out and up. Both windfalls eluded Mary herself; for her father used the money in an attempt to become a gentleman farmer, and as he lost his money he steadily went down in the world. Still, during the upper phase of the family’s descent, it knew what it was to have servants. Her mother, who came from an Irish family of genteel status based on money gained in the wool trade, even talked about employing a governess for her daughter, this being a necessary adjunct of gentry condition. For a period they moved in the same social circles as friends who were really rich, and maintained a suitably high style of life. As the family slipped in the social scale, in proportion to the slippage of its ready cash, it moved from one district to another, putting down no roots.
As Mary grew up, she was a Young Lady to some, an impoverished inferior to others: one of the social-schizos of the limbo. The balance kept shifting toward the lower end of the scale, nearer the lip of the abyss. By the time she reached eighteen, she moved inexorably into one of the three main occupations available to females who (1) were not so declassed as to have to work with their hands, but (2) were not so well-off as not to have to work at all. That is, she took employment as companion to a wealthy widow. Then, for a while, she and two sisters carried on the second of these three occupations: work in a small teaching establishment. At 26 she moved to the third occupation: governess in a wealthy household.
So far, the characteristic course of the people of the limbo. But at 28 her talents made it possible for her to slip out of the class structure altogether by one of the few side doors: she became a professional writer. Thus she entered that parallel social formation of inside Outsiders which accompanied the development of the bourgeoisie as the remora accompanies the shark: the intelligentsia.
One of the main virtues of Tomalin’s biography is that she does not turn her heroine into an icon. In this spirit, the book provides interesting glimpses of the specific sort of class feeling that informed Wollstonecraft. This may sometimes appear as snobbery, but its essence is not lofty superiority but rather apprehension and insecurity (the Angst of the Abyss). Tomalin uses the bad word ‘snobbery’ only in connection with Wollstonecraft’s tendency to adopt an air that “looked down on the manners of social superiors.” This was the self-defensive side.
There was another side. When her father took a second wife, Mary’s hostility to the newcomer was expressed by regarding her as something like “an artful kind of upper servant.” She was embarrassed by her sister’s marrying a mere boat-builder. When, in the Vindication, she complains justifiably about the narrow occupational possibilities open to women, she lists the occupations of companion, schoolteacher, and governess, and then adds that others are “certainly not very respectable.” Other occupations probably meant working with one’s hands at some “menial” employment, like “milliners and mantua-makers,” who are “reckoned the next class” just above prostitutes. The reckoning was, of course, by her as well as other respectable women.
While she was governess in the wealthy household of Lord and Lady Kingsborough, she wrote her sister, with hands-high virtuousness: “Thank heaven I am not a Lady of Quality.” That was the defensive side of snobbery. It would have been demeaning even to write, Thank heaven I am not a seamstress – or a scullery maid – or a spinning-jenny attendant ... For that would be the world of the abyss.
As far as socioeconomic roles go, this limbo has been marginal, but it has been the incubator of a whole race of bourgeois critics of society prominent in the intellectual history especially of the nineteenth century. In large part the essential characteristic of this type is given by their aim, which is to renovate or refurbish the rulers; the people in control are taken to task for not being worthy of the scepter; they should be reformed so as to be fit to rule.
This intelligentsia’s style may vary from soft-spoken admonishments to fiery philippics. As the spectrum moves to the latter end, as language grows more indignant, these missionaries to the bourgeoisie may get mistaken for real radicals, mistaken even by themselves. But it is precisely the roots of society that they have no wish to tear up. They would prune branches, fluff out blossoms, weed out rotten shoots, and improve the breed. Some of the cases are easy to recognize, like that other historian of the French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle, who made rebellious noises up to 1848; some are more disguised, like the alleged French “syndicalist” Georges Sorel. The same incubator later went on to produce figures who advocated a kind of anti-capitalism, like H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw; but Wollstonecraft was an early model and cannot be mistaken for the late Fabian model.
The author of the Vindication acted out her missionary reform role with respect to the contemporaneous English women of fashion and leisure. Her role was to make them worthy of being accepted as co-equal partners of the master class, fit to share the rule. It was an aim that had no relevance whatever for the majority of women, that is, the women of the abyss. This is written large all over Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women.
