Radicalism, religion and Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to challenge a prevailing assumption in accounts of Enlightenment radicalism that it was essentially secular. A major problem with such a view is that it precludes the possibility of women’s radicalism, given the importance of religion for women in this period. I challenge the disconnection between religion and radical thought by highlighting their interconnection in the case of Mary Wollstonecraft. Recent studies of Wollstonecraft’s republicanism have focused attention on her political radicalism. These studies, for the most part, suggest her sources were secular, especially her conception of liberty as freedom from arbitrary power. After discussing Wollstonecraft’s religious formation, I suggest that there are religious and ethical sources for her view of liberty which have been left out of account. Thus, religion was not just a matter of Wollstonecraft’s personal beliefs, or emotional temper, but provided an important intellectual resource for her political arguments.

KEYWORDS:

• Mary Wollstonecraft
• religion
• radicalism
• rational dissenters
• liberty
• Richard Price

Notes on contributor

Sarah Hutton is Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York, U.K. She has published extensively on women in the history of philosophy and science. Her publications include Anne Conway. A Woman Philosopher (CUP 2004) and Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680): A Philosopher in her Philosophical Context (Springer 2021, co-edited with Sabrina Ebbersmeyer). Until 2019 she was director of International Archives of the History of Ideas. She is President of the International Society for Intellectual History.

Notes

1 Reuter, Halldenius, and Coffee, “Cluster Introduction: Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophy and Enlightenment,” 906–7.

2 Cf. also on this point, Tomaselli, “Reflections on Inequality,” 323, and Lena Halldenius’ cautions about distortions arising from reading texts outside their intellectual context,:Halldenius, Mary Wollstonecraft, 16–17.

3 Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee point out the difficulty in identifying sources for figures like Wollstonecraft, who did not have the advantages of higher education or the possession of libraries: Bergès and Coffee, The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, 6. The recent collection of essays Women and Liberty, edited by Jacqueline Broad and Karen Detlefsen, demonstrates how different a familiar topos proves to be when seen from a female perspective.

4 See Hutton, “The Ethical Background of the Rights of Women”; Hutton, “Liberty, Equality and God”; Hutton, “Virtue, God and Stoicism.” Religion is not the only connecting motif between Wollstonecraft and her predecessors, as Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green show in their contributions in Bergès, Coffee, and Hunt Botting, The Wollstonecraftian Mind.

5 Two recent contributions to this long debate are Como, Radical Parliamentarians, and Hessayon and Finnegan, Varieties of Seventeenth-and-Early Eighteenth-Century Radicalism. Richard Popkin’s work on Spinoza underlines his connections with religious radicals of his time as well as his Bible scholarship.

6 Browne, The Eighteenth Century Feminist Mind, 199.

7 Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion. Also Mack, “Religion, Feminism and the Problem of Agency.”

8 Broad, “Liberty and the Right of Resistance.”

9 Barbara Taylor, for example, laments her “death by canonization”: see Taylor, “Mary Wollstonecraft and Modern Philosophy,” 219.

10 For example, the compendious biographies by Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, and Gary Kelly’s study Revolutionary feminism.

11 Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer.

12 Broad and Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought, 1400–1700; Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800. However, Janet Todd asserts that Wollstonecraft lacked knowledge of earlier feminist tradition: Todd, A Revolutionary Life, 177.

13 Khin Zaw, “The Reasonable Heart.” This was also one of the first studies to underscore the religious element in Wollstonecraft and her Platonism.

14 Bergès, Coffee, and Hunt Botting, The Wollstonecraftian Mind, 1. As Lena Halldenius points out, both feminists and political theorists have been slow to acknowledge her republicanism: Halldenius, Mary Wollstonecraft. Carole Pateman notes that it was only in the 1990s that Wollstonecraft found a place in the history of political thought: Pateman, “Mary Wollstonecraft.”

15 Bergès and Coffee, The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft; Bergès, Coffee, and Hunt Botting, The Wollstonecraftian Mind.

