The Power of Experience
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?
Mary Wollsonecraft's Early Life
Mary Wollstonecraft was born April 27, 1759. Her father had inherited wealth from his father, but spent the entire fortune. He drank heavily and apparently was abusive verbally and perhaps physically. He failed in his many attempts at farming, and when Mary was fifteen, the family moved to Hoxton, a suburb of London. Here Mary met Fanny Blood, to become perhaps her closest friend. The family moved to Wales and then back to London as Edward Wollstonecraft tried to make a living.
At nineteen, Mary Wollstonecraft took a position that was one of the few available to middle class educated women: a companion to an older woman. She traveled in England with her charge, Mrs. Dawson, but two years later returned home to attend her mother who was dying. Two years after Mary's return, her mother died and her father remarried and moved to Wales.
Mary's sister Eliza married, and Mary moved in with her friend Fanny Blood and her family, helping to support the family through her needlework -- another of the few routes open to women for economic self-support. Eliza gave birth within another year, and her husband, Meridith Bishop, wrote to Mary and asked that she return to nurse her sister whose mental condition had deteriorated seriously.
Mary's theory was that Eliza's condition was the result of her husband's treatment of her, and Mary helped Eliza leave her husband and arrange a legal separation. Under the laws of the time, Eliza had to leave her young son with his father, and the son died before his first birthday.
Mary Wollstonecraft, her sister Eliza Bishop, her friend Fanny Blood and later Mary's and Eliza's sister Everina turned to another possible means of financial support for themselves, and opened a school in Newington Green. It is in Newington Green that Mary Wollstonecraft first met the clergyman Richard Price whose friendship led to meeting many of the liberals among England's intellectuals.
Fanny decided to marry, and, pregnant soon after the marriage, called Mary to be with her in Lisbon for the birth. Fanny and her baby died soon after the premature birth.
When Mary Wollstonecraft returned to England, she closed the financially-struggling school and wrote her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. She then took a position in yet another respectable profession for women of her background and circumstances: governess.
After a year of traveling in Ireland and England with the family of her employer, Viscount Kingsborough, Mary was fired by Lady Kingsborough for becoming too close to her charges.
And so Mary Wollstonecraft decided that her means of support had to be her writing, and she returned to London in 1787.
Continued: About Mary Wollstonecraft
- The Legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft
- Rights in the Air
- What Rights?
- Grounded in Experience - Early Life
- Mary Wollstonecraft, Writer
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay: Paris and Sweden
- Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin: The End and Beyond
- Mary Wollstonecraft: Conclusions About Her Life and Work
Related Resources
- About Mary Wollstonecraft
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quotations
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- The Unsex'd Females - Poem by Richard Polwhele
- Book List
- Biographies on the Net
- Wollstonecraft's Writings
- Analysis/Criticism
- Judith Sargent Murray
- Olympe de Gouges
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