The social mark of the limbo defines the limitations of her pioneering tract about women’s rights. All that has to be understood is which women she was writing about.
It has been observed often enough that the Vindication is intensely personal in its expression of its theme – most personal in its generalities. Apropos of the question of female employment just mentioned, Wollstonecraft poignantly notes how sensitive the declassée has become:
But as women educated like gentlewomen are never designed for the humiliating situation which necessity sometimes forces them to fill, these situations are considered in the light of a degradation; and they know little of the human heart, who need to be told that nothing so painfully sharpens sensibility as such a fall in life. [222] [1]
And elsewhere she conjures up the sad picture of girls with inadequate education who are “left by their parents without any provision” and depend on “the bounty of their brothers,” even though they have an “equal right” to the family fortune. (This is a good example of the reformulation of autobiography as philosophy.) This “humiliating situation,” she goes on to say, is bad enough even when it remains comfortable, but when the brother marries, the sister becomes an unwelcome intruder. The author then cries: “Who can recount the misery, which many unfortunate beings, whose minds and bodies are equally weak, suffer in such situations – unable to work, and ashamed to beg?” [111] This is the nightmare of the betweener.
From this vantage point, Wollstonecraft’s view of society is one-way: up. Although she constantly refers to her subject with the common phrase describing womankind as “one half the human race,” the large majority of this half of the human race is invisible to her. The word ‘women’ in her vocabulary means the women of the Classes, not the Masses. A few examples will suffice, for this mode of thought is evident on every other page.
On the first page of the book (after the Dedication) we find that “The conduct and manners of women” are “not in a healthy state” because they sacrifice strength and usefulness to beauty. What “women” do this? It is an absurd statement to make about the women of the laboring classes, weighed down and worn out by the same work as the men, plus the added burdens of household tasks and family raising. She writes on the next page: “The civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love ...” She could not be thinking of the mass of women who were being recruited into the factories as cheap labor by the new industrialists. It is the industrialists’ wives alone that exist for her, and the women whom they envy.
“Women,” she writes, “live, as it were, by their personal charms,” as distinct from men, who perform a task in society. In actuality, of course, most women lived (and died) doing much of the tasks of society on a par with men. They lived and died not only in the fields and on the machines but on the gallows (one of the most non-sexist institutions of the day), for women were hanged without discrimination for more than two hundred offences, including simple theft, even if they were pregnant. Wollstonecraft can see only “personal charms.”
Men, wrote Wollstonecraft, try to keep “women” in a state of childhood. [50] Nothing could be more cruelly false, if one is really thinking of women. The women of the people, contemporaries reported, were already looking like faded crones in their twenties, exhausted by hard labor and regular pregnancies to keep the labor supply up. The truth indeed was the other way round: childhood was treated as womanhood, for children’s cheap labor was preferred by the mill and mine owners.
The set of Wollstonecraft’s mentality becomes even plainer when she specifies that she is speaking of “the whole sex,” as she does more than once. Take a passage in which she laments that women are preoccupied with frivolities, “running from pleasure to pleasure,” and that, since they “seek for pleasure as the main purpose of existence,” “the love of pleasure may be said to govern them all.” All. The highly moral complaint ends with this:
In short, women, in general, as well as the rich of both sexes, have acquired all the follies and vices of civilization, and missed the useful fruit. It is not necessary for me always to premise that [I] speak of the condition of the whole sex, leaving exceptions out of the question. [104–05]
Needless to say, the “exceptions” are women like herself – not the women of the impoverished smallholders and tenant farmers, who when not working in the fields might be employed in the manor house washing the lady’s fine linens. The ladies were the “women in general.”
Today this may sound like an indictment of Wollstonecraft; but it is not so intended. It is a manifestation of a not uncommon type of bourgeois mentality. To say this is to condemn not Wollstonecraft but her uncritical celebrants, who refuse to take her for what she is: not a pioneer of feminism in general but of a specific bourgeois feminism.
Let us fill in some distinctive features of this type.
