160. Mary Wollstonecraft — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Susan J. Wolfson

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host and writing partner, Amy Helmes. 

AMY HELMES: The lost lady we're discussing today. Mary Wollstonecraft, is known to some as the mother who tragically died giving birth to future Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. Today some consider Wollstonecraft the mother of feminism, though we should note the concept didn't really exist in her day.

KIM: Right. She used a framework of philosophical arguments to champion women's rights and was privately referred to by the writer Horace Walpole, as a quote, “a hyena in petticoats.”

AMY: Is that like some 18th century equivalent of “nasty woman?” 

KIM: I think so, yeah. Wollstonecraft's 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a feminist declaration of independence. She argued that women, despite being rational beings with minds equal to men, were kept powerless by a system that denied them an education and treated them as sexual commodities.

AMY: Wollstonecraft's words were revolutionary. Sadly, her husband's sincere endeavor to preserve her legacy following her death ended up having the opposite effect on how she was remembered. Her work molded an obscurity for almost a century before modern feminists took a renewed interest in her. 

KIM: If, like Amy and I, you've heard of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but have never actually taken the time to sit down and read it, you're in for a treat. Today we've got a special guest with a new book out on Wollstonecraft's seminal work, and she's gonna take us through the author's fascinating life as well as some of her key arguments in her vindication.

AMY: And since we're still fighting this fight, it only makes sense that we should take a closer look at Wollstonecraft's ideas. So let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today, Dr. Susan J Wolfson, is a professor of English at Princeton University. Her scholarship focuses on British writers of the Romantic period. She has written and edited numerous books, including a 2022 compilation of Keats’s poetry called A Greeting of the Spirit, and 2018's Romantic Shades and Shadows, as well as annotated editions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. So cool.

AMY: A Guggenheim and NEH recipient, her most recent title is called On Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in April by Columbia University Press. Susan, congratulations on the book and welcome to the show.

SUSAN WOLFSON: Well, I'm delighted to be here.

KIM: Wollstonecraft was born in 1759, and Susan, the first words in the first chapter of your book are, “She was destined for this.” Do you wanna elaborate on how her upbringing and her background set the stage for what would come?

SUSAN: Well, it wasn't just Wollstonecraft's family horror show, but this is rather typical. Women had no power in the family. She had an uneducated mother. The budget went entirely to the first son. The rest of the children were not educated. The father was a spendthrift. He was a drinker. He beat her mother. He beat the children when he could. She slept outside her mother's bedroom in order to protect her. And as soon as she could, she devised ways to get out of that family horror show altogether. She made friends with neighbors, with a clergyman, and became kind of self-educated with those resources. She knew early on from the example of her parents and a lot of what she saw that marriage wasn't for her. It wasn't just marriage to a husband who could do what he liked with her body; beat it, rape it, whatever else, but it was also the serial pregnancies that came with marriage and were eventually a death sentence. Not in your first or second pregnancy, which is what took her mother out, but in your 14th or 15th pregnancy. And yet the opportunities for women who did not want to marry were really quite scant. So what's a brainy woman like Wollstonecraft gonna do? Well, she tells herself and she tells her sister, my nature is pulling me in a different direction, off the beaten track, and I've gotta figure out how to make this work. she was, you know, fairly young when she made that decision. So she was already sensing that the social structure that governed women's lives was not something that she could embrace, and she wanted alternatives. So that's her being born for this. Meanwhile , the French Revolution happened and a form of government that people thought, you know, was baked into human history, monarchy, suddenly got overturned and a new Republican form of government based on participation, the famous motto was “Liberty Fraternity and Equality,” um, that was the French Revolution. The American Revolution had already happened. It seemed that revolution in social structures was not only possible, but inevitable. I mean, this was the coming political order, and Wollstonecraft was excited about that. She was a strong supporter of the principles of the French Revolution. However, women were excluded from the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft felt that the unfinished work of the French Revolution was The Rights of Woman.

AMY: So yeah, so it's clear that she's looking around as a young woman and saying, I don't like what I'm seeing. We gotta fix this. 

