Promiscuity And Responsibility In Mary Wollstonecraft's Work

Mary Wollstonecraft was truly as scandalous as she was influential. During her eighteenth-century life, her actions and lifestyle set the fingers and tongues of British upper-class society wagging. Known for her multiple suicide attempts and her many love affairs with married artists, an American adventurer, and an English radical anarchist (whom she would marry), Wollstonecraft’s unhappy, unorthodox life of promiscuity and debauchery rendered her a moral lesson used by British mothers to frighten their daughters. (Todd, 2000) Her critics sneered that no self-respecting woman of any social class should deign themselves to read her work, and as a result, throughout most of her life, Wollstonecraft’s writings were relatively ignored. (Sapiro,

Angered by the lack of careers available to decent, yet poor women, Wollstonecraft picked up her pen and broke through the gender-barrier into the man’s world of authorship. (Sapiro, 1992, pp. 6-8) She did not achieve immediate success - her early work, including a treatise on the education of middle-class daughters and a collection of didactic children’s stories, faded into obscurity. Her first publication to win her some renown was A Vindication of the Rights of Men, which attacked the philosopher Edmund Burke’s description of the weakness of womanly virtue, and his defense of the French monarchy and aristocracy. (Shmoop University,

Considered the earliest and most influential work of feminist philosophy, Rights of Women was written hastily in response to a presentation made at the French National Assembly that promoted bestowing only domestic education on women. (Sunstein, 1975, pp. 3-5) Wollstonecraft insisted that women were crucial to society, since they raised and molded the country’s future generations. She pointed out that educated women would raise educated children and could act as intellectual companions to their husbands, rather than just disconnected wives. Education would improve women, thus also improving society. (Todd, 2000) She declared that eighteenth-century women were petty and featherbrained because men made them that way by withholding education from the fairer sex. "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," Wollstonecraft proclaimed, referring to the contemporary argument by men that women did not care for conversation beyond that of fashion and beauty. (Wollstonecraft, 1796, p.