A fine portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft as an Enlightenment intellectual neglects the complexity of her views on the ‘oppression of my sex’
Reflecting on her career two years before her premature death, Mary Wollstonecraft described herself as one of those who serve as “sign-posts, which point out the road to others, while forced to stand still themselves amidst the mud and dust”. In fact she rarely stood still, but the self-description seems particularly apt now, when a statue of a nude woman commemorating her, unveiled recently on Newington Green in north London, is getting lots of critical mud chucked at it. Centuries after her death, Wollstonecraft still stirs controversy.
Wollstonecraft was a hardworking literary professional who in the late 1780s got caught up in the riptides of history and thereafter swam with them, earning her fame and notoriety. An unhappy girl from a dysfunctional family, she grew into a woman full of grievance, emotional need and intellectual appetite. A harsh critic, especially of herself, with the outbreak of the French Revolution she turned her critical fire on political and cultural conservatives, beginning with a fierce rejoinder to Edmund Burke’s 1790 attack on the revolution and proceeding through swingeing attacks on “despotic” thinkers of every stripe, especially defenders of male privilege. She was the daughter of a drunken wife-beater, and men’s “arbitrary”, “brutish” rule over women was the target of Wollstonecraft’s most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and the theme to which she returned repeatedly in subsequent writings until her death in childbirth, aged 38, in 1797.