SUSAN: I mean, that's the poignancy. There wasn't a community, a community of women who [unclear].

AMY: And so I think it's kind of fascinating that in 1783 she actually sets up an all girls school. 

SUSAN: Yes, she did. I mean, she wanted girls to have an education that stressed their brains and not their bodies. She wanted to introduce science, history, botany, physical exercise, subjects, uh, you know, of wider concern than preparing for the marriage market. It didn't work out. It turned out there wasn't that much of a market for that kind of education for women, and she was not an experienced businesswoman. So when she had to leave the school to go help out her dear friend, Fanny Blood, who died from her pregnancy in Portugal, and when she came back, the school was pretty much in a shambles. And to, you know, raise her spirits and raise some money to pay off the debts that the school owed, she wrote her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. So she's teaching by another means. She's discovered that you can teach through publication, through writing.

KIM: Okay, so when the school floundered financially, she ended up taking a governess position with a wealthy Irish family, and it was a twist of fate she equated with being sent to prison. Was there any upside for her in taking this job?

SUSAN: Yes. And of course Wollstonecraft has a real knack for turning dead ends into new pathways. And this is one of the first of those adventures. Through friends in London who were impressed with her, she got employment at 40 pounds a year with the wealthy Kingsboroughs. Now 40 pounds a year, I mean, this serious change. Um, but it took her far away. Her, this was gonna take her to Cork. I mean, 140 miles southwest of Dublin. uh, She said when she entered the household she felt like she was going into a Bastille, the French prison. But it turned out that this Bastille had a pretty decent library. So at night, Wollstonecraft read a lot. She also liked the daughters that she was hired to educate, particularly the oldest daughter, Margaret, who became very attached to her and Margaret herself, had a very interesting life. Afterwards, she became a doctor But Wollstonecrafter took the daughters outside, educated them by showing, challenging them intellectually. Meanwhile, um, Lady K as she called her, was a kind of bimbo out of the world of Jane Austen's novels, very wealthy, very vain, spent a lot of time dressing for dinner, um, doting on her dogs, taking baths of milk and rosewater. Wollstonecraft's letters of her are quite sarcastic and I mean, entire paragraphs could be, you know, exported to Jane Austen's novels, Lady Bertram, and those sort of wealthy aristocrats. And then Lady K fired Wollstonecraft. So she had, you know, just her salary. Her salary, um, no prospects, no letter of recommendation, no plans. And she goes back to London. And meets with Joseph Johnson, who had published a book that she had written while she was, in Ireland, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. He knew her and he thought she was really smart, that she wrote clearly, she wrote logically, she was lively. Um, and he was a mensch. I mean, he just said, I'll help you out. He set her up in rooms above his bookshop and then helped get her established in her own apartment. Um, he gave her employment, gave, he decided to publish her next novel called Mary. Then he soon hired her at this new sort of progressive journal, something like The New Yorker or something like that of the day called The Analytical Review. Wollstonecraft worked there as a translator and as a reviewer. That became a kind of second education for her. She got to read a lot of stuff and a lot of stuff that women usually don't get to read. But since the reviews were anonymous, she could write about boxing, politics, history and science as well as a shelf load of novels that really just disgusted her as being kind of junk literature. She's really funny in writing about them because you can tell she's just exhausted with the sort of recycled plots and character types over and over again. But she wrote a ton for him. Johnson had a kind of virtual college. He had these weekly dinners in his rooms above the bookshop. And the bookshop itself was a kind of de facto library. Um, you know, anybody could come in there and read the books. But at this table there was William Godwin and William Blake and Joseph Priestly, and Joel Barlow, Anna Barbauld, um, and Mary Wollstonecraft. 

AMY: Dream job.

KIM: Yeah. 

SUSAN: You know, this was a genuinely intellectual circle. I mean, Virginia Woolf writes a wonderful essay about this, where Virginia Woolf, excluded from Oxford, you know, had great sympathy for Mary Wollstonecraft's enthusiasm for this. She said, you know, she was an honorary young man. Basically she was just called “Wollstonecraft.” There wasn't any sort of polite, um, differential, you know, of manners or things they couldn't talk about. So this just completely jazzed her that she had an intellectual life at last in London.

