Vindicating Paradoxes - Wilcox

Vindicating Paradoxes: Mary Wollstonecraft's "Woman"
Author(s): KIRSTIN R. WILCOX

Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 48, No. 3 (FALL 2009), pp. 447-467
Published by: Boston University
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KIRSTIN
R. WILCOX
Paradoxes:
Vindicating
Mary
"Woman"
Wollstonecraft's
S MARY
SIGNIFICANCE
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
FOR
INTELLECTUAL
HISTORY
grown, her salience for contemporary feminism has receded. The

burgeoning scholarship onWollstonecraft has documented her importance
for understanding the intellectual ferment of the 1790s, but ithas paradoxi
cally pushed the gender advocacy thatkept her alive in the historical imagi
xVhas
nation
ever
farther
from
current
feminist
concerns.1
Yet
Wollstonecraft's
1792 Vindication of theRights ofWoman offersmore to present-day feminists

than "a symbol of what remains to be achieved,"2 a tradition to be re
trieved,3 or symptoms of liberal individualism's constitutive contradictions.4
IfWollstonecraft was initially vilified and subsequently remembered as a
"hyena
in petticoats,"5
rather
than
the
tame
advocate
of "a woman
nursing
her children and discharging the duties of her station, "6 it is because
.
Recent
studies that situateWollstonecraft's
lightenment and early Romantic-era

craft's Social and Aesthetic Philosophy
feminism within
culture and politics
broad
the
currents of late En
include Saba Bahar, Mary Wollstone
Gunther-Canada,
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Wendy
Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics (DeKalb: Northern
Illinois UP,
"A Disappearance
in theWorld: Mary Wollstonecraft
and Melancholy
2001); Jacques Khalip,
Skepticism," Criticism 47 (2005): 85-106; Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication ofPolitical Virtue: The
Political Theory ofMary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1992); Simon Swift, "Mary
Wollstonecraft
and the 'Reserve of Reason,'"
SiR 45 (2006): 3?24; Ashley Tauchert, Mary
Wollstonecraft and theAccent of theFeminine (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); and Barbara Taylor,
Mary Wollstonecraft and theFeminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003).
2. Taylor, Wollstonecraft 253.
3. Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700?1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford UP,
394-95?
4. Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes
Harvard UP,
1996) 18.
2000)
toOffer: French Feminists and theRights ofMan
(Cambridge:
"To Hannah More,"

5. Horace Walpole,
24 January 1975, Horace Walpole's Correspondence
with Hannah More, ed. W.
S. Lewis, Robert A. Smith, and Charles H. Bennett, vol. 31, The
Yale Edition ofHorace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (New Haven: Yale UP,
1961)
397
6. Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of theRights ofWoman, vol. 5, The Collected Works of
and Marilyn Butler (London: William

Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd
Pickering,
in the text.
213. Future references to this text will be cited parenthetically
1989)
SiR, 48 (Fall 2009)

447
448
KIRSTIN
R.
WILCOX
authorial voice that emanates from this book defines the "Woman" whose
rights are vindicated very differently from the "women" who intermit
tently appear in it. In between those two instantiations of eighteenth
century femininity liesWollstonecraft's

prescient engagement with the
of
much
feminism:
what is a woman? Rec
problematic
twentieth-century
of
the
the
limitations
of "woman" that is
category
ognizing
conceptual
available to her,Wollstonecraft
invokes a female subject who can be un
derstood independently of the oppressive contingencies of the later eight
eenth
The
century.
speed with which

to
weeks7
"a matter
thisbook was composed
of months")8
left gaps,
(estimates range from six
questions,
and
inconsistencies
the book a vessel for each generation's reconsideration of

gender oppression.9 If readers across time have identified in the Rights of
Woman different feminisms that have spoken to their particular needs in
that have made
that
ways
the many
other
treatises
eighteenth-century
on
gender
have
not,
it is because the "Woman" whose rights

Wollstonecraft sought to vindicate
is not reducible to either the "middle-class" wife and mother who occa
sionally appears in the book or to theAmazonian virago who was believed
to have
it.10 Instead,
penned
"Woman"
is an enigma
at the center
ofWoll
stonecraft's argument, a dimly perceived but compelling field of possibility

around
which
she
organizes
her
controversial
claims.
un
Wollstonecraft's
recognized prescience suggests thatRomantic-era

thought had room for a
more supple conception of gender than has been perceived. Her volume
has escaped the antiquarian repository into which many other like-minded
texts of her time have fallen because she invokes an unprecedently fluid
notion of female identity that could not be readily contained by the gender
categories
.Claire
of her
is one of many
thatWollstonecraft
and scholars who have accepted William

the work in six weeks
(The Life and Death
composed
1974]).
ofMary Wollstonecraft [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
8. Sylvana Tomaselli,
Men and A Vindication of
"Introduction," A Vindication of theRights of
theRights ofWoman, by Mary Wollstonecraft
1995): xxv.
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
Godwin's
Tomalin
time.
estimate
biographers
9. "Every feminist generation reinvents her" (Taylor 9).

10. On contemporary readers' expectations that the author of the Vindication was "a rude,
Godwin, Memoirs of theAuthor of "A Vindication of
pedantic, dictatorial virago" seeWilliam
theRights ofWoman,"
ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker
(Peterborough, Ontario:
is quoted here). On
Broadview,
2001) 76 (207 for the language of the second edition, which
the use of the term "Amazon"
both by Wollstonecraft
and by her critics with reference to
her,
see Donna
Revolution
Landry, "Figures of the Feminine: An Amazonian
The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall
Brown
(Durham:
Literary History?"
1995):
in Feminist
Duke
179-228.
UP,
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
.
Women
449
"WOMAN
As They Are
The
singular "Woman" in the title of her book signalsWollstonecraft's de

termination to write into being a new kind of female subject. The plural
"Women" would more exactly mirror the title ofWollstonecraft's A Vindi
cation of theRights ofMen, In a Letter to theRight Honourable Edmund Burke
(1790), one of the firstpublished responses to Burke's Reflections on theRev
olution inFrance (1790). A parallel title to this earlier book, which elevated
Wollstonecraft
to
national
prominence,
would
misrepresent
Wollstone
craft's project in her second Vindication: to raise the issue of just who
women are. The "Men" of her
reply to Burke and what it is to be manly
are ontologically sound concepts, somuch so thatWollstonecraft
can rely
on these signifiers to frame her ad hominem attack on Burke's
"unmanly sar
casms and puerile conceits."11 No such certainty
the
title of her
grounds
second Vindication. The women at issue in the second Vindication are, she
will argue, constituted by the inequities and prejudices that she decries. The
Vindication of theRights ofWoman seeks to vanquish these insidious precon
ceptions and to emphasize the gross disparity between "women" as they
are and the abstract "Woman" of her title, the formwomen would take in
a more
just world.
Wollstonecraft's
revolutionary and provisional efforts to envision not just
a new polemical language for thewomen of her time but a new kind offe
male subject have given her Vindication a currency that exceeds the content
of her argument. Wollstonecraft's claim that the inferiority customarily at
tributed towomen was the result of faulty education was neither new nor
controversial. Mary Astell, Poulain de la Barre, Judith Drake, and Cathar
ine Macaulay
had all made this point previously, and writers like Hays,
Mary Robinson, Olympe de Gouges, Judith Sargent Murray, and Charles

