Penguins on Parade: Vindication of the Rights of Woman!

Some Penguin Classics have been forgotten by those who need most to remember them. The Western world has never been more open-handed of women’s rights, for instance, than it is at this moment in the 21st century, and hundreds of thousands of young women in the United States alone have grown up their entire lives with freedoms their counterparts in any previous century simply wouldn’t have believed. These women have plenty of time to coin nonsense-words like ‘hystory’ or to scan every list and book review compulsively counting up the boys versus the girls (eventually reaching a state of mindlessness so morbid that they object if there are no women on a Worst Books list); they have plenty of time for lawsuits, but most of them have no time at all for the actual law-givers of their license.

In their complacent arrogance, such women ape the worst qualities of men and call it emancipation; they’re happy to bray catch-phrases, but they’re as lacking in coherent thought as any of the knuckle-dragging frat-boys they mock; they are the worst kind of pampered inheritors, stomping around on the mown grass inside the battlements built and defended by earlier generations for which they have nothing but indifference.

The first thought such ‘post-feminists’ invariably have when looking at the magnificent John Opie painting of Mary Wollstonecraft that typically adorns the front cover of any edition of her masterwork, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is how odd her hair looks. Such ‘new wave’ or ‘third generation’ feminists have no patience for “old-timey stuff” like Wollstonecraft – they’re too busy writing up a sloppy and ungrammatical encomium to Angelina Jolie for Bitchcrit or Chickchat. Wollstonecraft herself would have understood this; the bottomlessly sad but steely eyes looking out from that Opie portrait had seen plenty of such nonsense in their own world. The author of the Vindication knew better than anybody how often oppression is aided by the oppressed. And like all self-educated people, she had a healthy regard for the power of ignorance.

Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written in 1791 and published in 1792, springing from the same intellectual ferment that birthed the philosophies of Edmund Burke and The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine. It exploded like a shell-burst into an intellectual world still ruled by Blackstone’s legal commentaries, which infamously held that “the husband and wife are one person in law” – that, as in ancient Rome, a woman could have no legal existence apart from the men in her life.

Miriam Brody edited the 1983 Penguin Classic of the Vindication, and she points out how thoroughly this attitude was engrained in Western society:

A married woman, then [1758], could legally hold no property in her own right, nor enter into any legal contract, nor for that matter claim any rights over her own children. To be sure, families had got round these laws for many years and would continue to do so; still, the woman’s dependence on the economic productivity of her husband, a dependence which was becoming more and more manifest in the course of the eighteenth century, achieved a legal sanctity in Blackstone which formed the spirt, as well as the letter, of all traditional injunctions to women which writers on the subject would make.

Wollstonecraft saw a world around her in which women were trained from the nursery to be ‘tender,’ to simper and scheme, to pour their attentions into ‘accomplishments’ like paltry musical ineptitude or the painting of little bucolic scenes on furniture (some readers may recall the merry scorn Jane Austen heaps on such distractions in Pride and Prejudice) while men were outfitted with real educations and expected to go out and do things in the world. This was anathema to Wollstonecraft, who earned her own keep her entire life and was one of the first women to make a living by writing. The countless ways young women of her day were conditioned to be complicit in their own servitude enraged her, and her angry sympathy found excuses where it could:

Of what materials can that heart be composed, which can melt when insulted, and instead of revolting at injustice, kiss the rod? It is unfair to infer that her virtue is built on narrow views and selfishness, who can caress a man, with true feminine softness, the very moment when he treats her tyrannically. Nature never dictated such insincerity; and, though prudence of this sort be termed a virtue, morality becomes vague when any part of it is supposed to rest on falsehood. These are mere expedients, and expedients are only useful for the moment.

Editor Brodie rightly stands back from the Vindication and lets its author’s sometimes molten eloquence speak for itself. And despite the historically vital arguments being put forth in every chapter of the book, that eloquence is still one of the book’s most outstanding elements: Wollstonecraft is a simply magnificent prose stylist, and long, long stretches of Vindication of the Rights of Woman roll like thunder on a turbulent sea. The author often found herself caught on that lonely promontory between custom and reform, where the very people she was defending were most likely to attack her. This was true in her own day, and, bitterly, it would be almost as true today in many quarters. Swap out ‘celebrities’ for ‘idle rich’ and ‘Kardashians’ for ‘ladies,’ and Wollstonecraft might as well be railing against the ‘post-feminist’ young women of 2013, who don’t care beans about any sisterhood and just want to market their brand:

In the superior ranks of life, every duty is done by deputies, as if duties could ever be waived, and the vain pleasures which consequent idleness forces the rich to pursue, appear so enticing to the next rank, that the numerous scramblers for wealth sacrifice everything to tread on their heels. The most sacred trusts are then considered as sinecures, because they were procured by interest, and only sought to enable a man to keep good company. Women, in particular, all want to be ladies. Which is simply to have nothing to do, but listlessly to go they scarcely care where, for they cannot tell what.

Vindication of the Rights of Woman was the first true classic in the literature of female emancipation, the founding document in a tradition that includes The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (and that features as its greatest work A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf). I’ve never met a woman under the age of thirty who’s read Wollstonecraft, but thanks to Penguin Classics, she’s right there and handy, should anybody want to consult her coldly furious brilliance. The world of gender relations has changed a great deal in the West since she wrote her great work – and that great work is still the ultimate commentary on the changes that haven’t happened yet.