AMY: Yeah. This Joseph Johnson guy who would wind up publishing so much of her stuff for her, I mean, he comes across as a really great guy.

SUSAN: He is. And he published a lot of 'out there' writers. I mean, he was somebody who took risks with writers that he believed in, and, you know, was a real force in the London publishing world.

AMY: I wanted to touch, uh, really quick again on Thoughts on the Education of Daughters because in a previous episode, Kim and I had discovered, I think his name's John Fordyce?

SUSAN: James Fordyce.

AMY: James Fordyce. Yes. He wrote that very condescending book about how to educate your daughters, right? Yes. And so this book that she wrote is kind of almost like an answer back to that, right? 

SUSAN: Yeah, I mean, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters is very cautious. She's not yet "Mary Wollstonecraft."

AMY: Okay.

SUSAN: The real reply to Fordyce comes in the chapters in A Vindication where she takes his conduct manual, Dr. John Gregory's conduct manual and Jean Jacques Rousseau's conduct manual for women, uh, called Sophie the chapter of Emile [or a Treatise on Education], and she basically opens the book and says, “here's what they say; here's what's wrong with what they say.” In other words, she's teaching us how to read against the grain of the three most prestigious books that have been given to parents on how to educate their daughters. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters is just her kind of putting her toe in the water. Once she becomes Mary Wollstonecraft, she's a famous person by the time she's writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Then she lets it all rip open.

AMY: Okay. Love it. 

SUSAN: Now you might remember that Reverend Fordyce, um, James Fordyce, is set up for parody even by Jane Austen.

AMY: Yeah, exactly. In Pride and Prejudice. 

SUSAN: Mr. Collins takes it off the shelf and reads it and all the girls in the household just titter.

AMY: It's such a hilarious scene. And you know, the women at the time were doing that, you know, like, Oh, this guy. Yeah.

SUSAN: Well, yeah, Austen is writing this in the late nineties. Pride and Prejudice gets published in 1813, but yet it was already a kind of ironized discourse. But they still had to do it. I mean that middle class women who wanted to marry well pretty much had to shape themselves into marriageable young women. You know, “Don't be smart, Be deferential. Um, if you have any learning, hide it. If you have any physical vigor, don't show it because it's considered indelicate.” These were still the codes. And for most women, securing a good marriage with what you had was the life goal. And you had to make all those decisions in your twenties. By 28, you were a spinster and your shelf life was toast.

KIM: All right, well that's a perfect segue talking about marriage. So Wollstonecraft turned down a marriage proposal. She had a very memorable reply though. Can you tell us about that? And also her views on marriage, um, why did she see it as such an unappealing prospect? We can kind of guess, but.

SUSAN: The idea that you marry for love is a very late, you know, romantic notion that happens mostly in novels, which is why Wollstonecraft is so cautious about novels. Because it gives false expectations. It was an economic arrangement. You find the kindest and most prominent man, and then prostitute your body to that person. That's what she saw. And some women, you know, wound up lucky and happily married, but most really just made that kind of settlement. Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, for instance, the spinster who takes the odious, Mr. Collins on the rebound, makes a rational judgment. He's a bit of a clod, but 

KIM: Yeah. She knows exactly what she's getting into.