Brockden Brown were contemporaneously arguing in similar (and in the
case of Gouges, more vehement) veins. Even the
popular writer Hannah
More would go on to acknowledge the validity of this point in her conser
vative and evangelical Strictureson Female Education (1799). What was new
inWollstonecraft's
rendering of this key idea was her recognition that
ifbeliefs about women are shaped by false assumptions, flawed condition
ing, and faulty education,
thenwomen
themselves remain unknown,
their
ir. Mary Wollstonecraft,

A Vindication of theRights ofMen, vol. 5, The Collected Works of
Mary Wollstonecraft, ed., Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: William
1989)
Pickering,
in A Vindication of
17. For a detailed analysis ofWollstonecraft's
representation of masculinity
see Claudia
theRights ofMen,
Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in
the ?y?os (Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1995).
450
KIRSTIN
R.
WILCOX
true nature hidden by (and perhaps inextricable from) layers of accultura

tion.
Wollstonecraft concedes much ground to the sexism of her time in order

to emphasize the overwhelming power of culture to shape the behavior of
women.
It is "with
reason,"
Wollstonecraft
asserts,
that "men
complain
. . .
of the follies and caprices of our sex,when they do not keenly satirize our
headstrong passions and groveling vices" (88). Portrayals of vicious, weak,
stupid, and frivolous women abound in the Vindication, asWollstonecraft
does not attempt "to extenuate their [women's] faults; but to prove them
to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society"
is
(266). In contrast, the enlightened, virtuous, and reasonable "Woman"
the female subject who would exist in a world where principles of reason
and justice prevail. In the absence of such a reality, however, "Woman"
cannot
be
her
known,
virtues
cannot
be
asserted,
her
intellectual
capacity
cannot be gauged. All that can be postulated is that she does not correspond
to the "women" who populate the corrupt world inwhich Wollstonecraft
lives.
strategy has a startling consequence, which readers have generally

over
as a rhetorical effect.That men and women should be held to
passed
the same ideals of moral and intellectual development is the well-known
This
central thread of the Vindication. Less widely recognized, however, isWoll

stonecraft'swillingness to acknowledge thatwomen may be unable tomeet
a shared standard ofmental excellence. "Ifwomen are by nature inferior to
men," she argues, "their virtues must be the same in quality, if not in de
gree" (94?95). The Vindication hints at a range of outcomes that could en
sue from applying the same standards of virtue and intellect towomen as to
men.
Wollstonecraft
daughters,
more
believes
affectionate
that women
sisters, more
would
faithful
become
wives,
"more
more
observant
reasonable
mothers," which alone would be an improvement over the status quo

(220). She is less certain about how women would actually fare in compari
son tomen. A reform in the education of women might simply confirm
the existing disparities between the sexes:
experience prove that they [women] cannot attain the same
of
strength of mind, perseverance, and fortitude, let their vir
degree
tues be the same in kind, though theymay vainly struggle for the same
degree and the superiority ofman will be equally clear, ifnot clearer;
and truth, as it is a simple principle, which admits of no modification,
Should
be common to both. Nay, the order of society as it is at present

regulated would not be inverted, forwoman would then only have
the rank that reason assigned her, and arts could not be practised to
would
bring the balance
even, much
less to turn it. (105)
The
ambivalence.
man
over
woman,
in this passage
of "balance"
implicit metaphor
craft's
Does
"balance"
once
that
superiority
has
conveys Wollstone
in the
obtain
naturally
been
proved
of
"superiority"
by
experience?
even though "truth" would

given that only "arts" could
is prepared to accept the conse
is such a situation inherently unbalanced

fall equally on the sides ofmen and women,
Or
451
"WOMAN
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
bring this "balance even"? Wollstonecraft

quences of an "unbalanced" social order inwhich "the superiority ofman"
is a given and women "vainly struggle" to achieve parity. She only asks that
and
experience
might,
truth,
rather
than
as a consequence
of
convention,
that
bring
situation
about.12
than a speculative possibility thatwomen
registers no more
Wollstonecraft
education
improved
a more
and
rational
social
order, emerge as the intellectual and moral equals ofmen. "Let their facul
ties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength," she hedges,
"and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual
scale" (104).
At points, Wollstonecraft's
"woman
is naturally
weak"
apparent openness
rather
than
"degraded
to the possibility
by
a concurrence
(121) shades into ironic hyperbole, as when
cumstances"
that
of cir
she urges
Ifmen be demigods?why
let us serve them! And if the dignity of the
as
female soul be
disputable as that of animals?if their reason does not
afford sufficient light to direct their conduct whilst unerring instinct is
are surely of all creatures themost miserable! and, bent
denied?they
beneath the iron hand of destiny,must submit to be afair defectin cre
ation. (114)
It is difficult to take such lines at face value when every page of the Vindica
conviction that at least some women,
tion is infused with Wollstonecraft's
herself among them, have themoral and intellectual abilities that are sup
Wollstonecraft's deliberate ambigu
posed to be the domain ofmen. Yet if
were
on
the
women's
issue
of
abilities
only a rhetorical effect, itwould
ity
have little connection to other dimensions of her argument. As it is, this
strategic uncertainty is the organizing principle behind the unusual persua
sive tactics in thiswork.
To
sustain
the
indeterminacy
of
"Woman,"
Wollstonecraft
eschews
fa
miliar strategies of gender advocacy. First, she refrains frommaking totaliz

ing assertions about the abilities of women relative to those of men. She
sets aside at the outset "the contested question respecting the equality or
inferiorityof the sex" (74). This "agnosticism," as Barbara Taylor terms it,
uses the metaphor
12. Elsewhere, Wollstonecraft
of "gravity" to convey her conviction
"Let there be then no coercion estab
that there is a natural order between men and women:
lished
in society, and
proper places"
the common
law of gravity prevailing,
the sexes will
fall into their
(68).
452
KIRSTIN
R.
WILCOX
"places her firmly outside the old querelle desfemmes, with its stylized dis
putes of sex superiority."13Apart from a brief mention of men's superior
physical strength in the Introduction (because "I cannot pass over itwith
out subjecting the main tendency of my reasoning to misconstruction"
[74]) and a few lapses in her discussion of chastity,Wollstonecraft succeeds
in
. . .
"avoiding
any
direct
of
comparison
the
two
sexes
collectively"
(103).14 Although Wollstonecraft is often taken to be an early proponent of

equity feminism, for purposes of her argument she insistsnot on the equal
ity of the sexes but on the equality of expectation and opportunity.
Second, Wollstonecraft explicitly declines to supply a list of famous and
accomplished women. "I shall not lay any great stresson the example of a
few women
from
who,
received
having
a masculine
ac
have
education,
quired courage and resolution," she explains (145?46). A brief footnote

points out that extraordinary women like "Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs. Macaulay,
the Empress of Russia, Madame
d'Eon, &c." have no place in her book,
because
and many
"[t]hese,
more,
may
be
reckoned
women
neither
heroines
nor
brutes;
but
creatures"
reasonable
are
and
exceptions,
not all heroes, aswell as heroines, exceptions to general rules? Iwish

