Millicent Garrett Fawcett

“ It was Mary Wollstonecraft's good fortune that when she spoke the ears of men had been prepared to hear and their minds to assimilate what she had to say. In one sense she was as much the product of the women's rights movement as its earliest confessor. The fermentation in men's minds which had already produced new thoughts about the rights of man, which was destined presently to overthrow the authority of unrestrained despotism wherever it existed in Western Europe, did not pass by without producing its effect on the greatest despotism of all, that of men over women. ”

“ For this reason, the education of women should always be relative to that of men. To please, to be useful to US, to make US love and esteem them, to educate US when young, and take care of US when grown up, to advise, to console US, to render OUR lives easy and agreeable: these are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy. ”

“ Right through this tangle of pretences and affectations Mary Wollstonecraft cuts with the double-edged knife of a sound heart and clear head. It is against the system of dissimulation that she protests; instead of telling women how they are most likely to avoid censure and win praise, to gain a reputation for decorum and propriety of behaviour, she tells them to leave appearances out of consideration: "Make the heart clean, give the head employment," and behaviour will take care of itself. ”

“ Henrik Ibsen took the lead among the moderns in teaching that women have a duty to themselves as well as to their parents, husbands, and children, and that truth and freedom are needed for the growth of true womanliness as well as of true manliness. But Mary Wollstonecraft anticipated him in teaching that self-government, self-knowledge, and self-respect, a worship of truth and not of mere outward observances, are what women's lives mainly need to make them noble. ”

“ I have already quoted her saying: "I do not want them to have power over men, but over themselves," and other quotations of a similar drift may be given: "It is not empire, but equality and friendship which women want;" and again: "Speaking of women at large, their first duty is to themselves as rational creatures, and the next, in point of importance, as citizens, is that, which includes so many, of a mother." ”

“ Mary Wollstonecraft's great merit, however, lies in this, that with a detachment of mind from the prejudices and errors of her time, in regard to the position of women, that was quite extraordinary, she did not sanction any depreciation of the immense importance of the domestic duties of women. She constantly exalted what was truly feminine as the aim of woman's education and training; she recognised love and the attraction between the sexes a cardinal fact in human nature, and "marriage as the foundation of almost every social virtue." ”

“ The falsity, the immorality of this assumption, and the miserable consequences of acting upon it, it was the aim of "The Vindication of the Rights of Women" to demonstrate. In combating Rousseau's views on education, especially his antagonism to teaching boys and girls together or according to the same methods, she refers to his argument that if women are educated like men, the more they will resemble men, and the less power will they have over the other sex. "This is the very point," Mary Wollstonecraft says, "I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves." ”

“ One would have thought the fact so self-evident as to need no asseveration; but as a matter of experience we know that even now the mass of people mete out to the two partners the same action an entirely different degree of blame, and judge them by entirely different standards; the one who is condemned the most severely is not the one who has had the advantage, generally speaking, in wealth, education, experience, and knowledge of the world, and on whom therefore, if any difference be made, a greater responsibility ought to rest ”

“ On the first of these two nonsensical theories, that marriage is the one aim and object of women's existence, Mary Wollstonecraft, with her habitual reference to the religious sanction, pertinently asks how women are to exist in that state where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. "Man," she adds, "is always being told to prepare for a future state, but women are enjoined to prepare only for this." She also shows how wretchedly the sacredness of marriage and the charities of domestic life are violated by making marriage the only honourable career for women. ”

“ Her argument is that being weaker than men, physically and mentally, and not superior morally, the way in which women are brought up, and their subordination throughout life, first to their fathers, then to their husbands, prevents the due natural development of their physical, mental, and moral capacities. How can the powers of the body be developed without physical exercise? And in her day the ordinary rule for women in the upper ranks of society seems to have been to take none whatever. ”

“ Take this and contrast it, as containing a worthy and dignified theory of human life, with the well-known first question and answer of the Scottish Shorter Catechism, of which Carlyle said, "The older I grow—and I now stand on the brink of eternity—the more comes back to me the first sentence in the catechism which I learned when a child, and the fuller and deeper its meaning becomes: 'What is the chief end of man? To glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever." Rousseau and his disciples would disinherit women from this birthright, and to the question, "What is the chief end of woman?" ”