SUSAN: She knows exactly what she's getting into and she figures out how to make the best accommodation with it. So marriage is a very, very severe compromise, especially for an intellectually lively woman like Wollstonecraft.. Her husband could prohibit her from writing if he wanted to as a dereliction of her domestic duties. He certainly had an entire claim on any income she made from her writing, even claim on her manuscript. So she gets this proposal from an intermediary, someone who had noticed her and thought she was pretty hot. And she was, she was a really good looking woman. She was physically vigorous, she was smart, she was lively, and she refused it by proxy. And then the guy tried again and she was insulted. She said, I won't submit myself to prostitution just because I've fallen on financial hard times. It was the first time that she used the word prostitution for marriage, legal prostitution. Now, she did fall deeply in love with a really bad husband prospect, Gilbert Imlay, in France, had a daughter with him, but he just wasn't husband material. And he broke her heart, um, almost broke her body. She tried to commit suicide twice out of despair of his, you know, ever loving her and wanting to set up a home with her. She finally met William Godwin again; a mutual friend reintroduced them. And they began an affair within months. They would not get married. That was something they didn't wanna do because of the legal constraints on marriage for a woman. But when she got pregnant again with little Mary, um, they put aside principle and got married. It cost Wollstonecraft a lot because people hadn't realized that she wasn't married to Gilbert Imlay. She had been calling herself Mrs. Imlay; she had a daughter, little Fanny Imlay. And when she signed herself, “Mary Wollstonecraft, spinster,” in the church register, it was obvious that she had not been married and that Fanny was illegitimate and that she had had an affair out of wedlock. And a lot of their friends cut her, basically refused to see her. She was heartbroken by that. But her other friends stayed true.

AMY: So it really, in some ways, there's no winning. You know, you talk about all the bonds of marriage and how it, would chain her, but not marrying also cost her, you know, so,

SUSAN: Yeah, it did. But she was really happy with Godwin. I mean, that was a really good marriage, finally. It was her last great adventure. Um, it was somebody who loved her mind, who loved her courage, who admired her vindications, and uh, expected to have a life with her. Um, they had separate sort of apartments for working, then they got together in the evening for dinner and sex. So they, you know, they kind of figured out, you know, how to have a marriage that would work for both of them, where they would have intellectual independence and they would both be professional writers. And they would have a marriage. And he, you know, he adored her first daughter, little Fanny. Everybody expected that this was gonna work out.

AMY: It sounds like a very modern marriage by today's standards, right? You know, like they would fit in well today. Alright, so let's talk about her vindications now. Let's switch gears. You mentioned the French Revolution earlier. This really galvanized Wollstonecraft so tell us about this first work A Vindication of the Rights of Men and, uh, the importance of that.

SUSAN: So Edmund Burke turns out to be the father of both her vindications in some ways. Um, Edmund Burke was a liberal Whig parliamentarian. He sided with the American Revolution, um, basically on the issue of taxation without representation. He was against corruption of the colonial administration in India. He was for the abolition of slavery. In other words, she wasn't dealing with a right wing troglodyte. So Edmund Burke, however, saw the French Revolution, said, this is not good. Monarchy is a divinely sanctioned institution. Even though there are inequalities, it is the pattern of Nature. Nature is not uniform. Some trees grow big, some don't. And those who are talking about equality are really destroying the world. He writes about the French monarchy as if it were divinity on Earth. And Burke really knew how to rock a sentence. I mean, it was just, it became an instantaneous bestseller. Wollstonecraft was reviewing for The Analytical Review at the time, and so thinks that she wants to review Burke for The Analytical Review. And it was quite clear, even though The Analytical Review could sponsor a dozen pages for a review, she said, I can't do it. And she decided she had to just sit down and write this out. She wrote it in a blaze in about a month. It was the first response to Burke. There were several responses to Burke. This was the first one that came out. was called A Vindication of the Rights of Man. The Rights of Man being the French Revolutionary document. And this wasn't just “thoughts on,” or “reflections on,” or “letters on” the Rights of Man. She goes out for an aggressive genre, a vindication. That means literally “to speak with force.” It means that you're gonna make a really powerful argument. So this comes out and it's noticed. It sells out. The first edition sells out. Her name is not on the title page. The second edition comes out about three or four weeks later, and it's got "by Mary Wollstonecraft." Now that's really unusual for a woman to sign her name. It's considered extremely unfeminine to go public that way. It's a very short pamphlet, very powerful, very funny, and very sarcastic.

AMY: I love that it wasn't even like a preconceived thing for her. She was just so fired up, you know? It's just like she had no plans to write something like this until she was galled by it, basically.