(146,
to see
n.
14).
this synecdochic list,

Wollstonecraft dismisses a ubiquitous strategyof
one
familiar to readers of periodical and book-length
vindicating women,
defenses of women in the eighteenth century.15 Instead of using the exis
With
tence
of
admirable
more
exceptions
to
argue
that women
are,
on
the whole,
capable than they are generally believed to be,Wollstonecraft prefers

to search for the "general rules" by which all women can be understood as
"reasonable
creatures."
Third, in framing these "general rules,"Wollstonecraft resists any empir

ical grounding that might prematurely delimit women's
capacities. Al
thoughWollstonecraft alludes to the existence ofwomen who "have more
sense than theirmale relatives" and who "govern their husbands without
degrading themselves," she chooses not tomake such anecdotal instances a

part of her argument because "I . . . speak of the sex in general" (77). At a
time when
woman-authored
fiction,
essays,
and
conduct
literature
abound
13- Taylor 87. Such themes have been "a staple of theWestern
literary diet" ever since
women writers of the Renaissance
to
literature
began responding systematically
misogynistic
and Barbara F. McManus,
(Katherine Usher Henderson
Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts
of theControversy about Women in England, 1540?1640 [Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985] 3).
and Butler's
edition of Wollstonecraft's
14. Todd
to the second
identifies changes Wollstonecraft
made
of the Rights of Woman

of the book that eliminate
Vindication
edition
of the essentializing claims made

in the first edition.
thatWollstonecraft
omits the stock "collective biogra
15. Taylor finds it "unsurprising"
ofWollstonecraft's
views like Mary
phy of celebrated savants" (48), but later proponents
many
and Judith Sargent Murray would

rectify this apparent omission
on Wollstonecraft's
arguments in the later 1790s.
Robinson
as they expanded
O NE
W?LLS
CRAFT'S
453
"WOMAN
inmoralized portrayals of female protagonists, Wollstonecraft's

reluctance
to exploit this literary technique is significant.16 Instead, Wollstonecraft
emphasizes the fictive quality of the few exemplars she uses. There is only
one extended portrait of a woman displaying moral and intellectual sense,
and that portrait is an avowedly imaginary foil for an example of female
weakness. To illustrate her claim thatwomen should be educated for inde

pendence rather than blind obedience, Wollstonecraft describes two wid
ows. The first "has learned only to please men, to depend gracefully on
them"; the second has been brought up to think and act for herself (117).
sees no option but to remarry after her husband's death,
The firstwidow
she
whereupon
"either
a prey
falls
to some
mean
fortune-hunter
who
. . .
or [she] becomes the victim of discontent and blind

outcome will "bring her with sorrow, ifnot with
Either
indulgence" (117).
to
the
also,
poverty
grave" (117-18). "This is not an overcharged picture,"
assertsWollstonecraft, and she reinforces the verisimilitude of her claim by
stressing that "something similarmust have fallen under every attentive
she points out, this kind of female folly is sowidely
eye" (118). Moreover,
renders her miserable;
represented that "it does not require a lively pencil, or the discriminating
outline of a caricature, to sketch the domestic miseries and petty vices
which such a mistress of a family diffuses" (118).
No such appeal to common experience reinforces the portrait of the sec
ond widow, which Wollstonecraft

supplies for contrast. Instead, Woll
stonecraft emphasizes its fictionality. "I must now relieve myself by draw
says, introducing a woman whose
ing a different picture," Wollstonecraft
mind has been "gradually expanding itself to comprehend themoral duties
of life, and inwhat human virtue and dignity consists" (119). Wollstone
craft provides no authentication of this second widow, whom she chooses
to "let
. . .
Fancy
for purposes
present"
of argument.
Not
surprisingly,
this
product ofWollstonecraft's
"Fancy" copes more effectively than the first
widow, using her inner resources to provide for her children; but even in
imagining this fictive construct,Wollstonecraft avoids depicting womanly
The
excellence.
second
widow
is "a woman
with
a tolerable
understand
ing, for I do not wish to leave the line ofmediocrity" (119). As a thought
to demonstrate
allows Wollstonecraft
experiment, this second widow
that the folly of the firstwidow was not inevitable, but the result of
her poor preparation for the vicissitudes of life.Wollstonecraft

explicitly
refrains from framing this second widow as amodel her readers could fol
low.
16. On
"the pedagogy of example"

inwoman-authored
fiction of the eighteenth century,
Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and theNovel (Balti
see Eve Tabor

more:
Johns Hopkins
UP,
2000)
56-93.
454
2. Women
Determined,
"in
WILCOX
the Most
Natural
and,
on
the other
to convince
hand,
need to be regarded differently from how

the
reconfigures
State"
on the one hand, to argue from an open-ended

are
women
what
R.
KIRSTIN
literature
of advice,
conception of
readers
that women
they have been, Wollstonecraft
advocacy,
defense,
and
improvement.
Wollstonecraft
critiques a diffuse body of work in the Vindication, from
Lord Chesterfield's rakishLetters to John Fordyce's prim sermons, from the
embodied theoretical abstractions ofRousseau's Emile to theminute practi
cal advice conveyed by Hester Mulso Chapone's Letters on theImprovement
of theFemale Mind. Two significant problems unite these "many respectable
writers" inWollstonecraft's critique (25). First, individual programs of self
improvement offer limited scope for large-scale social change (Tomaselli
xi): "Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions
and manners of the society they live in . . . till society be differently consti
tuted,much cannot be expected from education" (90). The second and re
lated problem with "works for their [women's] improvement" is their fail
ure to recognize the full range of their readership (73).Wollstonecraft notes
that
. . . addressed
instruction
"the
to women"
is inadequate
for
accom
plishing this task of large-scale reform because it "has ratherbeen applicable

to ladies," a subset of the category ofwomen who might seek out improv
seeks to expand both the im
ing reading (74). In contrast,Wollstonecraft
women
forwhom it is "appli
plied audience for her work and the sorts of
cable" in order to change the nature of the "improvement" that is at stake.
This effortrequires a radical reformulation of the female subject who can
be the subject of "works for their improvement." Wollstonecraft's decision
to address herself to "those inmiddle-class, because they appear to be in the
most
natural
state"
has
often
been
taken
as a move
to lend
her
own
stratum
of society normative status to the exclusion of differently situatedwomen.17

While Wollstonecraft's formulation necessarily excludes large swaths of the
female population, it is a mistake to assume that she is speaking specifically
of themiddle class in the same way that the twentieth-century revisionist
critic does. Wollstonecraft takes for granted qualitative differences between

different ranks of people throughout her Vindication, from suggesting that
"a
servant
maid
. . . the
to take
servile
part
of the household
business"
is in
trinsic to a woman's full exercise of her moral and intellectual capabilities

(213) to proposing "taking a separate view of the different ranks of society,
in each" (75). Nevertheless, Woll
and of themoral character of women,
17- See, for example, Donna
Landry, The Muses
etry in Britain, 1739-1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge

nounces herself as addressing precisely the women
and which
she identifies as the class most worthy
ofResistance: Laboring-Class Women's Po

