wrote her first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788).
But, Wollstonecraft had become frustrated by the limited career options for poor women, even educated ones. She wanted to make a living as an author, which was an unwise decision. At the time, few women could support themselves by writing.
In 1788, she moved to London. She learned French and German and translated texts, most notably Of the Importance of Religious Opinions by Jacques Necker (Madame de Staël’s father) and became literary advisor to Joseph Johnson, the publisher of radical texts. She also wrote for Johnson's newly created periodical, the Analytical Review.
She became acquainted with and accepted among intellectual circles and radical thinkers of the time such as Thomas Paine and the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement. The first time Godwin and Wollstonecraft met, they didn’t like each other, as she criticized him and disagreed with him on everything.
In 1790, she produced her first overtly political and feminist work with Vindication of the Rights of Men, in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. She was outraged that the same man who had once defended the American colonies was now bashing the revolution.
After the publication of Rights of Men, which made her famous overnight, she decided to travel to France to participate in the revolutionary events, and to avoid an embarrassing failed affair with married man, Henry Fuseli. Pursuing the same ideas of Rights of Men in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), this publication became her most famous and influential work.
In Rights of Woman, "she clearly abhors prevailing notions that women are helpless adornments of a household. Instead, she states that society breeds ‘gentle domestic brutes’ and that a confined existence makes women frustrated and transforms them into tyrants over their children and servants."
[Wikipedia]. Her ideas were truly revolutionary. She was an
observer as well as a participant of
a remarkable series of social revolutions. It was the Age of
Enlightenment, when everything from family, to the state, and educational theory, even religion were being reconsidered. It was the Age of Reason, but these ideas seemed in blunt contrast to the realities of women's lives. Wollstonecraft, herself, could look to her own past. Victims of abuse had no legal recourse, and those who didn’t have husbands had to find ways to provide for themselves and their families.
To the same effect, Wollstonecraft touched the subject of feeling and thought, trying to bring them together instead of separating them according to men and women. If women seemed silly and superficial, it was due to their lack of quality education and not a deficiency of mind, and wrote: "Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”
French educational philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau—who was an advocate of personal rights and a firm believer that women did not deserve such a right for they were incapable of reason—theorized that only men could be citizens, and women should be educated only for the pleasure of men. Wollstonecraft's reaction to this statement was that there can only be true freedom if men and women exercised their responsibilities towards family, states, etc... on the same level. And, to obtain equality, she was convinced that the same education had to be given to both men and women, along with recognition of women as equal partners with their husbands. Also, that women, like men, were capable of both thought and feeling, and, therefore, of reason.
In the wake of Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft left for Paris in December 1792, at a time when France was in turmoil, and Louis XVI was about to lose his head on the guillotine. She met Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American timber merchant and adventurer, and fell madly in love with him. Though Mary had rejected intimacy in Rights of Woman, a pregnancy resulted in her newly awakened interest in sex. In 1793, Imlay registered Mary as his wife to protect her, for Britain had just declared war on France, but they never married. On May 14th, 1794,
Title page from the first American edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). PD.
32 | Ceres Magazine | Spring 2016