SUSAN: You know, so Burke became the sort of accidental muse. And then in arguing with Burke, she also kind of started writing paragraphs that she realized had the argument of a vindication of the rights of women. When she started talking about equality, she realized that women were involved in that. That there was a social system that created inequality in which ideally citizens would be fellow citizens and be equals. And I think as she was writing that the, um, idea of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was beginning to take shape, because as soon as she finished that, I mean, this was out in, you know, the second edition in, December 1790, by January of 1791, she was already kind of, you know, planning out A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and she was speaking to the political left. If you are for the rights of man, you have to be for the rights of woman. You can't have it both ways. 

AMY: I'm sure there were other women that were maybe writing or at least discussing fairness and inequality for women. What is it about this work that made it so persuasive and made it such a sensation right off the bat? 

SUSAN: Well, there were women who were writing, but they were accommodating themselves to the world in order to make a living. So you don't find, except obliquely, what we would recognize as a kind of feminist argument in the works of Frances Burney or Maria Edgeworth or even Anna Barbaugh, who distressed Wollstonecraft with some of her poems about female delicacy. So she got very interested in the linguistic politics in the Rights of Woman. Um, and she takes that on right away at the beginning. She has a real attack on comparing women to flowers. She said, that's just admiring them for their beauty and delicacy and short lived value. You're toast at the end of the day, and it can only be a barren blooming. She takes on the stigma of being called a “masculine woman.” That would be the version of a nasty woman, and she has this really funny satire. She says, Well, by that you mean that a masculine woman is somebody who's into hunting and gaming and swearing and cursing and drinking, I'm with you. Who wants to be a masculine woman? And then she says, if you mean by masculine power of intellect, moral self-accountability, the practice of civic virtue, may they every day grow more and more masculine. One of the most stunning passages in the Rights of Woman is when she says about Catherine Macaulay, who had just died. She said, “I will not call hers a masculine understanding because I do not want to give men that arrogation of, you know, the adjective. She is forceful and strong and there is no sex to that.”

KIM: Wow. Preach.

SUSAN: So she's amazingly detached the descriptors masculine and feminine from biological destiny and read them and what we would, you know, kind of call, um, you know, critical gender theory, seeing it as part of a political system of value and not inherent in any one particular accident of birth.

AMY: And she does it all in such an entertaining way. It's like, you know, her style of writing, she's laying out rhetorical gems that are almost irrefutable, really, but then at the same time, she has this kind of tone that I love where she's just like, “oh, I don't know, riddle me this.” You just kinda like her personality as she's laying it all out. 

SUSAN: It is funny. I mean, I'm glad you like that. 'cause some, some people find her boring to read, but I don't think, you know, you don't wanna read this all in one night. But the takedown on Burke is hilarious. My students are always quite surprised by that but she also has really interesting little insets and kind of narratives or character sketches that carry her argument forward too.

KIM: Yeah. I felt like, um, her humor was unexpected. 

AMY: Listeners, you know, we mentioned that it might feel overwhelming to sit down and read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that's what's so great about Susan's book is you incorporate a lot of the best bits into your book and explain it.

SUSAN: Well, give it a try. Um, I think pretty much you could read the first two chapters, the introduction and the first two chapters because she packs everything into there. I mean, readers sometimes complain that this is repetitive. But she's figuring it out for the first time. So of course it's repetitive and she's describing a worldwide web. Everything is connected to everything else. And you know, as soon as you start talking about one thing, you you find Mm-hmm bringing in something else

KIM: Mm-hmm. Good point. 

AMY: I mean, that's the power of the repetitiveness is like society needs to kind of have it hammered in over and over. 'cause if you just see the rationale, once you're like, oh, okay, that's a good point. But as the book builds, by the time you get to the end, you're like, this I can't argue with what this woman is saying. 

SUSAN: It has that cumulative force. I mean, I'm glad you felt it. I'm not even sure it's a hammering, but it's a kind of, um, relentless education. You know, she's teaching us how to read, even the vocabulary of praise. Well, what's wrong with a woman being called "innocent," "delicate," flower-like? Isn't that the language of love? And she teaches us how to read that not as a language of love, but as an insult wrapped in a language that feels like love. like innocent? She said, this is just a pretty name for ignorance, infancy. And within a chapter, she's calling it imbecility. 