UP,
1990): "In the Vindication she an
she herself belongs
of the class to which
of imitation" (266).
O NE
W?LLS
CR
AFT'S
455
"WOMAN"
stonecraftwrites from themiddle of a period of social and cultural change

by which a demographically real but only partly understood social "mid
dle" came to be understood as a distinct economic statuswith cultural and
political agency.18Her "middle class" is not a discrete layer of society with
a distinct culture and set of attitudes but an expansive category that lumps
together a wide variety of social experience, from the wealthiest non
landed urban gentry to tradespeople perpetually at risk of losing the foot

hold of upward mobility and slipping into servitude or indigence.
Something more than a demographic demarcation is at stake, however,
In asserting the
inWollstonecraft's focus on "women of themiddle-class."
of women
existence
"in
the most
natural
so
is not
state" Wollstonecraft
much exalting those of her own social rank as she is groping toward an ab
stract female subject isolated from the acculturation of social hierarchy. By
"most
does
Wollstonecraft
natural,"
not mean
"most
essentially
or
female"
"normative" but "least distorted by the effects of rank." Her goal may well
be Denise Riley's "sociological"
conception of women, which "like the
modern
of
collectivity
. . . can
'women'
be
traced
to a
complicated
post
the limitations ofWollstonecraft's

il?os gestation."19 Whatever
ability to
abstract gender from the social hierarchy that frames it in eighteenth
century England, the possibility of such an abstract female subject is pre
cisely what she is trying to convey in her Introduction.
Wollstonecraft's
ical
step
demarcation
forward
from
other
of the "middle-class"
eighteenth-century
marks
treatments
a
methodolog
of women
as a
whole. She improves upon works like JohnMillar's The Origin andDistinc
tion ofRanks (1777) andWilliam Alexander's The History ofWomen, from
Earliest Antiquity to thePresent Time (1779), which advanced what E. J.
Clery has termed "the enlightenment theory of feminizaci?n," the view
that "women's
condition
is ...
an
infallible
measure
or
index
of the civiliz
"20Such writers
ing process inmen.
sought to depict a broad historical cate
18. See Dror Wahrman,

Imagining theMiddle Class: The Political Representation ofClass in
contradic
Britain, c 1780-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1995) 1?18. On Wollstonecraft's
as a "palimpsest of the in
tory uses of the term "middle-class," which Wahrman
explains
"
. . .which Wollstonecraft
see his
was trying to fuse together,
compatible
linguistic practices
"
Goes Public: Gender, Class, and Politics from Queen
'Middle-Class' Domesticity
Caroline
to Queen
Journal ofBritish Studies 32 (1993): 296-432.

"Am I That Name?"
Feminism and theCategory of "Women" inHistory
Riley,
P, 1988) 49.
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
20. E. J. Clery, The Feminization Debate
in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Com
merce, and Luxury (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004) 3. On other figures, particularly of the Scot
Victoria,"
19. Denise
tish Enlightenment,
who voiced similar views (here termed "enlightened British gallantry")

see Barbara Taylor, "Feminists versus Gallants: Manners
in Enlightenment
Brit
and Morals
ain," Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor
(Basingstoke:
Palgrave,
2005)
30-52.
456
KIRSTIN
gory of women
a woman
be
R.
WILCOX
but without Wollstonecraft's
varies
not
across
only
time
but
it is to
recognition thatwhat
across
rank
as well.
Alexander,
for example points out that

in every age, and in every country, while themen have been partial
to the persons of the fair, they have either left their minds alto
gether without culture, or biassed them by a culture of a spurious
and improper nature; suspicious, perhaps, that a more rational one
would have opened their eyes, shown them their real condition, and
prompted them to assert the rights of nature, rights of which themen
have perpetually, more
or less, deprived
them (3).
Yet when Alexander moves from the evidence ofwhat he deems primitive
cultures and barbarous antiquity to the periods we now characterize as early
modern, his frame of reference changes fromwomen in general to the up
women
per-class
who
can
be
the object
of
"chivalry,"
glossed
as
"a
favor
able turn in the condition of the sex" (5). Class distinctions among women
get lost in a self-congratulatory historical trajectory ofwhich the capacity of
Alexander's
elite women
readers
("the
Fair
Sex")
to receive
"amusement
and instruction" from books like his is the culmination. In contrast to these
quasi-anthropological
treatments
of "women,"
invocation
Wollstonecraft's
class" manifests a recognition and critique of the self

indexicai
conflation of allwomen with those of high rank.More
servingly
the
indefinite
deferral of her plan to take "a separate view of the dif
over,
in each"
ferent ranks of society and of the moral character of women
reflects her openness to the greater analytical potential of a universal female
of the "middle
subject that cuts across different kinds of female experience.21

As she demonstrated in the Vindication of theRights ofMen, Wollstone
craft feels as strongly about the injustices of wealth and rank as she does
about
out
of
concern
This
oppression.
gender
the realm
of self-improvement
moves
and
her
conduct
to women
exhortations
manuals
and
into
en
lightened debates about morality and justice. To assert the improvability of

ordinary women without relying on demonstrations of women's parity
with men, historical exemplars, or richly textured positive portrayals,
in general principles
Wollstonecraft must root her claims about women
to
familiar
of
her
Vindication of the
about human nature, principles
readers
Rights ofMen and of the debates swirling around the French Revolution.
The firstchapter of theRights ofWoman, "The Rights and Involved Duties
takes readers so far afield of the specific concerns
ofMankind Considered,"
or theWrongs of
incomplete and posthumously published novel, Maria,
an even richer engagement with the issue of class in differentiating women's
displays
experience of gender oppression.
21.Wollstonecraft's
Woman
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
of women
addressed
that it is possible
to read the book
to men"
principally
457
"WOMAN
rather
than
as
as "a republican manifesto,

discus
the woman-centered
sion promised in the book's title and introduction (Johnson 24). The
opening chapters spell out the precept that underlies Wollstonecraft's argu
ments
about
women,
that
namely
the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness, must be esti

mated by the degree of reason, virtue and knowledge that distinguish
the individuals, and direct the laws which bind society; and that from
the exercise of reason knowledge and virtue naturally flow. (81)
the
the factors that "distinguish the individual and direct
arises when
Misery
are not
laws"
"reason,
virtue
and
knowledge"
but
to estab
deference
describes the evils that pervade themonar

and
the priesthood, in short, any profession
chy, standing armies, navies,
"in which great subordination of rank constitutes itspower" (86). Lumping
a variety of high ranks under one metaphorical rubric, she declares that "it
lished hierarchy.Wollstonecraft
is the pestiferous purple which renders the progress of civilization a curse"

