The Effect of an Early Association of Ideas on the Character

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The Effect of an Early Association of Ideas on the Character

Book excerpt

Date: 1792

Source: Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Penguin Books, 1992.

About the Author: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was an English writer, philosopher, translator, and vocal advocate of educational equality for women. Best known as a feminist author, Wollstonecraft produced a full range of work on topics such as religion, philosophy, sexuality, education, travel, history, and politics. An autodidact and former educator, Wollstonecraft immersed herself in London's intellectual culture in the late 1880s and published several books, most notably Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the latter of which is considered one of the first great feminist manuscripts. She died shortly after the birth of her daughter Mary Godwin, who would grow up to become Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, celebrated author of the classic Gothic novel Frankenstein.

INTRODUCTION

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft was first published in 1792. It is often cited as the founding text of feminism, that school of modern thought which emphasizes the equality of men and women. Wollstonecraft's Vindication has influenced feminist thinkers in all succeeding periods, including the suffragettes (women seeking the right to vote) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Virginia Woolf (author of the equally famous A Room of One's Own, 1929), and thinkers of the "second wave" of feminism from the late 1960s onward.

Mary Wollstonecraft grew up in England. Her family started out wealthy but was steadily impoverished by her father's business errors. Her first fifteen years were spent on farms; her family then moved to London, where Mary educated herself by reading newspapers and library books. She also received some instruction from friends of the family. Later, the education of women was to be her major theme as a writer.

Starting in 1787, only a decade before her death, she published a series of works on subjects including philosophy, politics, religion, fiction, and travel. Wollstonecraft was an ardent Protestant Christian with liberal theological views (she avowed in Vindication that she could not take the story of Genesis literally even "were an angel from Heaven" told her to). Her first major work was Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, which outlined a rationalist system for producing reasonable and virtuous girls. In 1790, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Man, a book-length rebuttal of a recent book by Edmund Burke that had criticized the recent egalitarian revolution in France. She began working on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman even before finishing A Vindication of the Rights of Man, completing it in a mere six weeks.

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft advanced many arguments that were to become basic principles of feminism in the centuries to come. Her effort was spent largely in rebutting claims, which were frequently made by male writers of her day, that women are mentally less capable of men by nature: obsessed with physical appearance, unreliable in judgment, unfit for intellectual work such as business or science. She admitted the reality of female character flaws but denied that innate female nature was the cause.

In the 1700s, writers pointed to behavioral differences between young children as evidence for innate mental differences between the genders. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1788), philosopher of the French Revolution, wrote that "Boys love sports of noise and activity; to beat the drum, to whip the top, and to drag about their little carts: girls, on the other hand, are fonder of things of show and ornament; such as mir-rors, trinkets, and dolls; the doll is the peculiar amusement of the females; from whence we see their taste plainly adapted to their destination … Here then we see a primary propensity firmly established." Wollstonecraft quoted this passage and counter-asserted that gender differences of taste and behavior arise from education. "Girls," she wrote, are "forced to sit still, play with dolls, and listen to foolish conversations; the effect of habit is insisted upon as an undoubted indication of nature." Prefiguring modern views of acculturation, she wrote that "Everything that [children] see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind."

If women were eductated better throughout life, Wollstonecraft argued, they would grow up more virtuous and rational. "Asserting the rights which women in common with men ought to contend for, I have not attempted to extenuate their faults; but to prove them to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society. If so, it is reasonable to suppose, that they will change their character, and correct their vices and follies … Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man." This, according to Wollstonecraft, would be manifested especially in a correction of women's tendency to choose unworthy, exploitative men ("rakes") as mates, which she attributes to the schooling of women in vanity: "Rakes know how to work on their sensibility, whilst the modest merit of reasonable men has, of course, less effect on their feelings …"

Ironically, Wollstonecraft's own first choice of a mate met with exactly the disaster that she hoped all women would someday be able to avoid. In 1793, she began an affair with Gilbert Imlay; she had a daughter by him in 1794 and in 1795, after learning of his unfaithfulness to her, she attempted suicide twice. She married the more stable William Godwin in 1797 and died that same year from medical complications arising from the birth of their daughter Mary.

PRIMARY SOURCE

This habitual slavery, to first impressions, has a more baneful effect on the female than the male character, because business and other dry employments of understanding, tend to deaden the feelings and break associations that do violence to reason. But females, who are made women of when they are mere children, and brought back to childhood when they ought to leave the go-cart for ever, have not sufficient strength of mind to efface the superinductions of art that have smothered nature.

Everything that they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind. False notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of their limbs and produce a sickly soreness, rather than delicacy or organs; and thus weakened by being employed in unfolding instead of examining the first associations, forced on them by every surrounding object, how can they attain the vigour necessary to enable them to throw off their factitious character?—where find strength to recur to reason and rise superior to a system of oppression that blasts the fair promises offspring? This cruel association of ideas, which everything conspires to twist into all their habits of thinking, or, to speak with more precision, of feeling, receives new force when they begin to act a little for themselves; for they then perceive that it is only through their address to excite emotions in men, that pleasure and power are to be obtained. Besides, the books professedly written for their instruction, which make the first impression on their minds, all inculcate the same opinions. Educated then in worse than Egyptian bondage, it is unreasonable, as well as cruel, to upbraid them with faults that can scarcely be avoided, unless a degree of native vigour be supposed, that falls to the lot of the very few amongst mankind.