Wollstonecraft is not insensitive to class distinctions. On the contrary, at several points she undertakes a class analysis so openly presented that it might be damned as “Marxist” today. She even offers a class analysis of breast-feeding: it is wealth, she says, that makes women spurn breast-feeding because their only aim is “to preserve their beauty.” [214] Such class analyses were common in the early literature of the bourgeoisie.
It is when she claims to be taking account of class differences that her class-blinkered view becomes plainer – something like what happened when she claimed to be speaking of “the whole sex.” Her class-analytical view is limited to the following pattern: (1) society divides between the Classes and the Masses, and the Classes divide only between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy; (2) in this counterposition, she lines up with the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy, women included, all other women outside these two upper classes being written off as usual.
Her Introduction makes the same point that I have made here about the restricted use of the word “women,” only she does this within her own class framework. That is, she demonstrates that certain other writers are really only speaking of the women of the upper-class rich when they say “women.” They address themselves to “women,” she points out, but their advice is really applicable to ladies. (The ironic italics are hers.) In contrast, she states, “I pay particular attention to those in the middle class [2], because they appear to be in the most natural state.” She attacks the artificiality and false refinement of the women of the rich, which corrupt society. “As a class of mankind they have the strongest claim to pity; the education of the rich tends to render them vain and helpless ...” [33]
This is a straightforward expression of a pro-bourgeois viewpoint, an open declaration of hostility to the old ruling class above the bourgeoisie – the “superior ranks” of society, in her usual phrase. Thus Wollstonecraft announces that she purposes “taking a separate view of the different ranks of society, and of the moral character of women, in each.” This aim of differentiated class analysis is carried out most fully in Chapter 9, according to her lights, but it crops up in other places too.
The context is always a class attack on the aristocracy as a corruptive force: the corrupter of its own women and of the bourgeois women who model themselves on it. At the end of Chapter 3, she argues that “the superior ranks of life” have seldom produced “a man of superior abilities, or even common acquirements,” because they are born into an “unnatural” state.
The human character has ever been formed by the employments the individual, or class, pursues; and if the faculties are not sharpened by necessity, they must remain obtuse. The argument may fairly be extended to women; for, seldom occupied by serious business, the pursuit of pleasure gives that insignificancy to their character which renders the society of the great so insipid. (The italics for great reflect irony.)
We see in this passage that “women” are defined by “the pursuit of pleasure.” This is likewise true in several other places: “Pleasure is the business of woman’s life ...” “Confined then in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves ...” [97–98] Incidentally, there are perhaps two or three sentences in the whole book in which the laboring poor are mentioned as existing; one of these is even complimentary about the devotion of women “in low life” to their families. [126, 220, 251]
This question gets serious discussion in Chapter 9, which is entitled Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society. She begins by indicting “property” understood in a limited way à la Rousseau:
From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind [that is, to the intelligentsia].
The main indictment, however, is of landed property (the class property of the gentry); it still dominates her thought (if not economic reality) as the only “real” property. “Property” evokes the old ruling class as “money” evokes the new. Her very next sentence links the indictment to “the most polished society,” previously identified as the society of the hereditary and titled rich. In fact, on the same page, “hereditary wealth and titles” are further linked to “property” as the poisoning factor of this world. (But the wealth earned by hard-working businessmen, like Mary’s grandfather, is not evil.)
While the aristocracy is an element of corruption and empoisonment, the bourgeoisie is (as we have seen) “in the most natural state.” It is not one of the “unnatural distinctions established in society”; it is the natural class distinction. But Wollstonecraft is not simply a vulgar apologist for the bourgeoisie; she is critical of this new, raw ruling class. She is not critical of its right to rule, but of its fitness to rule as presently constituted. This is why it needs to be reformed along the proper philosophical lines. And at this juncture we must remind that her point of view is not wholly from within the bourgeoisie itself, but rather from the standpoint of the parallel formation, the betweeners’ limbo, and particularly the intelligentsia. This is what she writes:
One class presses on another; for all are aiming to procure respect on account of their property: and property, once gained, will procure the respect due only to talent and virtue.
If one had to choose a passage from the body of English social thought which most frankly asserts the claim of the intelligentsia within the existing class system, this might be it.
