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1. Ferocious Condemnations
This book appeared in 1794 as An Historical and Moral View o f
the Origin and Progress o f the French Revolution. It ends with the
removal o f the king and the Assembly from Versailles back to Paris
(October 1789) as a consequence of the Women's March, which is
discussed at very great length. It is a thoroughly political-ideological
work, not merely a narrative o f events. The narrative, what there is
of it, is often over-whelmed by her accompanying criticism of the
historical actors, and by her exposition of what they should have
done in accordance with her views.
There is no other work in which the sociopolitical views of the
author are exposed half so clearly. It casts a fierce light backwards
on the ideological context of the earlier book about women's rights,
the Vindication of 1792.
Her major biographers, Tomalin and Flexner, are frankly puzzled
by the book on the Revolution, and therefore give it scant attention.
Both of these biographers are naturally taken aback by the blatant
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passage that savagely condemns the Women's March on Versailles in
<)etober, but they solve the problem of explaining it to the reader by
refraining from presenting it to the reader in the first place. Here, for
example, is some of what Wollstonecraft wrote:
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2. The Monsters
Wollstonecraft's political views, expressed at very great length,
are of a piece with her social orientation.
On the personal level, the unbridled hatred she feels for the
majority of the revolutionary Assembly breaks out in constant
imprecations, in “ferocious” language: for example, “a race of
monsters, the most flagitious that ever alarmed the world by the
murder of the innocents” (the innocents are not identified but are
presumably the nobles). They are “sanguinary brutes,” “those
monsters who are meditating the violation of the sacred ties of
honour and humanity...” These pleasantries dot her “reflections” on
the Assembly majority of 1789 (which, remember, was still far from
being Jacobin-dominated). But it is not always easy to know who or
what she is cursing at, in a given passage. When she refers clearly to
the leftists, they are “the popular promoters of anarchy, to serve their
private interest,” and so on (as distinct from her friend Mme.
Roland's circle, who are interested only in the Good of Humanity).
Her serious view is that the Revolution already went to a
monstrously ultraradical extreme early in 1789, and that the October
march on Versailles by the women turned the revolution into
“anarchy.” The basic mistake was this: after the fall of the Bastille,
the course should have been very slow, slowly effecting gradual
reforms that took away a minimum of power from the throne.
This position is repeated over and over (the repetitive style is
characteristic of the book). She especially condemns any wish to
attack the system at the roots: “instead of looking for gradual
improvement, letting one reform calmly produce another, they [the
people] seemed determined to strike at the root of all their misery at
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Assembly was unwise in not curbing it. The trouble with the
Assembly majority is that, with overweening arrogance, it wants to
institute a better system than the English or Americans have done:
(1) Part of the “proof’ that the whole affair was whipped up by
“designing persons” is her argument that independent movement by
women is unthinkable:
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That a body o f women should put themselves in
motion to demand relief of the king, or to
remonstrate with the assembly respecting their tardy
manner of forming a constitution, is scarcely
probable...
She regards the queen as only another woman, our author says,
while she curses at the women of the people who disturbed “the chaste
temple o f a woman.” It would be hard to find a passage in political
literature that more blatantly reflects internalized class hypocrisy.
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commit “still more atrocious crimes” and encourage “the brutality of
their sanguinary dispositions.” And the Assembly was just as remiss: it
should “have smothered in embryo that spirit of rebellion and
licentiousness, which [was] beginning to appear in the metropolis...”
whereas they “permitted that gang of assassins to regain their dens...”
She plainly thinks there should have been a blood-bath of repression
directed against the women.
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there is little danger in that direction. Especially in the last two
decades there has been a flood of biographical and historical
literature, from full-length biographies to articles; whereas the
revolutionary women she contemned have been pushed into the
shadows. In part it is a question of turning the helm the other way.
In any case what concerns us is not the fact of her limitations but
their nature and source. This too has been pushed into the shadows.
Mary Wollstonecraft was brought up in a social limbo which has
no established sociological tag because it is seldom distinguished
from the basic counterposition o f bourgeoisie and working class,
with the old ruling class of the landed gentry in process of fusing
into the former. This limbo is the uneasy twilight zone between two
societal worlds— the shining world of the affluent bourgeoisie with
its aristocratic partners and allies, on the one hand, and on the other
the dark abyss of the working poor. This zone o f betweeners is alien
to both worlds. Its inhabitants fear the abyss above all—the slide
down into the hopeless world o f propertyless labor; they fear it like
sin. They long for the upper regions above them with a longing that
is the very hope of salvation. It is no use muttering the label “petty-
bourgeoisie,” which is too restricted, for reasons not germane here;
the limbo is a junkyard of social fragments, one o f them called the
shabby-genteel.
