Feminism (5 page)

heroine and her creator share the same initials. Angellica, ironically,
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is at heart an idealist, and as such alone among a cast of cynics and manipulators. She believes her seducer’s fine romantic words, and
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at the close of the play she is excluded, left bitter and disillusioned.

Behn’s ending leaves us disconcerted, uncomfortable, questioning, for Behn’s sympathies, and ours, are undoubtedly with the hapless Angellica. In a postscript defending her play against charges of plagiarism (women were especially vulnerable to dismissive sneers about their ability), Behn admitted that though she might ‘have stoln some hints’ from an earlier work by Thomas Killigrew, ‘the Plot and Bus’ness (not to boast on’t ) is my own’. And she continued with an ambiguous statement that seems to confirm some kind of personal identification with her unhappy character: ‘I, vainly proud of my judgement, hang out the Sign of Angellica (the only stoln Object) to give Notice where a great part of the Wit dwelt.’

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Chapter 3

The 18th century:

Amazons of the pen

Mary Astell was one of the earliest true feminists, perhaps the first English writer to explore and assert ideas about women which we can still recognize and respond to. Throughout her life she identified with and spoke directly to other women, acknowledging their shared problems. Though she was deeply religious, she had little in common with her outspoken predecessors in the 17th-century sects. She was profoundly conservative; a life-long Royalist and a High Church Anglican, radical only in her perception of the way women’s lives were restricted by convention, and their minds left undeveloped and untrained.

Astell was born in 1666. Her father, a Newcastle coal merchant, died when she was 12 years old. In her late teens, Astell fell into a deep depression, writing poems about her lonely misery, and the fact that, for all her intellectual self-confidence, she could not envisage any tolerable future for herself. At the age of 21, she wrote a poem complaining about her frustration (which must have been shared by many other girls) and gloomily admitting that she could imagine no life that would allow her to use her talents or satisfy her ambition.

Nature permits not me the common way,

By serving Court or State, to gain

That so much valu’d trifle fame

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She might, perhaps, have found satisfaction as a missionary: That to the Turk and Infidel

I might the joyfull tydings tell

And spare no labour to convert them all

But ah my Sex denies me this . . .

But a few months later, in what was surely an act of remarkable courage, she left home, setting out on the long and uncomfortable journey to London with only a little money, and the addresses of a few family contacts. She seems to have settled in Chelsea from the start, and would remain there for the rest of her life; she had some distant relatives there. But they were not very helpful, and she was soon depressed and unable to see any way forward. In 1688,
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desperate because she was ‘not able to get a liflyhood’, she wrote to
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William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, asking for help: For since GOD has given Women as well as Men intelligent Souls,
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how should they be forbidden to improve them? Since he has not denied us the faculty of Thinking, why should we not (at least in
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gratitude to him) employ our Thoughts on himself their noblest Object, and not unworthily bestow them on Trifles and Gaities and
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secular Affairs?

Archbishop Sancroft, obviously impressed by her intelligence, and piety, responded with money, but, more importantly, with contacts.

Before long, Mary Astell had come to know a circle of intelligent women, who became her life-long friends, sympathizing with and supporting her ideas. By 1694, she had written and published her first book,
A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
, urging other women to take themselves seriously: they must learn to think for themselves, work to develop their own minds and skills, rather than always deferring to masculine judgement. One of her books was entitled
Thoughts on Education
; her work was pioneering, genuinely seminal – and it remains interesting because of her stress on the urgent necessity for women to be properly educated. Girls, she argued, must be taught to think for themselves, to judge clearly and 27

sensibly, rather than waste all their time in acquiring graceful social skills and accomplishments.

We value them [men] too much and our selves too little, if we place any part of our desert in their Opinion, and don’t think our selves capable of Nobler Things than the pitiful Conquest of some worthless Heart.

Astell always wrote clearly and sharply, often with an edge of wit:

‘your glass will not do you half so much service as a serious reflection on your own Minds’.

Astell’s analysis was certainly timely. Some modern historians have argued that the Reformation, and especially the closure of many convents, had actually made it harder for English women to get any kind of education. But women, Astell argued, were just as capable as men; all they lacked was a rigorous training that would ‘cultivate and improve them’. She generously supported other women,
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warmly praising, for example, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s
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collection of correspondence and travel writing,
Turkish Letters
: Let her own Sex at least do her Justice . . . let us freely own the Superiority of the Sublime Genius as I do in the sincerity of my Soul, pleas’d that a
Woman
triumphs, and proud to follow in her train.

But ‘what poor Woman is ever taught that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband?’ she asked in her 1700 book
Some Reflections Upon Marriage
. She admitted, rather reluctantly, that marriage was necessary to propagate the species, but insisted that a wife is all too often simply ‘a Man’s Upper Servant’. Any woman who ‘does not practice Passive Obedience to the utmost will never be acceptable to such an absolute Sovereign as a Husband’, she warned. She had sketched her own ideal in her first book: a secular convent, where women could live together, retired from the world, in happy and studious innocence, ‘such a paradise as your mother
Eve
forfeited’. Adam would have no place in this Eden. In 28

Some Reflections
, she developed the suggestion in greater and more practical detail, arguing the need for women’s colleges that would provide them, whatever their future, with a thorough education.

Perhaps even more important to her, these colleges would also help unmarried women; they might, in fact, offer some women the choice of a life that was not dependent upon men.

