In 2017 the city of Hull was the UK City of Culture. As part of the year-long celebrations Gender Studies at the University of Hull hosted a conference entitled Mary Wollstonecraft; Life Work and Legacy on International Women’s Day. This conference was supported by the Journal of Gender Studies. Many of the papers collected here in this Special Issue had their origin in work presented that day.
Mary Wollstonecraft was an appropriate choice for a celebration of Hull’s history, for she spent her formative years in East Yorkshire (the county surrounding Hull). She lived there from the ages of nine to fifteen, longer than anywhere else in her life. It is said to be the only place she remembered with any affection. Initially, the family farmed at Walkington, but three years later took a house in the centre of Beverley. The conference and the annual Mary Wollstonecraft Lecture established in 2008 in her honour have raised her profile locally, and in 2018 the house in which she lived was finally identified and honoured with a green plaque. Her image, as designed by street artist Stewy, has also been projected onto a building in the centre of Beverley. These celebrations followed on the heels of the Mary On the Green campaign for a statue to memorialize Mary on Newington Green in London, where she established her first school and mixed with the radical thinkers who were also formative of her own thought. A design by the artist Maggie Hambling has been chosen and the fundraising for the statue is ongoing (https://www.maryonthegreen.org/index.shtml).
Part of our concern in the celebratory conference was to address questions of public celebration and memorial and we were joined and informed by Caroline Criado Perez who has been so central to campaigns to increase the public visibility of women in the UK; successfully leading campaigns to maintain the presence of a woman (apart from the Queen) on bank notes issued by the Bank of England and to celebrate the suffragette Millicent Fawcett by a statue in Parliament Square. We were also joined by members of the Mary On the Green network.
We wanted to celebrate Wollstonecraft’s life. Her life, Virginia Woolf suggested was ‘an experiment’ and it provides an inspiration, even now, for those wanting to strike an independent path in a world which judges them, by attempting to exercise intellectual power without sacrificing love and intimacy. But we also wanted to celebrate her work. Wollstonecraft is most famous for her 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the pioneering feminist political text. She also wrote novels, travel writing and other key works of political philosophy. She mixed with fellow radicals and was in Paris to witness key events of the French revolution. In the words of the edition of the Vindication, in the Penguin books Great Ideas series, she is highlighted as one of ‘the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilisation and helped make us who we are’ (Penguin 2004, cover). To this end we were very lucky to welcome Janet Todd to the conference, whose authoritative biographies of Wollstonecraft and her daughter, and editions of her letters and travel writings have provided the rest of us with crucial resources and insights. Janet’s opening address is published here as our first paper.
Janet Todd’s address reflects on the way in which Wollstonecraft’s reputation, personal and intellectual, was damaged and skewed by the memoir written shortly after her death by her husband William Godwin. It, as Todd says, ‘tied her political convictions to … personal and sexual life’ obscuring the seriousness and complexity of her thought and resulting in scandal. A very different Mary emerges if we pay attention to her letters to her sisters and friends and to the full range of her work.
One of the elements Godwin misrepresented was Wollstonecraft’s relation to religious thought, and this is picked up in the second paper here, by Victoria Browne (winner of the 2017 Mary Wollstonecraft Prize). She argues that ‘Religious concepts and themes are central to many of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings, yet rarely feature within popular representations of her life, work and legacy today’. Readdressing these themes can be important in the context of present day feminism, dominant strands of which have been resolutely secular, and thereby unable to engage with voices which make use of religious frameworks. Interestingly, at the conference, the theme of Wollstonecraft’s religious influences and their relation to her feminism was also addressed by Sandrine Berges. She also suggested that they provide important resources for contemporary feminist thought.
In the third paper Angela Maoine (runner up for the 2017 Mary Wollstonecraft prize) turns to another neglected aspect of Wollstonecraft’s thought: Wollstonecraft’s republicanism. She argues that ‘over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both outside and within academia, the dominant interpretive tendency of neglecting Wollstonecraft’s radical republican politics has deradicalized both her historical political thought as well as her iconic image.’ In this paper she is reclaimed as a key contributor to republican thought.
Her republican politics also form the background to the criticisms of Burke aired in The Vindication of the Rights of Man. Katherine O’Donnell, linking this discussion to the pamphlet wars of the times, highlights the way in which Wollstonecraft charges Burke with an effeminacy of thinking, in which he indulges sentiment at the expense of reason. The charge of effeminacy, of course, relies on an identification of women with sentiment rather than reason, an association which Wollstonecraft herself contested, though she employed the term. Her insistence on the role of reason and women’s need to be trained to exercise it, carried over into the second Vindication.
It is, however, a mistake to align Wollstonecraft only with rationalist thinkers. Her early and late writings celebrated sentiment and throughout her life she attempted to articulate a balance between reason and passion, to the exclusion of neither. In a paper which also considers her criticisms of Burke, Arman Teymouri Niknam, argues, while developing the conceptions of trust which she employed, that ‘Wollstonecraft ultimately reinforced the value of “an educated heart”, namely the idea that the feelings of the heart should be cultivated by reason’. What she rejected in Burke was an appeal to inbred sentiments, which were uncultivated.
What emerges from this is a picture of sentiments as trained dispositions to respond. Such trained dispositions are also central to Ros Hague’s paper. Here however the dispositions are of a different sort, dispositions to non-domination which cut across the public and private sphere and are cultivated by education. Such dispositions are at the heart of the account of autonomy Hague derives from her work. We are only truly autonomous if we do not dominate others. Very sadly Ros Hague died suddenly a few months after the conference. We are pleased to publish her work here, together with a tribute from her colleagues.
Autonomous individuals, trained to eschew domination, lie at the heart of a model of marriage as friendship, discussed in the paper by Matthew Hartman. This paper argues that Mary Wollstonecraft interprets marriage in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a relationship reminiscent of Aristotelian higher friendship ‘rather than an institution Aristotle explicitly viewed as a husband ruling a wife’. If we accept this picture we can see how, as an institution, it is not necessarily one between a man and a woman.
In Valentina Pramaggiore’s paper, looking at Wollstonecraft’s travel writing, we come to appreciate the range of her thought and work. As Pramaggiore suggests, ‘In her 1796 travelogue, Wollstonecraft combines the main elements of many different genres, blending together the physical-geographical account of the countries she was visiting with her own feelings, producing a Romantic conception of the human being overwhelmed by and subsumed into the natural elements.’ She shows how, in these writings, Wollstonecraft continues her interrogation of the relation of sentiment and reason and puts it to work to explore the pleasures and responsibilities of motherhood.
Finally, in our forum piece, Rachel Alsop and Suzanne Clisby reflect on how the picture painted of the lives of young women in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication compares and contrasts with the experiences and concerns of girls today. Drawing on their research on contemporary girls rights in the UK, they put the voices of 21st century girls and young women in conversation with some of Wollstonecraft’s key ideas in relation to education, body image and objectification.
We would like to thank all our contributors for sharing their work with us, and hope that you, the readers, will go away inspired by this iconic early feminist who lay the groundwork for what is possible for women today.