16 Barbara Taylor bridles at “attempts to assimilate Wollstonecraft to male-dominated philosophical traditions,” the price being a loss of women’s views. She also cautions against “slotting her in to this or that intellectual tradition”: Taylor, “Mary Wollstonecraft and Modern Philosophy,” 219. I agree that placing Wollstonecraft as a philosopher should not be a matter of assimilation to existing philosophical traditions, male (as they usually are) or not. I would add, furthermore, that to place her as a philosopher is not to seek to unearth the philosophical system in her writings or deny that her ideas changed and developed. For the general problem of recovering women’s philosophy, see Hutton, “Women, Philosophy and the History of Philosophy.”

17 The influence of Price on Wollstonecraft is discussed by Saba Bahar and Louise Hickman; the latter focusing largely on a rather generic account of Platonism in Price. Bahar, “Richard Price and the Moral Foundations”; Hickman, Eighteenth-century dissent. See also Hutton, “Ethical Background.”

18 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is hereafter referred to as V.R.W. All quotations from V.R.W. and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (hereafter V.R.M.) are from Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli.

19 Rees and Todd in their “Introduction” to Wollstonecraft, Political Writings. Janet Todd goes so far as to claim that V.R.W. abandons the “political matter” of V.R.M.: Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 177. Ruth Abbey attributes what she sees as Wollstonecraft’s “failure” to speak about rights to her appeal to God: Abbey, “Are Women Human?”

20 Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy; Kaplan, Sea Changes, 35.

21 Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue.

22 E.g. Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 179: “With its religious and moral emphasis, the book was little concerned with political ‘rights’.”

23 Khin Zaw, “The Reasonable Heart”; see also Hutton, “The Ethical Background of the Rights of Women.”

24 Taylor, “The Religious Foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminism”; Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Barbara Taylor draws on my 1993 paper, Hutton, “The Ethical Background of the Rights of Women” (published 2003). More recently, Wollstonecraft and religion are discussed by Hunt Botting, Family Feuds; Abbey, in Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, ed. Hunt Botting; Dumler-Winckler “Theology and Religion” in Bergès, Coffee, and Hunt Botting, The Wollstonecraftian Mind. Especially valuable for challenging atheistic interpreations of Wollstonecraft is Bergès, “Wollstonecraft.”

25 See, for example, Bour, “Epistemology”; Carlson, “Immanuel Kant”.

26 See, for example, Emily Dumler-Winckler, “Theology and Religion,” who argues that Wollstonecraft’s theology provides “an aesthetic basis for her feminist ethics and political theory,” and treats religion as a metaphor (my emphases). Lena Halldenius, by contrast, does accept the importance of religion, but reduces Wollstonecraft’s God to the perfection of reason: Halldenius, Mary Wollstonecraft.

27 Godwin, Memoirs, 215, quoted in Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, 96.

28 Godwin’s reliability has been called into question. See Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft.

29 Wollstonecraft, Hints, in Wollstonecraft, Works, 5: 273.

30 See Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Fiction, Chapter 13, in Wollstoncraft, Works, vol.1.

31 Wollstonecraft, Hints, in Wollstonecraft, Works, vol. 5: 274.

32 Lianne Carlson considers her “only Christian in the vaguest sense” (Carlson, “Immanuel Kant”), while Isabelle Bour regards her as becoming more secularized over time: Bour, “Epistemology,” 312. Wollstonecraft’s “stripped down” account of religion does not mean that it is “only Christian in the vaguest sense,” as argued by Carlson, “Immanuel Kant.” Her God is “good, benevolent, rational, and providential” to be sure, but not therefore “thin.” While she may have had ecumenical reasons for treating religion in this way in her writings, it is, in fact, fairly standard in philosophical discussions.

33 As Silvana Tomaselli notes, Wollstonecraft writes on the sanctity of rights with the “assurance of a believer”: Wollstonecraft, “Introduction” to V.R.W., xii.

34 While she was governess to the Kingsborough family, she read Fanny Burney’s Cecilia, Charlotte Smith and Mme de Genlis’ Letters on Education.

35 Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft.