As she became better known, Astell was often the target of mockery and crude lampoons: she eventually stopped writing, but was able to use her influence in very effective ways. In 1709, he persuaded some of her wealthier Chelsea acquaintances to support the opening of a charity school. Her project was timely: between May 1699 and 1704, fifty-four schools had already been set up in London and Westminster; by 1729, there were 132 in this area, and many
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women were becoming deeply involved in their planning and management; and, gradually, in teaching.

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Astell’s consistently and austerely negative attitudes towards men

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and marriage undoubtedly limited her appeal for many women
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readers. But her great contribution to feminism was the way she urged women to take themselves seriously, to trust in their own
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judgement, to make their own choices in life by developing their talents and educating themselves. Her own achievements, she insisted, were not in any way exceptional; she had ‘not the least Reason to imagine that her Understanding is any better than the rest of her Sex’. Any difference arose only from ‘her Application, her Disinterested and Unprejudic’d Love to Truth, and unswerving pursuit of it, notwithstanding all Discouragements, which is in every Womans Power’.

It was only towards the end of the 18th century that other women would speak out as clearly and forcefully, or put forward a comparable, and as powerfully feminist, programme. But through the 18th century, the situation of women was changing, not always favourably. In an increasingly bourgeois society, fewer women were working alongside their husbands in family workshops or 29

businesses. It was perhaps harder for women to live independently, supporting themselves; and, it has been suggested, it was much harder to find a husband without a dowry. At the same time, far more women were being educated, at least to read and write. All through the century, ‘conduct’ books were addressed directly to women, though they mostly recommended the ‘womanly’ virtues of meekness, piety, and charity, and all stressed the central importance of modesty, which was often used as a polite synonym for chastity.

But more women themselves were also writing and publishing, and in many different genres; they were numerous enough, indeed, to annoy the great Dr Johnson, who took time out to mock the new

‘Amazons of the pen’.

The greatest of these feminist ‘Amazons’ was Mary Wollstonecraft.

Her
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
was published in 1792, and still speaks directly to us. But she was by no means alone. Catherine Macaulay, for example, was, like Wollstonecraft, a radical who responded thoughtfully to the Revolution in France. She had
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already published a many-volumed
History of England
when, in
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1790, she wrote
Letters on Education
, arguing, as Wollstonecraft would do a little later, that women’s apparent weaknesses were not natural, but simply the product of mis-education. Macaulay also attacked the sexual double standard, insisting that a single sexual experience does not transform a virgin into a wanton. She firmly rejected the notion that women were ‘the mere property of the men’, with no right to dispose of their own persons.

She certainly alarmed some readers; as one man remarked dismissively to a woman friend, ‘once in every age I would wish such a woman to appear, as proof that genius is not confined to sex . . .

but . . . you’ll pardon me, we want no more than
one
Mrs. Macaulay’.

Even a sympathetic reader like John Adams, the future American president, praised her, ambiguously, as ‘a Lady of masculine masterly understanding’. Mary Wollstonecraft knew Macaulay’s work, and sent her a copy of her own
Vindication of the Rights of
Men
, along with a letter remarking that ‘you are the only female 30

writer who I coincide in opinion with respecting the rank our sex ought to endeavour to attain in the world’. ‘I will not call hers a masculine understanding’, Wollstonecraft wrote, ‘because I admit not such an arrogant assumption of reason; but I contend that it was a sound one, and that her judgement . . . was a proof that a woman can acquire judgement in the full extent of the word.’ She valued Macaulay, she continued, because she ‘contends for laurels’

while most women ‘only seek for flowers’.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759, to a not very successful would-be middle-class family; her early life is a chilling reminder of how little education was available to girls in that period. Most girls were taught at home – rarely very satisfactorily – either by their mothers, or by poorly trained governesses. In the later part of the
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century, private schools for middle-class girls flourished, but many simply concentrated on helping their pupils to be graceful and well-mannered, readying them for ‘good’ marriages. Wollstonecraft
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had briefly attended a day school in Yorkshire, but she was

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essentially self-educated. At one point a neighbouring clergyman
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lent her books, and she seems to have studied them rigorously, allowing herself nothing ‘for mere amusement, not even poetry’, but
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‘concentrating instead on works which are addressed to the understanding’.

Like so many skimpily educated girls in her day, she found it hard to earn a living. She took a post in Bath as companion to an old lady when she was 19 years old, then came home to nurse her dying mother; later she scraped a living by taking in needlework. With her sisters and her closest friend Fanny Blood, she set up a school in Newington Green, which soon failed (not surprisingly, given their lack of both experience and training), though she at least made some friends among the Dissenting intellectuals who lived in the area. Fanny soon married and accompanied her husband to Portugal; in 1785, when Fanny was about to have a baby, Wollstonecraft went to Lisbon, but was heartbroken when her friend died in childbirth. In 1786, she was briefly employed as 31

governess (still without any training whatsoever) by the aristocratic Kingsborough family in Ireland; detesting her employers and critical of their lifestyle, she was bitter and miserable. She then came home to nurse her sister, who had broken down after childbirth.

She was in her early 30s when she was rescued from paralysing depression by Joseph Johnson, the radical publisher, who offered her work on his new
Analytical Review
. She began regularly reviewing and translating for him; she clearly educated herself by reading and writing. Moreover, the work, and her friendship with the radical intellectuals she met through Johnson, built up her confidence as a writer. He published her first book,
Thoughts on the
Education of Daughters
, in 1787; it is a well-argued plea for girls to be given the chance to develop their God-given intelligence. But it derives real power from an undercurrent of personal feeling, a sharpness and urgency that clearly sprang from Wollstonecraft’s own difficulties in picking up an education as and how she could, as
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