gotthold ephraim lessing 1729–1781 - St. Francis Xavier University

496 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
appendixes, has been prepared by D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (1997). Following
the first modern scholarly biography, Ralph Wardle’s Mary Wollstonecraft
(1951), numerous others have appeared; particularly noteworthy are Claire Tomalin’s
Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974), Gary Kelly’s Revolutionary Feminism:
The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (1992), Janet Todd’s Mary Wollstonecraft:
A Revolutionary Life (2000), and Lyndall Gordon’s Vindication: A Life of Mary
Wollstonecraft (2005). Many general studies of Wollstonecraft devote substantial
space to the intertwining of her life and work: good basic introductions include
Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd’s Mary Wollstonecraft (1984), Jennifer Lorch’s Mary
Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Radical Feminist (1990), and Harriet Jump’s Mary
Wollstonecraft: Writer (1994). For a good selection of essays, see Feminist Interpretations
of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Maria Falco (1996), and The Cambridge Companion
to Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Claudia L. Johnson (2002). To contextualize
Wollstonecraft within the aesthetics and politics of her day, see Mary Poovey, The
Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft,
Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (1984); the debate about Enlightenment “reason”
between Timothy Reiss and Frances Ferguson in Gender and Theory (ed. Linda
Kauffman, 1989); Syndy Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility
(1994); and Claudia Johnson’s discussion of politics, gender, and sentimentality in
Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (1995). Susan
Gubar’s examination of current feminist criticism, Critical Condition: Feminism at
the Turn of the Century (2000), contains an analysis of Wollstonecraft’s own misogyny.
Janet Todd’s Mary Wollstonecraft: An Annotated Bibliography (1976) is helpful
for the period before the flowering of contemporary feminist criticism, but it needs
updating. The Cambridge Companion contains a useful bibliography.
From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
From Chapter II.
The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed
To account for, and excuse the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments
have been brought forward to prove, that the two sexes, in the acquirement
of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character: or, to speak
explicitly, women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to
acquire what really deserves the name of virtue. Yet it should seem, allowing
them to have souls, that there is but one way appointed by Providence
to lead mankind to either virtue or happiness.
If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron 1 triflers, why should they be
kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? Men complain,
and with reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex, when they do not
keenly satirize our headstrong passions and groveling vices.— Behold, I
should answer, the natural effect of ignorance! The mind will ever be unstable
that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive
fury when there are no barriers to break its force. Women are told from
their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge
of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward
obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety,
will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful,
every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.
1. Short- lived (literally, living only one day).