(87).
When Wollstonecraft demonstrates the trajectory from unmerited power
to vice by drawing analogies to classes of men "exalted by the same
means," she devotes entire lengthy paragraphs to spelling out the vehicle of
her comparison (men of rank) with the same passionate language that she
uses for the tenor (women). These apparent digressions yield the haphazard
organization that has been a stumbling block to supporters and opponents
alike ofWollstonecraft's
thought. This long disquisition on "unnatural dis
tinctions" also explains why Wollstonecraft believes women "of themiddle
class"
to be
in the
"most
natural
state."
No
social
stratum
is,
in her
view,
immune to the evils of unmerited social hierarchy, but those furthest from
either extreme of rank (those in themiddle) are less susceptible to this cor
ruption.
This
rather
focus on the ways

than
on women
that reason and virtue are thwarted generally,
themselves,
allows Wollstonecraft
to assume,
rather
than defend, her open-ended assessment ofwomen's capabilities. That the

current state of society stunts the intellectual and moral development of
many different kinds of people on many different levels is exhaustively
demonstrated in the Vindication. So pervasive is the decay Wollstonecraft
describes that the specific moral and intellectual weakness attributed to
women
emerges
as a
self-evidently
arbitrary
distinction.
The
conduct
liter
ature on which Wollstonecraft builds, however, offers little precedent for

turns her
sustaining this level of innovative abstraction. As Wollstonecraft
attention from these general principles of human nature to some of the spe
458
KIRSTIN
R.
cific challenges faced by women

brates
in two ways
"Woman"
WILCOX
in her here and now, her language adum

that
exceed
the
content
of her
argument.
First,Wollstonecraft
sporadically falls back on images, assumptions, and
it
that
make
easy to conflate "Woman" with the emergent domestic
tropes
moment. Wollstonecraft's appeal to general princi
of
her
cultural
fantasy
ples
of human
nature
asserts
for achievement
potential
not
in all women,
just a few anecdotal exceptions. Yet thewomen "of themiddle class" (75),
who can represent "the sex in general" (77), "of tolerable understanding"
(119), take on contours in their
(119), and in "the line of mediocrity"
in
little to do with the social reali
this
book
that
have
fleeting appearances
ties ofWollstonecraft's
time. The most sustained of these inadvertently
"Of the Pernicious Effects
definitive moments occurs in Chapter Nine,
Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society,"
Which
when Wollstonecraft
imagines the scene thatmight refresh her after con
templating some of these "pernicious effects." In contrast to the "insipid
ceremonies and slavish grandeur" of an aristocratic family,Wollstonecraft
imagines "a woman nursing her children and discharging the duties of her
station," and she fills out the depiction with picturesque detail: such a
woman
prepare [s] herselfand children, with only the luxury of cleanliness, to

receive her husband, who returningweary home in the evening found
smiling babes and a clean hearth. My heart has loitered in themidst of
the group, and has even throbbed with sympathetic emotion, when
the scraping of thewell-known foot has raised a pleasing tumult. (213)
This stylized image is offered not so much to advance this particular ideal
as to suggest the superiority of this scene to the
of domestic womanhood
"riches
and
character"
When
inherited
power"
are
which
"destructive
...
to
the
human
(214).
Wollstonecraft's
woman
in "the most
natural
state"
takes
on
spe
cific characteristics for the sake of argument, she is generally married, has
children,
does
for household
work
outside
not
engage
in remunerative
employment,
relies
on
servants
labor, and refrains from taking on political and philanthropic

the home,
a related
cluster
of circumstances
that was
unavail
able (and not necessarily desirable) inwhole or in part formany women,

even in what Wollstonecraft
identifies as "the middle class." The persis
tence of this ideal for so innovative a thinker asWollstonecraft warrants
further scrutiny as what Joan Scott terms a "fantasy echo," "a set of psychic
operations by which certain categories of identity aremade to elide histori
cal differences
22. Joan W.
and
create
apparent
Scott, "Fantasy Echo:
continuities."22
History
For
and the Construction
purposes
of
this es
of Identity," Critical In
WOLLSTONE
CRAFT'S
459
"WOMAN"
say, however, it is enough to note that this domestic ideal collides sharply
with the second adumbration of "Woman" that emerges from the Vindica
tion: that conveyed byWollstonecraft's depiction of herself as the female
author of thiswork.
Voice
3. Wollstonecraft's
In the portrait of "a woman nursing her children" cited above, Wollstone
craft inserts herself as a participant spectator, one who "hears the scraping
of thewell-known foot" and whose heart "has throbbed with sympathetic
connection to it (is she a friend or relation
emotion," butWollstonecraft's
of this family? a benefactor? a passer-by?) is entirely ambiguous: it is not
even clear if the episode is recollected or invented. All that authenticates
this
scene
isWollstonecraft's
vigorous
emotional
offered
response,
as a tell
ing gloss. This disembodied yet robust display of self is central toWoll
stonecraft's rhetorical strategy,which Wollstonecraft appears to model on
re
Catharine Macaulay's
1790 Letters on Education, which Wollstonecraft
viewed for Joseph Johnson's Analytical Review and cites approvingly within
the Vindication. "In her style ofwriting, indeed, no sex appears" saysWoll
stonecraft, "for it is, like the sense it conveys, strong and clear" (175).
Wollstonecraft specifies that "writing inwhich no sex appears" is not writ
ing inwhich male standards pose as gender-neutral norms ("because I ad
mit not of such an arrogant assumption of reason"; 175). Rather, this kind
ofwriting manifests personal virtues that are desirable formen and women
alike. "[Macaulay] writes with sober energy and argumentative closeness,"

Wollstonecraft explains, "yet sympathy and benevolence give an interest to
her sentiments, and thatvital heat to arguments, which forces the reader to
weigh them" (175). The personal qualities that emerge fromMacaulay's
prose?sympathy
not
ments,
and
the
benevolence?"force
rhetorical
"sober
the reader
energy
and
to
weigh"
argumentative
her
argu
closeness,"
however desirable close and sober argumentation may be.

Wollstonecraft's
introduction spells out her plan to emulate the emphatic
a
virtuous
of
self that she finds inMacaulay's
prose, inwhich per
display
suasive power rests on the author's ability to convey the authenticity of her
feelings:
Should I express my conviction with the energetic emotions that I feel
I think of the subject, the dictates of experience and
whenever
quiry 27 (2001): 286. Lynn Friedli engages in some of this necessary
in the Eighteenth Century,"
Women'?A
Study of Gender Boundaries
theEnlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau
and Roy Porter (Chapel Hill: U
scrutiny in '"Passing
Sexual Underworlds of
of North
Carolina
1988): 234-60.
P,
460
KIRSTIN
R.
WILCOX
reflectionwill be felt by some ofmy readers. Animated by this impor

tant object, I shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style;?I aim
at being useful, and sinceritywill render me unaffected. (75)
Implicitly reclaiming "sensibility" as a tactic of persuasion, Wollstonecraft
does not expect readers to agree with her simply because her sound argu
ments
lead
to
conclusions.
inescapable
She
to
plans
"move"
her
audience
through the "energetic emotions" she presents. If her prose is sufficiently

immediate, not polished or culled, then the reader will be swept along, not
only by evidence and argument, but by the "dictates" of her self-evidently
moral
and well-intentioned
and
"experience
reflection."
product of these intentions is an unapologetically personal prose

one
inwhich Wollstonecraft's
subjectivity iswrit large on the page.
style,
the
Wollstonecraft
book,
puts herself, as author, in the fore
Throughout
are
"I"
riddled
with
where
the point could be made aswell
ground. Pages
without it: "I am fully persuaded that . . ."; "This is the very point I aim
The
at";
old
"In
the
same
. .
argument
strain have
I heard
men
."; "When
I treat
of
. .
argue
."; "I
the particular
come
duties
round
of women
to my
..."
(131?32, passim). At times, this emphasis on the authorial "I" makes it im

possible for her claims to "appear as unequivocal as the axioms on which
reasoning is built," as she asserts they should be (81). The vivid authorial
presence that suffuses the Vindication manifests a female subject that is not
gendered female in textual ways familiar to its eighteenth-century readers.

