Mary Wollstonecraft believed that
one's life experiences had crucial impact on one's possibilities and character.
Her own life illustrates this power of experience.
Commentators on Mary Wollstonecraft's ideas from her own time until now have
looked at the ways in which her own experience influenced her ideas. She handled
her own examination of this influence on her own work mostly through fiction and
indirect reference. Both those who agreed with
Mary Wollstonecraft
and detractors
have pointed to her up-and-down personal life to explain much about her
proposals for women's equality, women's education and human possibility.
For instance, in 1947, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, Freudian
psychiatrists, said this about
Mary Wollstonecraft:
Mary Wollstonecraft hated men. She had every personal reason possible known
to psychiatry for hating them. Hers was hatred of creatures she greatly
admired and feared, creatures that seemed to her capable of doing everything
while women to her seemed capable of doing nothing whatever, in their own
nature being pitifully weak in comparison with the strong, lordly male.
This "analysis" follows a sweeping statement saying that Wollstonecraft's
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (these authors also mistakenly
substitute Women for Woman in the title) proposes "in general, that women should
behave as nearly as possible like men." I'm not sure how one could make such a
statement after actually reading A Vindication, but it leads to their
conclusion that "Mary Wollstonecraft was an extreme neurotic of a compulsive
type.... Out of her illness arose the ideology of feminism...." [See the
Lundberg/Farnham essay reprinted in Carol H. Poston's Norton Critical Edition of
A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman pp. 273-276.)
What were those personal reasons for
Mary Wollstonecraft's
ideas that her detractors and
defenders alike could point to?
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