Mary Wollstonecraft · Politics
Wollstonecraft’s deepest claim was that women’s apparent weakness was no fact of nature but the manufactured product of a corrupt education designed to make them charming, dependent, and unfit to reason.
The deepest and most original argument in Wollstonecraft’s work is her claim that the character of women - the weakness, frivolity, vanity, cunning, and incapacity for sustained reason that her age took as proof of women’s natural inferiority - was not natural at all, but made. It was the predictable, even inevitable, product of the way women were raised, educated, and treated from infancy. Give any human being an education designed to develop only their capacity to charm and please, deny them serious knowledge, train them to depend entirely on others, reward them only for beauty and submission, and forbid them any path to dignity except through the approval of a more powerful group - and you will produce exactly the degraded character that women were then said to possess by nature. The inferiority was real, but it was an effect of oppression, not a justification for it.
This was a revolutionary move, because it broke the circular logic that had imprisoned women for millennia. The traditional argument ran: women are naturally inferior, therefore they should be denied education and kept dependent. Wollstonecraft reversed the causation: women are denied education and kept dependent, therefore they appear inferior. The apparent confirmation of women’s incapacity was in fact the consequence of the very treatment it was used to justify. Once this was seen, the whole edifice of justification collapsed, and the supposed natural order stood revealed as a system of artificial degradation. The task was not to accept women as they had been made, but to change the conditions that made them - above all, to give them a real education.
Wollstonecraft’s argument rested on a foundation laid by John Locke, whose theory of the mind had revolutionized Enlightenment thought. Locke had argued that the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, with no innate ideas - that all our knowledge, character, and understanding are built up from experience, from the impressions we receive and the way we are educated and treated. This was a profoundly democratic and hopeful doctrine: it meant that differences between people were largely the product of their different experiences and educations, not of fixed innate natures, and therefore that people could be improved, even transformed, by improving their circumstances and education.
Wollstonecraft applied this Lockean insight to the situation of women with devastating effect. If the mind is shaped by experience and education, then the minds of women - subjected from birth to a radically different and far more impoverished education than men, trained in different habits, exposed to different expectations - would necessarily develop differently. The differences between the male and female mind that her age attributed to nature were exactly what Locke’s theory would predict from the differences in their education and treatment. Women’s minds were not naturally inferior; they had been shaped, by a defective education and a degrading social condition, into the form that was then mistaken for their nature. And the corollary was full of hope: if women’s degraded character was produced by their education, then a better education could produce a better character. Change the experiences, and you change the mind. The blank slate that had been written upon so badly could be written upon well. This is why Wollstonecraft made the reform of female education the absolute center of her program - because in the Lockean framework, education was the lever that could lift women out of their manufactured inferiority into the full rational humanity that was their birthright.
Wollstonecraft insisted that the defective education of women was not a private misfortune for women alone but a catastrophe for the whole of society, and her argument on this point is among her most compelling. Consider, she said, that women, however degraded, are the mothers and first teachers of all children, including all the boys who will become the men, citizens, and rulers of the next generation. A woman who is herself frivolous, ignorant, and incapable of reason cannot raise rational, virtuous children; she will transmit her own degradation to her sons and daughters alike, perpetuating the corruption across the generations. The folly of educating women badly thus rebounds upon the men who decreed it, in the form of the poorly raised children those women produce. A society that wants virtuous and rational citizens must begin by making virtuous and rational mothers - which means educating women.
The corruption ran further. A man who marries a woman trained only to charm gets not a companion and friend but, at best, a pretty plaything and, at worst, a cunning manipulator who, denied honest power, exercises the only power left to her through flattery, deceit, and sexual influence. The relations between the sexes are poisoned at the root: instead of the friendship and partnership of equals, there is the mutual corruption of master and dependent, the one made tyrannical and the other made sly. Marriage becomes a trap rather than a union; the family, which should be the school of virtue, becomes a school of vice. And the nation is deprived of the rational contribution of half its members, their faculties wasted, their potential squandered. Wollstonecraft thus turned the conservative argument on its head: it was not the education of women that threatened the social order, but their mis-education, which corrupted marriage, parenting, virtue, and the commonwealth alike. To educate women was not to endanger society but to heal it - to make possible the rational mothers, the virtuous families, and the honest partnerships on which a healthy society depends. The liberation of women was in the interest of everyone, men and women, and the refusal to educate them was a folly that the whole society paid for.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Wollstonecraft traced women’s degradation to their education. In your own words, how did she argue that a system can manufacture the very inferiority it then uses to justify itself?
Leads to John Locke.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.