Naturally the limbo took shape as the bourgeoisie itself came to
term; and so Mary Wollstonecraft's case, coming at the threshold of
the nineteenth century, was one o f the earlier prominent examples. It
is a very clear case.
Her paternal grandfather, whose will overshadowed the family
for two generations, was a successful capitalist who rose from among
the master weavers, one of the few to make his way up from that
decaying trade. He left a third of his estate to Mary's father, and
another third to her brother, who eventually became a lawyer and
moved out and up. Both windfalls eluded Mary herself; for her
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father used the money in an attempt to become a gentleman farmer,
and as he lost his money he steadily went down in the world. Still,
during the upper phase of the family's descent, it knew what it was to
have servants. Her mother, who came from an Irish family of
genteel status based on money gained in the wool trade, even talked
about employing a governess for her daughter, this being a necessary
adjunct of gentry condition. For a period they moved in the same
social circles as friends who were really rich, and maintained a
suitably high style of life. As the family slipped in the social scale,
in proportion to the slippage of its ready cash, it moved from one
district to another, putting down no roots.
As Mary grew up, she was a Young Lady to some, an
impoverished inferior to others: one of the social-schizos of the
limbo. The balance kept shifting toward the lower end of the scale,
nearer the lip of the abyss. By the time she reached eighteen, she
moved inexorably into one of the three main occupations available to
females who (1) were not so declassed as to have to work with their
hands, but (2) were not so well-off as not to have to work at all. That
is, she took employment as companion to a wealthy widow. Then,
for a while, she and two sisters carried on the second of these three
occupations: work in a small teaching establishment. At 26 she
moved to the third occupation: governess in a wealthy household.
So far, the characteristic course o f the people of the limbo. But
at 28 her talents made it possible for her to slip out of the class
structure altogether by one of the few side doors: she became a
professional writer. Thus she entered that parallel social formation
of inside Outsiders which accompanied the development of the
bourgeoisie as the remora accompanies the shark: the intelligentsia.
One of the main virtues of Tomalin's biography is that she does
not turn her heroine into an icon. In this spirit, the book provides
interesting glimpses of the specific sort of class feeling that informed
Wollstonecraft. This may sometimes appear as snobbery, but its
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But as women educated like gentlewomen are never
designed for the humiliating situation which
necessity sometimes forces them to fill, these
situations are considered in the light of a
degradation; and they know little o f the human
heart, who need to be told that nothing so painfully
sharpens sensibility as such a fall in life. [222]*
* The page number in brackets refers to the edition listed in the Bibliography,
for readers who may want to follow the argument in Wollstonecraft's book.
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existence,” “the love of pleasure may be said to govern them all.”
All. The highly moral complaint ends with this:
5. Vindication— O f Whom?
Wollstonecraft is not insensitive to class distinctions. On the
contrary, at several points she undertakes a class analysis so openly
presented that it might be damned as “Marxist” today. She even
offers a class analysis of breast-feeding: it is wealth, she says, that
makes women spurn breast-feeding because their only aim is “to
preserve their beauty.” [214] Such class analyses were common in
the early literature o f the bourgeoisie.
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*“Middle class” here means the bourgeoisie; it is seen as being in the middle
between the aristocracy and the lower orders. Wollstonecraft usually uses 'the
rich' to mean the old landed ruling class, even though the bourgeoisie was rich
too. That is, in her usage 'the rich' means the idle rich, those who are merely
rich, who do nothing for their wealth, unlike the hard-working capitalists. She
eschews the term 'aristocracy.'
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giddy whirl o f pleasure...” How few —only the great majority! Even
the simple thought of women who work fails to turn her eyes to the
Invisible Women of the masses. By women who work she is thinking
solely o f her own type of dropout from the “giddy whirl.” She
virtually says so, a second time, by making clear she is thinking of
women who might aspire to business and professional
vocations— “who might have practised as physicians, regulated a
farm, managed a shop.”
These “respectable” women (“the most oppressed”) aspire to
manage the shop; the female drudges who will wear themselves out
by working there are the Invisible Women. In more modem
parlance, Wollstonecraft speaks and thinks as the champion o f the
aspiring business and professional career woman, who has
essentially the same attitude toward the mass o f the female sex as
have the male exploiters in the dominant society. She is just as
determined to get her rights over their backs.
In celebrating her pioneer achievements, we should not go
beyond the truth. Her pioneer contribution was a Vindication of the
Rights of Certain Women She was not concerned about “one half of
the human race,” despite the feminist rhetoric, but about her sector of
the upper tenth. Her plea was that the natural masters of society
should accept their women into the ruling circles as partners. She
belongs on the list of those reformers who importuned the ruling
classes to reform themselves in order to be fit to rule.
This is the meaning of bourgeois feminism, and Wollstonecraft
was its great herald. That is honor enough for anyone.
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