asWollstonecraft's
Even
argument
sustains
an
unthreatening
valorization
domesticity, her authorial voice has no analogous grounding

ventions
that
stonecraft's
enclosed
ordinarily
authorial
voice
asserts
a woman's
appearance
its presence,
and
in
it makes
of
in the con
print. Woll
no
effort
to
hide its sex, but it does not lay claim to an existence within the flawed fa
milial and social frameworks that define gender. If the content of the Vindi
cation opens wide the question of what women might become in a re
formed social order, its style supplies an implicit answer that is at odds with
Wollstonecraft's claim to "rest thewhole tendency ofmy reasoning" upon
"this
truth":
that
"whatever
tends
to
incapacitate
the maternal
character,
takes woman out of her sphere" (248). Nothing connects the voice that
speaks forth from the Vindication to""a woman nursing her children and dis
charging the duties of her station.
Though thework as a whole ismeant to reflect "the dictates of experi
ence," the vivid self that appears in the Vindication is not an autobiographi
cal self (75).Wollstonecraft would be prepared in her 1796 travelogue, Let
tersWritten during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to
confess that "most of the struggles of an eventful life have been occasioned
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
461
"WOMAN"
by the oppressed state of my sex: we reason deeply, when we forcibly

feel."23 But that was a different kind of book. Wollstonecraft
famously
compared the Vindication of theRights ofWoman to her portrait, but the
book reflects an intellectual and moral sensibility, rather than the rich tex
ture ofWollstonecraft's experience of being female.24The authorial self on
display in the Vindication standswell outside any connections to life beyond
the printed page.25 Wollstonecraft's
extensive background in education,
first as a governess, then as founder of a school, gives her sound qualificat
ions for her views, but she nowhere alludes to these important extraliterary
episodes in her life.Wollstonecraft only draws on her specifically female
experience to describe a few isolated phenomena that she has been particu
larlywell positioned to observe. "I have, probably, had an opportunity of
she points out
observing more girls in their infancy than J. J.Rousseau,"
(112). "Matters of fact,which have come under my eye again and again,"
include a "weak woman of fashion" (112), unmarried women thrust upon
the charity of their stingy sisters-in-law (134), and women of sensibility
who make poor mothers (137). Apart from such passing instances,Woll
stonecraft introduces no evidence from her own life to support her claims
about the subjection of women and the need for reform.
Nor
tion
does Wollstonecraft
readers
often
encountered
gloss her authorship with

in late
eighteenth-century
the kind of explana

books,
particu
authors. Eighteenth-century women writing in a

larly books by women
of
genres, including the novel, generally responded to the expecta
variety
tion that they offer some defense of their public print appearance in order
to "come forth,without charge of presumption, or forfeiture of delicacy,"
as Frances Burney put it.26
Wollstonecraft's prefatorymaterial (the dedica
Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and
23. Mary Wollstonecraft,
Denmark, vol. 6, The Collected Works ofMary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn But
ler (London: William
1989) 325.
Pickering,
described the Vindication to a friend as "a more faithful sketch" than the
24.Wollstonecraft
in
she was then sitting: "a book that I am now writing,
portrait for which
I myself, for I cannot yet attain to Homer's
head
and
shall
appear,
certainly
dignity,
6 October
1791, The Collected Letters ofMary Wollstonecraft,
Roscoe,"
("To William
commissioned
which
heart"
ed. Ralph M. Wardle

1979] 202-3.
[Ithaca: Cornell UP,
25. As Gary Kelly points out, "the 'author,' a character constructed in and by the text,
to achieve the moral autonomy and intellectual au
exemplifies the ability of some women
and to achieve itwithout any sign (in her text) of hav
thority that she claims for all women,
ing been blessed or denatured by a man's education"
(Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and
1992] in).
ofMary Wollstonecraft [New York: St. Martin's,
26. Frances Burney
and Cecilia],
[The Author of Evelina
Brief Reflections Relative to the
Emigrant French Clergy: Earnestly Submitted to theHumane Consideration of theLadies of Great
Career
Britain (1793; Los Angeles: William

print Society, 1900) iv?v.
Andrews
Clark Memorial
Library for the Augustan
Re
462
KIRSTIN
letter
tory
to M.
R. WILCOX
the
Talleyrand-P?rigord,
and
"Advertisement,"
the
Intro
duction) serves only to outline her project and situate itwithin contempo
rary debates. She does not use the space to explain her presence in the
public arena. Though shewas struggling financially to support herself and
others at the time she wrote the Vindication,Wollstonecraft does not use
that fact to justify her imposition on the reading public as belletristic con
temporaries like the poet and novelist Charlotte Smith did. Wollstonecraft
addresses the reading public with the entitlement of one who deserves at
tention
for no
other
reason
than
her
self-ascribed
acumen
in
"considering
the historic page" and "viewing the living world" and bringing her re
sponses into dialogue with those of other significant (and mostly male)
thinkers (73).
Floating free from frames, examples, or prefatory matter that link this
print persona to a sexed body in theworld beyond the printed page, this
unprecedented representation of the abstract female subject in general, and
the female author in particular, has eluded critical scrutiny.The critical de
bate about whether Wollstonecraft mimics a male voice, aspires towards
gender neutrality, or deliquesces into ineffectually female language reflects
the inevitable tendency of readers to define Wollstonecraft's

innovations
within the essentialized gender categories of her time. Though Mary
Poovey argues that "Wollstonecraft clearlywants most of all to distinguish
herself
tral"
from
voice
all
sexual
falls
upon
so as to attain
categories
many
ears
as
a neutral
a valorization
voice,"27
of masculinity.
this "neu
"Rarely
in
does she [Wordsworth] present herself as a woman speaking towomen"
the Vindication, says Susan Gubar,28 a view that critics like Cora Kaplan and
Joan Landes support with evidence of a disavowal of female sexuality em
bedded inWollstonecraft's
tropes.29 "Repudiating the female position, she
orients herself almost exclusively toward the male logos," claims Landes
on the other hand, identify a self
(135). Gary Kelly and Andrew McCann,
in
female
the
Vindication.
Whereas Kelly finds that
consciously
language
on
the
whole
McCann
says of the Vindica
language
empowering (109?55),
tion, "Despite
itswell
documented
attempt to repress the feminine, it re
27- Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and theWoman Writer: Ideology as Style in theWorks of
P, 1984) 80.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: U of Chicago
28. Susan Gubar, "Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft
and the Paradox of'It Takes
One
to Know
vol. 2, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Critics, 1788?2001, ed. Harriet