AMY: That idea of infantilizing, even today, like "baby doll," you know, the terms of endearment that women are given sometimes. 

SUSAN: Or just, “don't worry your pretty little head about it.”

AMY: Yeah, yeah. 

KIM: So, some of her chapters seem to be juicier than others, and they may have shocked her readers at the time. We know she wasn't a puritanical person, but it seems like there's a cautionary view of sex in her work. Could you maybe explain her perspective?

SUSAN: Well, you know, 1980s feminists made a great deal about, you know, her being puritanically hysterical about sex. And she's writing this in 1792 before she's ever had sex, and she's only seen bad consequences. Moreover,

AMY: Oh, I didn't realize this was before Imlay and everything!

SUSAN: Yeah, before she fell, she meets Imlay in '93. And then Godwin, with whom she has really good sex, too, she meets in 95 96. So, I mean, this is, you know, while she's still a virgin, and a very intellectual virgin, and she's seeing only bad consequences of women indulging, or being manipulated as sexual beings. Moreover, as Wollstonecraft herself experienced, if you get pregnant out of wedlock as a young woman, you have no social viability. You will never be marriageable. The only option for you is to become a prostitute or to kill yourself. And that was the frequent outcome. So there's a way in which sexual self discipline is not just prudery. It's a rational assessment of what the severe penalties are for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. So there is that caution. What very comfortable birth control era 1980 feminists, you know, condescend to Wollstonecraft for, is something they've never had to contend with themselves. So I think that there's a historical situation for what gets called prudishness, but I would say just rational restraint. The woman who was writing in 1792 really sees female sexuality and men's exploitation of it as part of the tremendous problem of being a woman in the world, she'll call it the wrongs of woman. So I don't want to sort of downplay that she's extraordinarily cautious about this, but there are very good reasons for her caution.

KIM: Yeah, it's like a life-saving issue

AMY: Yeah. 

SUSAN: Literally life saving. Literally.

KIM: Yeah, yeah, 

AMY: Even, I didn't even get the sense that she was placing a moral judgment other than the practical outcome.

SUSAN: Well, she does have the distaste of having boys pigging together, you know, in those boys schools, and girls learning nasty tricks from servants and each other. I mean, there's a kind of lurid, softcore porn that is in her head. 

AMY: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I could see people skip ahead to chapter eight or whatever chapter she's talking about this.

SUSAN: She is worried about that, though, because she doesn't want girls to become too interested in sex at the expense of rational self control. 

KIM: Right, right. 

SUSAN: What looks to us like, you know, kind of excessive prudishness. It is a real concern for her about becoming a sexual body, what that can mean for a woman. 

AMY: All right. So in this work, she so skillfully lays out all of the problems that she sees with society's treatment of women. Does she have any concrete ideas for how to fix things? Does she offer up any solutions? 

SUSAN: Well, the solution is the last chapter, if you lasted that long, on national education. She is for free national public co education. Uh, the first side of education is the Republic of Home, where boys and girls, sons and daughters, are treated equally and where parents regard their children as future citizens and not as, um, subjects, merely there to be grateful to their parents and to obey their parents. This was her plan, educating everybody and developing a rational citizenship from this factory of education. But she ends by saying, it's not up to me. The men have the power. They have to start changing the system or put in a fresh order for Russian whips. 

AMY: Oh, I know, that goes back to one of my favorite lines, that she wrote, which is, Let women share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man. For she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty. It's basically like, call my bluff on this. Give us a chance, and if we cannot rise to the occasion, then we are justified at being held down. And we'll shut up. You can't even argue with that really. It's just, give us a chance. And if we don't do it, then you win, you know? 

SUSAN: And she's, she knows that that's the key point. The first chapters have a whole bunch of words that begin with pre. Preconceived, prejudice, prevailing, prescribed, prescription. That's the world into which we're born. So she wants to remove all those pre constraints and say, yes, exactly right, you can't say that we are weak, irrational, stupid, and incapable, essentially, when this, in fact, is an effect of the system we live in, and not the cause for that system's reinforcement. So you're exactly right. I mean, she's proposing a grand national experiment. Um, redo education, educate us, and see if we can share rational responsibility.