36 Wollstonecraft, V,R.W., 86.

37 Analytical Review, vol. 5 (September 1789), 217, in Wollstonecraft, Works, 7: 175.

38 Wollstonecraft, V.R.W., 186–7. Without going into detail, she repudiates De Genlis’ belief in eternal hell punishment.

39 Analytical Review, vol. 3, January 1789, 41–8.

40 Hutton, “Virtue, God and Stoicism,” 138.

41 Wollstonecraft, V.R.M., 7.

42 Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism, 91. Also Barker-Benfield, “Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthwoman.”

43 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism.

44 See, for example, Coffee, “Mary Wollstonecraft”; Pettit, “Republican Elements”; Halldenius, Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism. Some, like Alan Coffee, disagree that Wollstonecraft’s conception of republicanism is entirely secular. Cf. also Coffee’s “Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Conception of Social and Political Liberty.”

45 Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View, 296.

46 Ibid., 3.

47 Ibid., 12.

48 Ibid., 72.

49 Ibid., 346–7.

50 Ibid., 489.

51 Defending the Revolution, she urged William Roscoe in 1792 not to “throw an odium on immutable principles” simply because of the excesses of some revolutionaries: Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters, 218.

52 Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism, 91.

53 On rational dissent, see Haakonssen, Enlightenment and Religion. See also Smith, “Rational Dissent.” Wollstonecraft was well aware of the political disadvantages faced by the dissenting community with which she was associated. In V.R.M., she makes direct reference to the restrictions on their exercise of political and religious rights when she cites “liberty civil and religious” as an example of “disputed right”: Wollstonecraft, V.R.M., 7.

54 See, for example, Coffee “Freedom as Independence.”

55 Bergès, “Wollstonecraft”, 62–3.

56 Wollstonecraft, V.R.W., 106, 127.

57 Analytical Review, vol. 8, Nov. 1790 in Wollstonecraft, Works, 7: 309–22.

58 Ibid., 318.

59 Ibid. These quotations are taken from Macaulay.

60 Wollstonecraft, V.R.W., 118.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid. Wollstonecraft is theologically correct when she declines to differentiate or order the attributes of God. She criticizes Rousseau for “exalting one attribute at the expense of another” (ibid., 81). She also allows that there may be more divine attributes than those of which humans are aware (ibid., 118).

65 Wollstonecraft, V.R.M., 64.

66 Wollstonecraft, V.R.M., 7.

67 Ibid.

68 Wollstonecraft, V.R.W., 107.

69 Price, A Review, 181. Cf. Price, Political Writings, 76: “The liberty of men as agents is that power of self-determination which all agents, as such, possess. Their liberty as moral agents is the power of self-government in their moral conduct.”

70 Price, A Review, 21.

71 Ibid., 22–3. Cf. Price, Political Writings, 76: “all the different kinds of liberty run up into the general idea of self-government.”

72 The significance of Price is not merely biographical, as Liane Carlson suggests in “Immanuel Kant.” There are strong intellectual links. Ignorance of this has allowed earlier commentators to dismiss him and fellow dissenters for their “prim littleness”: Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 59.

73 Price was not the only significant influence on Wollstonecraft. As Susan Khin Zaw notes, she was something of a “cherry picker” in her philosophical methodologies. There are fewer contraditions and inconsistencies when matching her ideas against Price than against Locke or Kant (e.g. in epistemology). Her debt to Price is certainly a more plausible one than to Rousseau, who is the philosopher of choice among Wollstonecraft scholars for influence on Wollstonecraft. See, for example, Poovey, Proper Lady; Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism; Abbey “Are Women Human?” Another possible source for her Platonism was the translator of Plato, Thomas Taylor (Tomaselli, “Reflections on Inequality,” n. 6), but it was most unlikely to have been Milton, as suggested by Taylor “Religious Foundations,” 115.

74 Hutton, “The Religious Roots of Catharine Macaulay’s Feminism.”

75 An important step in this direction is the collection of essays Women on Liberty, edited by Jacqueline Broad and Karen Detlefsen.