One,'"
(New York: Routledge,
2003) 150.
29. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in theAge of the French Revolution
(Ithaca:
Cornell UP,
1988) 135; in Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso,
describes how Wollstonecraft's
"a constant slippage
1986), Cora Kaplan
metaphors produce
Devine
Jump
back
into a more
naturalized
and reactionary view
of women"
(43).
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
463
"WOMAN
mains, by its own account of flawed femininity, a persistently 'feminine'

text,
in its rehearsal
of
sentimental,
proto-Romantic
language."30
This bewilderment bespeaks the unprecedented character ofWollstone

craft's voice in the Vindication. It is neither a ventriloquized male voice,
conventionally
female
voice,
nor
a voice
"distinguished
. . . from
all
sexual
categories" thatWollstonecraft makes use of in the Vindication, but the

voice of "Woman": avowedly female, but gendered independently of the
conventions,
assumptions,
and
expectations
that
circumscribe
femaleness.
is crucial toWollstonecraft's program in the Vindication. Not

only does it sustainWollstonecraft's agnosticism about what women will be
in a reformed world, but Wollstonecraft's
self-presentation allows her to
address male and female readers alike without reference to the structures of
This voice
subordination thatwould define their interactions in theworld beyond the

to
this voice makes it possible forWollstonecraft
printed page. Moreover,
enfold her female readerswithin the revolutionary possibilities of her open
ended conception of female identity.
4. Women
Readers
So committed isWollstonecraft to her radical revision of how "Woman"

speaks that she sacrifices her argumentative fluency to it. In choosing not to
give her second Vindication an epistolary frame,Wollstonecraft departs from
her most comfortable and effectivewriting practice: writing to a known or
individual interlocutor. Although Wollstonecraft

claims
well-imagined
early on inA Vindication of theRights ofMen, in a Letter to theRight Honour
able Edmund Burke that "I war not with an individual when I contend for
the rights ofmen and the liberty of reason," she fully exploits direct episto
lary address to make Burke the target of her most vehement rhetorical
flights (Rights ofMen 7). Wollstonecraft's personal attacks on Burke lend
the firstVindicationmuch of its energetic power; even when Wollstonecraft
is not excoriating Burke, his words, actions, and opinions serve to focus her
impassioned opinions. Wollstonecraft would also use epistolarity to power
ful effect in her 1796 LettersWritten during a ShortResidence in Sweden, Nor
way andDenmark. In this book, themost popular ofWollstonecraft's publi

cations in her lifetime, the unnamed addressee of the Letters (Gilbert Imlay)
is responsible for themelancholy that dogs thewriter as she travels through
Scandinavia, recording her observations. Around her epistolary yearning
coalesces a subtle narrative that draws the author's avowedly subjective im
Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism,

30. Andrew McCann,
1999) 151.
Sphere (New York: St. Martin's,
and
the Public
464
KIRSTIN
R.
WILCOX
pressions of her travels and her reflections on the nature of themind

seamless
and
into a
whole.
thought-provoking
If the Vindication of theRights ofWoman lacks the cohesion and rhetorical

vigor of these other two works, it is because directly addressing the amor
phous reading public constitutes a challenge forWollsto ne craft.By taking
on this challenge, though,Wollstonecraft is able to apply her open-ended
to both herselfand her female readers. At

and abstract depiction ofWoman
the same time thatWollstonecraft
scolds contemporary women for their
as if the reforms she advocates
writes
readers
she
for
her
follies,
implied
have already taken place. The women Wollstonecraft writes about may
well
be
convinced
that
"a
little
. . .
cunning,
softness
of
outward
temper,
obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will

obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, ev
erything else is needless" (88). The female readers thatWollstonecraft's
prose takes for granted, on the other hand, must be rational, self-critical,
and capable of improvement, andWollstonecraft includes them along with
her male readers into an audience that she divides by gender as the occasion
warrants.
Wollstonecraft's wildly fluctuating pronouns reflect this concern with

audience, even as they lend an element of instability to the book. On occa
sionWollstonecraft
is pointedly indeterminate: "But fair and softly,gentle
or
male
reader,
female, do not alarm thyself" (216). The rhetorical ques
tions thatWollstonecraft frequently relies upon to advance her argument,
for example, tacitly address both men and women.
In other cases,Woll
and men alike with a third-person
stonecraft separately labels women
"them." She writes of women, "In how many ways do I wish, from the
to impress this truthupon my sex; yet I fear theywill
purest benevolence,
not listen to a truth that dear bought experience has brought home to
many an agitated bosom"
(220). At times she addresses her male readers
with similar indirectness: "I appeal to their understandings; and ... I en
treat them to assist to emancipate their companion, tomake her a help meet
for them!" (220). Elsewhere, an archaic "ye" signalsmoments of high rhe
torical
drama
hortation,
when
as when
Wollstonecraft
she urges
sex or
out one
singles
men
of
"ye
understanding"
the other
to "Be
for ex
just.
. . !"
(266). But Wollstonecraft does not consistently stand aloof from her sex. At
various points she uses a first person plural pronoun to unite with her fe
male
readers:
prejudices!
"Let
. . . Let
dear
us, my
us not confine
contemporaries,
all our thoughts
rise
...
above
to an
such
narrow
acquaintance
with our lover's or husbands' hearts" (161).

The proliferation of pronouns undermines the consistency of her argu
ment and opens the door to the kind of critical confusion described above,
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S
465
"WOMAN"
when the distance between the femaleWollstonecraft and women in gen

eral fluctuates, when her implied reader changes sex mid-paragraph, or
when themodes shiftsabruptly from the rhetorical forms of detached rea
son
to emotive
direct
address.
Yet
Wollstonecraft's
strong
authorial
pres
ence and her consistent tone of underlying urgency knit her argument to
gether around these rhetorical instabilities.31The sense ofwomen and men
alike drawn into conversation with Wollstonecraft's forceful print presence
pulls this text back from incoherence, at the same time that it extends to
women
readers Wollstonecraft's
emancipatory
conception
of
"Woman."
By embracing the heterogeneity of the reading public in the second Vin

liberates readers, particularly women,
from
dication, Wollstonecraft
about
how
and
what
read.
Wollstonecraft's
gendered preconceptions
they
and other "Writers Who Have Rendered Women
critique of Rousseau
Objects of Pity" in Chapter Five is particularly effective in portraying fe
male readers as the "rational creatures" she wishes to bring into being.
terms of critique presuppose that thewomen reading her
Wollstonecraft's
book already have a broader realm of inquiry than the "petty occurrences
of the day" (161). Her confidence in their critical acumen leads her to
point out that
my comments ... all spring from a few simple principles and might
have been deduced from what I have already said; but the edifice
[Rousseau's depiction ofwomen] has been raisedwith such ingenuity,
that
it seems
ner. (147)
necessary
to attack
it in a much
more
circumstantial
man
This
"more circumstantial manner"

involves interspersing lengthy direct
from
with
Emile
her
quotes
commentary, "lest my readers should suspect
that Iwarped the author's reasoning to support my own arguments" (148).
By exposing her readers to both sides of the debate, Wollstonecraft brings
in her audience, women and men alike, as active and critical participants in
her dialogue with Rousseau.