KIM: Yeah, so gauntlet thrown, and then what was the response to this work when it was published? 

SUSAN: Two things. Uh, pretty good reviews in the 1790s. There was one sort of, um, right wing journal, which just wasn't buying it at all, you know, and said that this is, this is just, you know, disrupting the ways of God to man. Next thing we're going to talk about is the rights of children and the rights of animals, and this is a ridiculous, slippery slope. But most other reactions were very positive. It's about time. Yes, this is exactly right. John Adams loved it. Abigail Adams loved it. Aaron Burr loved it, and gave it to his daughter. Um, a really interesting American feminist, Judith Sargent Murray loved it. It went international, and women around the world said At last someone has put this together. I've seen this in my classrooms too, I mean, where women, not U. S. women, but women who attend Princeton from very patriarchal cultures completely recognized the situation Wollstonecraft was describing. Obviously they were exceptions, being sent by their parents to Princeton, but this was completely readable to them as, you know, education is the first step. So that was the plan. Everyone thought it was a good idea. What killed it, you mentioned earlier, was Godwin's grieving memoir, in which he reproduced Wollstonecraft as a fallen, corrupt, deviant woman. He didn't mean to, but the enemies jumped on it.

AMY: Why do you think he, I know he wasn't trying to vilify her. He was just trying to tell her story, but her sexual past and everything. Why would he have included some of that? 

SUSAN: That's the big question, you know, what was he thinking? His philosophical commitment was to candor. But, you know, his best friend said, You stripped your wife naked. How could you do such a thing? And you know, immediately, Wollstonecraft was described as a prostitute, as a whore. The Rights of Woman was the philosophy of a whore. Her reputation was incinerated immediately, and was not recovered for about a hundred years. 

KIM: Wow. 

AMY: It's like she was canceled. 

SUSAN: Her name could not be mentioned in polite society. And it was only when women suffragists were reading her, she was being read sort of underground. She was being read in countries other than England. And they started, um, producing centennial editions of her work. And then Virginia Woolf writes this amazing essay about her. And then Wollstonecraft gets taken up by second wave American and British feminism in the 1970s. But as you can see in my book, there's still a reaction. I mean, there's David Levine's atrocious cartoon of her. The archetypal nasty woman, right? With that hatchet face. Um, really sarcastic reviews of new editions and new lives of Wollstonecraft. Then you have, you know, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham writing in 1947 that, um, pretty much, you know, they could have been writing this in, in 1801, that, um, you know, that feminism is only the philosophy of bitterness and resentment and female deviance and penis envy, um. That passed as science. You know, history is always uneven progress, but the back and forth about, um, you know, about feminist principles is still very much with us.

KIM: I mean, there's more of a conversation at least today that we're starting to have, but Amy and I talk about this all the time, but it still feels like in some ways we're at the infancy of a feminist movement, even, uh, you know, even after this amount of time. Yeah. Yeah. 

SUSAN: I mean, I still, um, you know, I'm 75. Will I ever see a female president? I don't know.

KIM: I hope so. Someday hopefully people will be looking back on this time and it'll be closer than we think 

SUSAN: You know, they'll look at our conversations and say, “What were they talking about? We're so past that!” 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

Yeah. 

AMY: But getting back to, Mary Wolf, Mary Wollstonecraft (I still can't say her name, even at the end of the episode), Susan, I knew so shamefully little about her before reading your book. Um, I'm so glad that I now have a better understanding of her life and her work and her impact. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about it all with us. It's been great. 

SUSAN: Well, no, this has really been fun talking to you. I didn't know anything about her when I was an undergraduate because she just simply wasn't on our syllabuses or in our books. Um, you know, that was a kind of act of recovery on my own part. is to learn about her and then just to be amazed.  I think Wollstonecraft is, you know, is a teacher. And that you, you know, you felt that too, you felt that you were not just studying something that you should know, but you were actually being taught about how to think. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Love her. Love her. So that's all for today's episode. Don't forget to give us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast, if you enjoy it. Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.