Vindication_as_an_Example_of_Anglo-American_Feminism

The ‘women’s movement’ of the 1960s was not, of course, the start of feminism. Rather, it was a renewal of an old tradition of thought and action already possessing its classic books which had diagnosed the problem of women’s inequality in society, and (in some cases) proposed solutions. These books include Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the rights of women (1792), which discusses male writers like Milton, Pope, and Rousseau; Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which vividly portrays the unequal treatment given to women seeking education and alternatives to marriage and motherhood; and Simone de Beauvoirs The Second Sex (1949), which has an important section on the portrayal of women in the novels of D.H. Lawrence.1 A major division within feminist criticism has concerned disagreement about the amount and type of theory that should feature in it. What is usually called the ‘Anglo-American’ version of feminism has tended to be more sceptical about recent critical theory, and more cautious in using it, than have the ‘French’ feminists, who have adopted and adapted a great deal of (mainly) post-structuralist and psychoanalytic criticism as the basis of much of their work. Toril moi was the first to distinguish between these two schools of criticism in her book Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985). The basic tenet of so called Anglo-American feminist criticism lies in their presupposition that sex, that is biologically determined differentiates between individual and some roles are constructed by the society for the individuals and these performances in turn are different or expected to be different in different sexes. Feminist critics strike here. The root cause of all female oppression is this gender binary which thrust upon women different various codes and behaviours, defined to be feminine, and throws them out of the mainstream flow of the society into a marginalised position. Mary Wollstonecraft,s position in history can be traced to be a pioneer of proto feminism. Before Wollstonecraft, there were works suggesting the reform of female manners or proposals for improving female education, but there was no single-minded criticism of the social and economic system which created a double standard of excellence for male and female and relegated women to an inferior position. The reformers who wrote about women interest us not only in what they proposed but also in what they assumed. Many appeared progressive, proposing the advancement of female learning, but often they clung like puritans to biblical injunctions that necessarily limited any substantive change in the status of women. The rationale always cited for limiting the sphere of women was biblical, that they had been divinely ordained the mental and physical inferior of men. Mary Wollstonecraft insisted that these basic attitudes and principles which subordinated women must be repudiated before a real change in a woman’s condition could be gained permanently. But the overwhelming majority who wrote on women either assumed these traditional axioms were correct, or chose not to argue with them. Wollstonecraft’s general line of argument in her Vindication can be traced in three parts.2 Firstly, she argues that reason is essential for the development of moral character, whether that of a man or woman. Secondly, then she refutes the contemporary prevalent doctrine of the “separation of virtues” doctrine, then a popular belief that there is a difference between “male” and “female” virtues. Thirdly, in explanation of the position of women in the society, she offers an argument based upon the theory of associated ideas of “nurture” over “nature” as the cause of any deficiency found in the reasoning powers of females of the time. These ideas go almost hand in hand with the with the ideas pervading the literature of the feminist movement of the nineteenth century in England and America. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the seeds of the women’s rights movement began to grow in England and America, it was the popular conception that men and women enjoyed different “spheres” of activity and that their virtues...the character, quality, abilities they should strive to attain...were specifically tailored to these spheres. Considered too weak to physically to venture outside the home and too deficient in reason to make important decisions, the woman was relegated to the domestic sphere where, under the guidance and direction of her rationally superior husband, she tended the house, raises children, and gave her family comfort and pleasure. Corresponding her virtues were an outgrowth of her sensitive, yielding nature: kindness, humility, gentleness, protectiveness and so on. Young girls, Chapter VI of the Vindication argue, are encouraged by their parents, their teachers, by the very structure and sedentary nature of their daily routine to become the kind of woman conceived of popularly as the feminine model. Few rebels could escape these moulding. Young girls soon perceive that pleasure and power will be theirs only in proportion to their ability to please men. She cites that even Rousseau, whom she admired for his humanitarianism and liberal sympathy, states that “...that woman is specially made for man’s pleasure”. Wollstonecraft allows men a natural superiority in bodily strength, but she feels that female frailty is no incurable affliction. To quote her “but should it be proved that woman is naturally weaker than man, whence does it follow that it is natural to her to labour to labour to become still weaker than nature intended her to be'”.3 Not only is this carefully cultivated physical frailty achieved at the expense of the natural pleasures a young girl would find in playing hard out of doors, but it also undermines intellectual achievement. Wollstonecraft is quite evidently talking about the real physical infirmity, not unusual in young girls not raised in the world or for the world, but raised instead, protected from the world for the man she will marry one day. Thus she argues that women’s faults are not proof of their natural inferiority but proof of instead of the intrinsic inferiority of their environment. Chapter V of Vindication surveys the field of important writers on women in the eighteenth century. When she came to treat Rousseau’s opinion of women, Wollstonecraft was not remiss in explaining where Rousseau went astray. Much of the Vindication is a refutation of Rousseau’s theories of women, and clearly, to Wollstonecraft, Rousseau’s acceptance of traditional attitudes about female inferiority is a more painful betrayal of liberalism than the fatherly preachings of a Gregory or a Fordyce. ‘Sophie’ is Rousseau’s creation of a young girl bred to be the ideal wife of ‘Emile’ and the antithesis of Wollstonecraft’s rational woman. Not only is she by nature inferior, but she exists only to provide entertainment for men. Wollstonecraft challenges Rousseau’s major assumption about women: that a state of dependence is natural to them, therefore they should be dependent on men; that they are naturally uninclined to learn, therefore they should be given less opportunity; that they should have little liberty, but become accustomed to ‘habitual restraint’ since dissipation, levity and inconstancy are also natural to them. Wollstonecraft argues with all these assumption. Beyond the general argument for the emancipation of women the Vindication advocates more specific social reforms in education and family. Wollstonecraft speaks not of male or female children, but of all children, given equal advantages. The home, with an educated mother and father presiding over it , looms large in shaping good character in the child. One must realize again, however, that the fundamental imperative for education in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication is that a woman has an innate capacity to reason which is its own moral justification for development. Wollstonecraft asserts candidly that a woman’s first responsibility is to herself as a rational creature, and should one conceive of a conflict between domestic duties’ motherhood and reason, it is reason which should be served. But such a conflict was highly unlikely. Right conduct, motherhood and developing reason could never be at variance. “Reason is absolutely necessary to enable a woman to perform any duty properly,” 4explains Wollstonecraft and no duty was important as her duty to her children. The force of the Vindication is clearly to derive education for women so that they might be virtuous mothers of a reform minded new generation of citizens, extending the republican requirement of civic virtue to women by schooling them in rational motherhood. The Vindication then offers no romanticization of motherhood or hosework or poverty.the ideal woman pictured in the Vindication is active and intelligent, blending civic and familial responsibilities. Thus we see that Wollstonecraft in Vindication pleads for her sex.but she no doubt remains within the structure of the bourgeois societal structure and endeavours to put forward ways that might emancipate women from their repression. The clear social agenda evident in the Vindication marks it a clear example of Anglo-American feminist critical theory, though written almost hundred and fifty years before the term was coined. WORKS CITED 1. Peter Barry, Beginning Theory; An Introduction to Literary And Cultural Theory, pp. 121 2. Carolyn W.Korsmeyer, Reasons And Morals in the Early Feminist Movement: Mary Wollstonecraft 3. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H.Poston, Norton 4. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H.Poston; Norton