The First Feminist

...He issued several of her novels, and she reviewed for his liberal Analytical Review...

...Her life, in fact, has stood as an example to generations of feminists...

...The eldest daughter of a tradesman, Mary was responsible from an early age for her own support plus the partial support of two sisters and a brother...

...Fuseli would not consent, Mary, faced with an intractable and unhappy situation, fled to France...

...As an adolescent, she often spent the night outside her parents' door to protect her mother from her father's drunken outbursts...

...When Mrs...

...Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell "How many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have practiced as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility...

...Flexner demonstrates, were habitually hurried and careless: full of repetitions, inaccuracies and intemperate opinions...

...That contemporary sentiment was expressed in 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft, in her "A Vindication of the Rights of Women...

...Mary hated her father, and resented her mother and sisters for their submissiveness...

...Unfortunately, her tract had little or no effect on existing conditions...

...Evidently she held her own in this distinguished company...

...the girl was so distracted that she bit her wedding ring to pieces in the coach...

...Flex-ner convincingly diagnoses as stemming from repressed anger against her parents, coupled with the lack of emotional gratification...

...He was a terrible choice...

...And can she rest supinely dependent on man for reason, when she ought to mount with him the arduous steps of knowledge...

...In the 18th century the number of respectable professions open to a girl of Mary's class was severely limited...

...The infant, named for her, was to become Mary Shelley, the poet's wife and author of Frankenstein...

...Following four years of instruction, children from poorer families (excepting any who had shown unusual ability) would be sent to trade schools...

...She was something of a late developer, failing to encounter a man who stirred her feelings until she was in her early 30s...

...He was the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, 18 years her senior, whose paintings forecast both the Romantic era and modern surrealism...

...Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfill...

...Mary tried unsuccessfully to drown herself, then took the initiative and broke with Imlay completely...

...As a gesture of faith in women, Mary decided to have her baby delivered by a midwife, and to appear at dinner the next day...

...Mary refused to recognize any erotic element in her unreciprocated attachment to him...

...Obviously such a plan would not abolish the class system, but it was certainly more broad-minded than the ideas of Hannah More, who disapproved of teaching the lower classes to read and write, lest it interfere with their ability as servants...

...Soon she was seeing him regularly...

...At his house she was introduced to the leading intellectuals of the day, including William Blake, who illustrated one of her books, and Thomas Paine...

...In Mary's own words...

...Although Godwin had previously written against the institution of marriage, after Mary became pregnant again they wed in order to legitimize the child, but continued to maintain separate dwellings...

...and there is perhaps no animal so much indebted to subordination for its good behavior as women...

...she could teach, act as a governess or paid companion, or do needlework...

...Her novels were no better...

...Meek wives are, in general, foolish mothers...

...About her description of northern Europe, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, he said: "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book...

...herself...

...The love she could not give her family she lavished initially on girl friends, then on the lot of women in general...

...Women's education was her main concern, since, in her opinion, inadequate schooling enforced an unnatural state of dependence upon men: "To be a good mother, a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands...

...although possessed of considerable descriptive powers, she had but one subject...

...Godwin took a critical interest in Mary's work, and provided the emotional stability she was never able to get from Imlay...

...Mary's polemics, Ms...

...And in this new biography Eleanor Flexner (the author of Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States) shows just how exemplary it was...

...There, against the background of the Terror, she involved herself with an American, Gilbert Imlay, an adventurer from New Jersey promoting a scheme to foment war between the United States and Spain...

...From the harshness of the responses it is clear that many found her feminism a ridiculous and seditious idea...

...Most of her life she suffered from neurotic ailments and depression, symptoms that Ms...

...In the 20th century, of course, Mary has been treated with greater sympathy, but has frequently been confused with her equally unconventional daughter...

...the wealthier students would continue their intellectual pursuits...

...Tiring of Mary not long after the birth of their daughter, he did not have the strength to end their affair, and instead went to live with an actress while she was in Scandinavia, on a business trip for him...

...Alone now, she called on William Godwin, the philosopher whom she had met at Joseph Johnson's...

...Mary tried all of these at different times, finding her true vocation only after she moved to London and met the publisher Joseph Johnson...

...Mary first achieved notoriety with "A Vindication of the Rights of Men," a pamphlet that attacked Edmund Burke for his condemnation of the French Revolution in a hard, sometimes libelous fashion...

...Eleanor Flexner's faultless biography portrays a captivating individualist whose life is of more than historical significance...

...Unless the understanding of woman be enlarged, and her character rendered more firm, by being allowed to govern her own conduct, she will never have sufficient sense or command of temper to govern her children properly...

...Mary was hardly a radical feminist by modern standards...

...if anything, the position of women in the 19th century changed for the worse, a reaction against the revolutionary spirit that had inspired Mary's generation...

...She did not affirm that women ought to seek careers, simply that in the home they should be treated as equals, not chattels...

...Upon returning to England...

...Mary's struggle is the struggle of every intelligent woman: the quest for an independent identity, self-respect, relationships based on mutual regard, the means to better both oneself and mankind...

...Mary's solution was mass coeducation, encompassing a broad curriculum, for boys and girls aged 5-9...

...Later this pattern repeated itself when she rescued a sister from her husband...

...but they are human duties, and the principle that should regulate them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same...

...For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same...

...If Mary was less of a theorist than subsequent leaders of the women's rights movement, she was nevertheless the first, the progenitor...

...Indeed, so sure was she of the purity of her motives that she implored his wife to let her live with them-for "the satisfaction of seeing him and conversing with him daily...

...Yet others of a more liberal stripe, sympathizers with the American and French revolutions, were fascinated and persuaded by the passionately unconventional Wollstonecraft...

...The formidable bluestocking Hannah More, a noted authority on education, declared that "to be unstable and capricious, I really think, is but too characteristic of our sex...

...An anonymous male writer titled one rejoinder "A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes...

...She was 38 years old...

...Despite the midwife's competence, complications developed and at the end of a week of intense suffering Mary Wollstone-craft died...

...Still, her enthusiasm and intelligence were always apparent, and at times she was quite eloquent...

...Her own experience may have led Mary to acknowledge that women were prone to "sensibility" (what we would call emotional impulse...

...To this era, the outspoken feminist seemed merely a tragic transgressor...