Like the implied author of the Vindication, the implied female reader is
necessarily
an
exceptional
woman.
Wollstonecraft's
emphatic
yet
tacit
in
terpellation of such literate and critical female selves appeared tomany con
temporary readers to bespeak not her explicit concern for ordinary women
and her abiding commitment to enlightened motherhood but themargins
of her
argument,
where
"women
sive plans of . . . independence"
of a superior
cast
. . .
pursue
more
(217). Although Wollstonecraft
exten
believes
31. Kelly offers a different interpretation of these tonal inconsistencies, which he reads as
the consequence
ofWollstonecraft's
cobbling together of the disparate array of rhetorical
models
available to her.
466
KIRSTIN
R.
WILCOX
that "women in the common walks of life are called to fulfil the duties of
wives and mothers, by religion and reason," she "cannot help lamenting
thatwomen of a superiour cast have not a road open by which they can
pursue more extensive plans of usefulness and independence" (217). Three
brief paragraphs of the book propose "the art of healing," the study of his
tory and politics, and "business of various kinds" (including elective office)
as possible expansions of women's domestic roles (5: 218).32 Wollstone
craft's
discussion
of opening
traditionally
male
to women
occupations
man
ifests only a small and highly speculative part of her argument, and it in
volves a subset of the female population
thatWollstonecraft
herself
to
to
be
her
claims.
Yet
innova
Wollstonecraft's
acknowledges
tangential
tive voice so amplified these provocative suggestions, that critics could
claim that she "wished, as the consummation of female independence, to

introduce the sex into the Camp, the Rostrum
and the Cabinet."33 If
.
.
.
discussions
of
Wollstonecraft's
Vindication
"many
begin with apologies,
and some conclude in frank disappointment" (Johnson 23), it is because
these pockets of transgressive possibility were disproportionately seized on
and
inflated.
Wollstonecraft's
Consequently,
reputation
as an
iconoclast?
abhorrent tomany readers at the turn of the eighteenth century but entic
any engagement with her
ing to feminist readers of our century?precedes
to
work. Recent
has
sought
scholarship
replace the mythic feminist
a
more
accurate
with
of
the wide-ranging visionary
figurehead
depiction
Romantic-era
intellectual, but it has done so at the expense of some of
Wollstonecraft's most innovative and prescient thought.
Postmodern and poststructuralist feminism has been preoccupied with
identifyingwhich of themultiple valences of the term "woman" can be
most effectively appropriated within and alongside other dimensions of
identity and self-hood in order tomake theworld more just. The goal is to
get beyond a feminism whose history has been, according to Joan Scott,
"the history of the project of reducing diversities (of class, race, sexuality,
ethnicity, politics, religious and social economic status) among females to a
common identity of women."34 That reductive project
arguably begins
with
Mary
whose
Wollstonecraft,
32. Like-minded
Sargent Murray,
women
writers
and Catharine
category
of
"Woman"
is a more
capa
of the
Macaulay)
1790s (Mary Hays, Mary Robinson,

Judith
to become
that women
seek ways
propose
such traditionally
stop short of recommending
financially independent, but they generally

as medicine
male occupations
and government.
33. Benjamin
Silliman, The Letters ofShahcoolen, aHindu Philosopher Residing inPhiladelphia
toHis Friend, El Hassan,
an Inhabitant ofDelhi (1802; Gainesville:
Scholars' Facsimiles and Re
prints, 1962) 24.
34. Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category
tory,ed. Scott (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1996) 4.
of Historical
Analysis,"
Feminism and His
O NE
W?LLS
CRAFT'S
467
"WOMAN"
cious receptacle for other identities than any which had been advocated
west
previously, and who has been a touchstone for generations ofwhite,
ern middle- and upper-class feminists presenting their experience as uni
versal. Yet Wollstonecraft's determination to hold open the category of
"Woman" gives her a role in the larger historical trajectory that Scott ad
vances. Wollstonecraft works towards a timewhen principles of justice will
produce
"women"
who
are
so different
from
the products
of her
own
cor
era that she refuses to anticipate their precise qualities.

does not attempt to transcend the parameters of
Wollstonecraft
Though
and
race, sexuality,
ethnicity that confine many reformistwriters of her
rupted Romantic
time,
the concept
dence might
University
of "Woman"
that
she
invokes
shows
what
such
transcen
look like.
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Vindicating Paradoxes - Wilcox

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Vindicating Paradoxes: Mary Wollstonecraft's "Woman"

Author(s): KIRSTIN R. WILCOX

grown, her salience for contemporary feminism has receded. The

1792 Vindication of theRights ofWoman offersmore to present-day feminists

studies that situateWollstonecraft's

lightenment and early Romantic-era

culture and politics

include Saba Bahar, Mary Wollstone

toOffer: French Feminists and theRights ofMan

"To Hannah More,"

and Marilyn Butler (London: William

SiR, 48 (Fall 2009)

century femininity liesWollstonecraft's

speed with which

thisbook was composed

(estimates range from six

the book a vessel for each generation's reconsideration of

it is because the "Woman" whose rights

stonecraft's argument, a dimly perceived but compelling field of possibility

recognized prescience suggests thatRomantic-era

and scholars who have accepted William

9. "Every feminist generation reinvents her" (Taylor 9).

singular "Woman" in the title of her book signalsWollstonecraft's de

Mary Robinson, Olympe de Gouges, Judith Sargent Murray, and Charles

themselves remain unknown,

ir. Mary Wollstonecraft,

true nature hidden by (and perhaps inextricable from) layers of accultura

Wollstonecraft concedes much ground to the sexism of her time in order

strategy has a startling consequence, which readers have generally

central thread of the Vindication. Less widely recognized, however, isWoll

mothers," which alone would be an improvement over the status quo

be common to both. Nay, the order of society as it is at present

bring the balance

less to turn it. (105)

even though "truth" would

is such a situation inherently unbalanced

bring this "balance even"? Wollstonecraft

than a speculative possibility thatwomen

(121) shades into ironic hyperbole, as when

miliar strategies of gender advocacy. First, she refrains frommaking totaliz

law of gravity prevailing,

the sexes will

fall into their

(103).14 Although Wollstonecraft is often taken to be an early proponent of

quired courage and resolution," she explains (145?46). A brief footnote

not all heroes, aswell as heroines, exceptions to general rules? Iwish

this synecdochic list,

capable than they are generally believed to be,Wollstonecraft prefers

Third, in framing these "general rules,"Wollstonecraft resists any empir

degrading themselves," she chooses not tomake such anecdotal instances a

of the Rights of Woman

of the essentializing claims made

and Judith Sargent Murray would

inmoralized portrayals of female protagonists, Wollstonecraft's

weakness. To illustrate her claim thatwomen should be educated for inde

or [she] becomes the victim of discontent and blind

ond widow, which Wollstonecraft

her poor preparation for the vicissitudes of life.Wollstonecraft

"the pedagogy of example"

see Eve Tabor

need to be regarded differently from how

on the one hand, to argue from an open-ended

they have been, Wollstonecraft

plishing this task of large-scale reform because it "has ratherbeen applicable