Feminism by Margaret Walters Read Free Book Online Page A

Mary decides to live for others, becoming a dutiful ‘feminine’
    woman, whose life, sadly, is an echo of her mother’s. Wollstonecraft may have lacked the skill to develop her characters fully, and the 32
    book was not widely reviewed; but it remains an intriguing and revealing attempt to explore some of the dilemmas with which she herself was confronted.
    By 1790, Wollstonecraft was feeling confident enough to tackle politics; A Vindication of the Rights of Man is a scathing – and occasionally unpleasantly personal – attack on Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections Upon the Revolution in France . She accuses him of sentimentality, and, indeed, a kind of corrupt femininity; she compares him to a ‘celebrated beauty’ desperate for admiration; he is a fantasist, not a serious thinker. Her great feminist polemic, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , followed in 1792; she sets out to speak ‘for my sex, not for myself ’, though she admits that ‘most of the struggles of an eventful life have been Th
    e 18th centur
    occasioned by the oppressed state of my sex’. She takes the simple but crucial step of extending the rights of man , which had been asserted during the French Revolution, to woman .
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    If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, ons of th
    those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test . . . Who made man the exclusive judge, if women partake e pen
    with him of the gift of reason?
    Wollstonecraft admitted that, in the times in which she lived, women were inferior; oppressed from birth, uneducated, and insulated from the real world, most women, inevitably, grew up ignorant and lazy.
    Taught from their infancy that beauty is a woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison.
    Masculine gallantry and flattery are seen simply as attempts to keep women in their places, and the most ‘feminine’ woman is the one who best fulfils male fantasies. Femininity, she argues, is too often an artificial, class-based construct, no more than an anxious 33
    Olympe de Gouges
    In 1791, in revolutionary France, Olympe de Gouges issued a
    Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen , arguing, clearly and forcefully, that woman is born free, and equal to man. In de Gouges’ account, in the old days, a woman who was beautiful and amiable would be offered a hundred fortunes, but she was little more than a slave. Now that she has, at least in theory, rights to liberty, property, and security, and the right to resist oppression, she must be free to mount the rostrum and speak – just as, on occasion, she has had to mount the scaffold. Like man, she is subject to the law, and may be accused and tried according to the law. But that means that woman must also be granted an equal responsibility for public life and in decisions about law and taxation; as well as the right to insist that a man recognizes minism
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    his own children. In the past, both married and unmarried women have been disadvantaged, and survived by exploiting their charm. In future, de Gouges insisted, they must be free to share all man’s activities. More practically, she spells out a detailed ‘social contract’ that would protect any woman – and any man – who chose to unite their lives.
    demonstration of gentility, or would-be gentility. Girls learn how to be women when they are hardly more than babies; as they grow older, and in the absence of any alternative, they exploit this femininity. This, she argues, is a covert admission of women’s inferiority; but women are no more ‘naturally’ inferior than the poor are ‘naturally’ stupid or ignorant. Moreover, she added, all the women she knew who had acted like rational creatures, or shown any vigour of intellect, had accidentally been allowed to run wild as children. She not only argued forcefully for better education for 34
    girls, but for