For instance, the severest sarcasms have been leveled against the sex, and they have been ridiculed for repeating 'a set of phrases learnt by rote,' when nothing could be more natural, considering the education they receive, and that their highest praise is to obey, unargued—the will of man.

And when all their ingenuity is called forth to adjust their dress 'a passion for a scarlet coat,' is so natural, that it never surprised me; and, allowing Pope's summary of their character to be just, 'that every woman is at heart a rake,' why should they be bitterly censured for seeking a congenial mind, and preferring a rake to a man of sense?

Rakes know how to work on their sensibility, whilst the modest merit of reasonable men has, of course, less effect on their feelings, and they cannot reach the heart by the way of understanding, because they have few sentiments in common.

It seems a little absurd to expect women to be more reasonable than men in their likings, and still to deny them the uncontrolled use of reason. Why do men fall in love with sense? When do they, with their superior powers and advantages, turn from the person to the mind? And how can they then expect women, who are only taught to observe behaviour, and acquire manners rather than morals, to despise what they have been all their lives labouring to attain? Where are they suddenly to find judgement enough to weigh, patiently the sense of an awkward virtuous man, when his manners, of which they are made critical judges, are rebuffing, and his conversation cold and dull, because it does not consist of pretty repartees, or well-turned compliments? In order to admire or esteem anything for a continuance, we must, at least, have our curiosity excited by knowing, in some degree, what we admire; for we are unable to estimate the value of qualities and virtues above our comprehension. Such a respect, when it is felt, may be very sublime; and the confused consciousness of humility may render the dependent creature an interesting object, in some points of view; but human love must have grosser ingredients; and the person very naturally will come in for its share—and, an ample share it mostly has!

Love is, in a great degree, an arbitrary passion, and will reign like some other stalking mischiefs, by its own authority, without designing to reason, and it may also be easily distinguished from esteem, the foundation of friendship, because it is often excited by evanescent beauties and graces, though, to give an energy to the sentiment, something more solid must deepen their impression and set the imagination to work, to make the most fair—the first good.

Common passions are excited by common qualities. Men look for beauty and the simper of good-humoured docility: women are captivated by easy manners; a gentleman-like man seldom fails to please them, and their thirsty ears eagerly drink the insinuating nothings of politeness, whilst they turn from the unintelligible sounds of the charmer—reason, charm he never so wisely. With respect to superficial accomplishments, the rake certainly has the advantage; and of these females can form an opinion, for it is their own ground. Rendered gay and giddy by the whole tenor of their lives, the very aspect of wisdom, or the severe graces of virtue, must have a lugubrious appearance to them; and produce a kind of restraint from which they and love, sportive child, naturally revolt. Without taste, excepting of the lighter kind, for taste is the offspring of judgement, how can they discover that true beauty and grace must arise from the play of the mind? And how can they be expected to relish in a lover what they do not, or very imperfectly, possess themselves? The sympathy that united hearts, and invites to confidence, in them is so very faint, that it cannot take fire, and thus mount to passion. No, I repeat it, the love cherished for such minds, must have grosser fuel!

The inference is obvious; till women are led to exercise their understandings, they should not be satirized for their attachment to rakes; or even for being rakes at heart, when they who live to please—must find their enjoyments, their happiness, in pleasure! It is a trite, yet true remark, that we never do anything well, unless we love it for its own sake.

SIGNIFICANCE

The ideas put forward by Mary Wollstonecraft long remained those of a tiny minority. Throughout the nineteenth century, the view that men are innately more rational than women actually became more prevalent, gaining the endorsement of mainstream scientific opinion. For example, Gustave Le Bon, a respected French psychologist, wrote in 1879 that "All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason." These are exactly the charges that Wollstonecraft was answering in the 1790s.

In the late nineteenth century, however, Wollstonecraft's ideas began to gain wider currency. Suffragettes fought for and won the vote for women early in the twentieth century. Starting in the 1960s, a new wave of feminists began to take Wollstonecraft's radical egalitarianism with renewed seriousness. Although her religious beliefs and her emphasis on the "virtues of man" (which women, she thought, could hope to emulate) were largely dropped, her belief that girls and women could be equally capable in all departments if given equal education became standard for millions of women and men, as did her demand of equal pay for equal work.

However, the belief that human behaviors are to some large extent programmed by inheritance regained credence in parts of the scientific community starting with the rise of sociobiology in 1975. Rousseau's belief that boys' and girls' play habits reflect innate mental differences is being seriously researched today; in 2005, a widely cited study announced that male vervet monkeys are more likely to play with balls and toy trucks and female monkeys with pots and dolls. Thus, controversy continues over precisely the nature/nurture debate in which Wollstonecraft participated over two hundred years ago. However, it is very rare today for any scientist to insist that male/female differences, even if partly or mostly biological in origin, imply female inferiority; Wollstonecraft's once-revolutionary insistence on the equal merit, "virtue," and reasonableness of the sexes has now become nearly universal in Western society.