It asserts that “respect” – which of course includes proper rewards – is due only to those attributes which happen to be the special distinctions of the intellectual claimants. Talent and virtue – intellectual and moral value – may also distinguish the good hard-working bourgeois, who therefore are also entitled to respect and rewards; but the formula cuts out entirely the “idle” class, who need no talent except being well-born and whose way of life undermines virtue.
Thus Wollstonecraft not only draws the class line between the “natural” class rulers and “unnatural distinctions,” but among the “natural” recipients of respect and rewards it points straight to the bourgeoisie’s companion formation, the intelligentsia. What better class theory could there be? – for a propertyless and moneyless intellectual laborer in limbo who is hanging onto the lower rungs of those who claim talent and virtue.
It is in this context that Wollstonecraft lays down the grandiose generality that “There must be more equality established in society.” [213] We must not suppose that this means what it may seem to say to modern ears; for that would unfairly convict Wollstonecraft of hypocrisy. She was not demanding equality of rights for all women, or even giving lip service to the view that women of the Masses were relevant to the “equality” she was concerned with. It would be unfair to expect from her a social radicalism that was far from her convictions or even comprehension. She wrote that there must be more equality – and she was understandably concerned especially with “more” equality for the social formation for which she had trained herself.
She is quite aware of what we called a side door by which the intelligentsia could get outside of the class system; her term is a “loophole”:
Still there are some loopholes out of which a man may creep, and dare to think and act for himself; but for a woman it is a herculean task ... [217]
She did manage to find the “loophole” by which to creep out of, or escape from, the class cul de sac which her family situation had boxed her into; and she is a hundred times right in recognizing that she had performed a herculean task – by dint of talent and virtue. So far, so good for her.
Yet so class-egocentric is her social viewpoint that she works herself up to the astonishing statement that the women of her own bourgeois world are the most oppressed of all! She actually writes: “The most respectable women are the most oppressed.” [223]
Was she so totally unaware of the life-crushing oppression of hundreds of thousands of her sisters among the half of the human race? – like the good Germans who lived around the corner from Dachau and managed to remain oblivious to what was going on, they claimed? Perhaps; there may be no limits to the capacity of the bourgeois feminist to complain self-righteously of her own oppression while turning a blind eye to the oppression of the majority of womankind. Sisterhood may be powerful, as the feminist slogan has it, but class blinkers are more powerful.
The most respectable woman, continues Wollstonecraft, is “the woman who earns her own bread,” but – “I sigh to think how few women aim at attaining this respectability by withdrawing from the giddy whirl of pleasure ...” How few – only the great majority! Even the simple thought of women who work fails to turn her eyes to the Invisible Women of the masses. By women who work she is thinking solely of her own type of dropout from the “giddy whirl.” She virtually says so, a second time, by making clear she is thinking of women who might aspire to business and professional vocations – “who might have practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop.”
These “respectable” women (“the most oppressed”) aspire to manage the shop; the female drudges who will wear themselves out by working there are the Invisible Women. In more modern parlance, Wollstonecraft speaks and thinks as the champion of the aspiring business and professional career woman, who has essentially the same attitude toward the mass of the female sex as have the male exploiters in the dominant society. She is just as determined to get her rights over their backs.
In celebrating her pioneer achievements, we should not go beyond the truth. Her pioneer contribution was a Vindication of the Rights of Certain Women She was not concerned about “one half of the human race,” despite the feminist rhetoric, but about her sector of the upper tenth. Her plea was that the natural masters of society should accept their women into the ruling circles as partners. She belongs on the list of those reformers who importuned the ruling classes to reform themselves in order to be fit to rule.
This is the meaning of bourgeois feminism, and Wollstonecraft was its great herald. That is honor enough for anyone.
1. The page number in brackets refers to the edition listed in the Bibliography, for readers who may want to follow the argument in Wollstonecraft’s book.
2. “Middle class” here means the bourgeoisie; it is seen as being in the middle between the aristocracy and the lower orders. Wollstonecraft usually uses ‘the rich’ to mean the old landed ruling class, even though the bourgeoisie was rich too. That is, in her usage ‘the rich’ means the idle rich, those who are merely rich, who do nothing for their wealth, unlike the hard-working capitalists. She eschews the term ‘aristocracy.’
Last updated on 12 September 2020