Feminism by Margaret Walters Read Free Book Online Page B

something new in her day: universal education, at least to the age of 9.
    Any woman who tries to act like a human being, Wollstonecraft remarks, risks being labelled ‘masculine’, and she admits that the fear of being thought unwomanly runs very deep in her sex. But if
    ‘masculinity’ means behaving rationally and virtuously, she recommends that we all ‘grow more and more masculine’. Even though she defends women’s potential powers – their capacity for all kinds of intellectual activity – she was scathing about the actual behaviour of many of her contemporaries. ‘Told from their infancy and taught by the examples of their mothers’ that they must find a man to support them, they learn to exploit their charms and looks until they find a man willing to support them. They rarely think –
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    and have few genuine feelings. But Wollstonecraft also accepted that, though better education for women is all-important, it cannot change everything: ‘Men and women must be educated in a great y
    degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.’ And : Amaz without a radical change in society, there can be no real ‘revolution ons of th
    in female manners’. In this present state of things, she finds it hardly surprising that so many women are ignorant, lazy, and e pen
    irresponsible.
    It is interesting, and rather sad, that other women – even some highly literate ones – were among Wollstonecraft’s sharpest critics.
    Hannah More, for example, refused even to read Wollstonecraft’s book because its very title was ‘absurd’; while Hannah Cowley protested coyly that ‘politics are unfeminine ’.
    Wollstonecraft’s Vindication may seem, at first glance, dated. But she is an effective writer; her prose is down-to-earth, lively, and often tart. The book is still highly readable, and it remains one of the foundation stones of contemporary feminism. Her argument is circular and, because it is exploratory, often breaking new ground, can seem at times confused. She was sharply, sometimes bitterly, aware of the personal difficulties that women experienced in her 35
    society. She argued, for example, that an understanding of childhood is central to any self-knowledge. The ability to recognize one’s own childishness is crucial to maturity: ‘till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child – long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it’. A few months later, she wrote sadly to the philosopher and novelist William Godwin that ‘my imagination is forever betraying me into fresh misery, and I perceive that I shall be a child to the end of the chapter’.
    As we have seen, Wollstonecraft’s story Mary, A Fiction , based in part on her own childhood and her difficult relationship with her parents, is an intriguing attempt to explore the way women grow up. (It is also an occasionally heavy-handed celebration of her heroine’s sensibility , that capacity for true feeling that sets her apart from other people.) The book draws on Wollstonecraft’s painful recognition of the way unresolved feelings from childhood so often dominate, and even pervert, adult relationships; how, throughout minism
    our lives, we may be unknowingly re-enacting dramas rooted in the Fe
    past. Women, she argued in the Vindication , are given little encouragement to become truly adult; they are ‘made women of when they are mere children, and brought back to childhood when they ought to leave the go-cart forever’. But any girl ‘whose spirits have not been damped by inactivity, or innocence by false shame, will always be a romp, and the doll will never excite attention unless confinement allows her no alternative’.
    In Thoughts on Education , she had insisted that marriage should be based on friendship and respect rather than love; in the Vindication she claimed, dismissively, that most women remain obsessed by love, dreaming of happiness