“ Her husband dies, and leaves his wife with a large family of young children. Her previous life has not prepared her by experience to fulfil the arduous task of being both father and mother to them. She is ignorant of the management of their property and of their education. She is utterly unfit for the weight that suddenly falls on her shoulders. What is left for her to do except transfer to some other husband the direction of her family, or in some other way shift to other shoulders the responsibility that she ought to discharge? ”

“ Mary Wollstonecraft pleaded that the lower degree of physical strength of women, and the strain upon that strength caused by maternity, ought to secure for them such conditions as regards exercise, clothing, and food as would make the most of that strength, and not reduce it to a vanishing point.
In the same spirit she argues about the mental capacity of women. Perpetual obedience, she contends, weakens the understanding; responsibility, and the necessity of thinking and deciding, strengthen it. ”

“ THERE is no truer or more consolatory observation concerning the great movements of thought which change the social history of the world than that no individual is indispensable to their growth. The Reformation in England and Germany would have come and would have changed men's thoughts concerning the relations of man to God, and of the Church to society, if Wiclif and Erasmus and Luther had never lived, and if Henry VIII. had never wished to put away his first wife. ”

“ Hence very largely from her initiative the women's rights movement in England has kept free from the excesses and follies that in some other countries have marred its course. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her writings as well as in her life, with its sorrows and errors, is the essentially womanly woman, with the motherly and wifely instincts strong within her, and caring for all she claims and pleads for on behalf of her sex, because she is convinced that a concession of a large measure of women's rights is essential to the highest possible conception and fulfilment of women's duties. ”

“ Yet while in a variety of ways it was dinned into the minds and consciences of women that husband-catching was the end of their existence, they were at the same time enjoined that this object must never be avowed. The aim must be pursued with unceasing vigilance, the whole of women's education, dress, manners, and thoughts must be subordinated to this one object, but they must never openly avow it. In Mary Wollstonecraft's time those who undertook to lead the female mind in the principles of virtue advised women never to avow their love for the man they were about to marry ”

“ In many respects Mary Wollstonecraft's book gives us a pleasing assurance that with all the faults of our time we have made way upon the whole, and are several steps higher up on the ladder of decency and self-control than our forerunners were a hundred years ago. ”

“ As long as this is the case, and so far as it is the case, women are apt to marry "to better themselves," as the housemaids say, or "for a support, as men accept of places under Government," and not because they are heartily and honestly in love, or because they have any real vocation for married life. Mary Wollstonecraft had had abundant experience, in her own circle, of domestic wretchedness, brought about partly by this cause, and partly by the bestial vices of domestic tyrants invested with the irresponsible power associated with "the divine right of husbands." ”

“ The moral trustworthiness of the run of women is accepted by most of us, in our every-day life, as part of the natural order of things on which we can rely as implicitly as on the continuity of the forces of nature. Mary Wollstonecraft, however, finds great fault with women in her time, and roundly accuses them of cunning, superstition, want of generosity, low sense of justice, gross mismanagement of their children and of their households, and of a domestic selfishness which, in some respects, is worse than neglect. ”

“ An action that is one and the same is regarded as in the last degree heinous in one of the actors and as quite excusable in the other. Against the essential immorality and injustice of this doctrine and practice Mary Wollstonecraft protested with her whole strength. She exposes the insincerity of those who profess zeal for virtue by pointing the finger of scorn at the woman who has transgressed, while her partner who may have tempted her by money, ease, and flattery to her doom, is received with every mark of consideration and respect. ”

“ James Fordyce, in his sermons addressed to women, says: "Let it be observed that in your sex manly exercises are never graceful; that in them a tone and figure, as well as an air and deportment, of the masculine kind, are always forbidding; that men of sensibility desire in every woman soft features and a flowing voice, a form not robust, and demeanour delicate and gentle." The lordly protector, man, was supposed to have his vanity tickled by a constant exhibition of female feebleness. ”

“ Individuals, indeed, have expressed in the most remote periods of history what we should now consider modern ideas concerning the duties and rights of women. Plato's "Republic," Solomon's description of the virtuous woman, Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," contain arguments and theories that satisfy the most modern advocate of women's rights. But these and other indications that many master minds did not placidly accept as satisfactory the relation of man and woman as master and slave, were for long ages powerless to affect the realities of life. ”