Mary Wollstonecraft · Politics
Wollstonecraft delivered a searing critique of marriage as it was - a system that left women economically dependent, legally powerless, and reduced, she charged, to a respectable form of bondage.
For a woman of Wollstonecraft’s time and class, marriage was not one life choice among many; it was, for all practical purposes, the only respectable path to security and status. A woman could not, with rare and difficult exceptions, enter the professions, attend a university, hold most kinds of employment above the demeaning, or earn an independent living. She typically could not own property in her own right once married, could not vote, and had few legal protections against her husband. Her economic survival, her social standing, and her very identity depended almost entirely on attaching herself to a man - first her father, then her husband. To fail to marry was to face a life of dependent spinsterhood, often as an unpaid burden in a relative’s household or in genteel poverty. Marriage was, in short, a woman’s career, her livelihood, and her only avenue to a place in the world.
Wollstonecraft saw, with merciless clarity, what this meant for the moral situation of women. If a woman must marry to survive, then she does not freely choose marriage; she is compelled into it by economic necessity. And if she is compelled into it, then the relationship rests not on free choice and mutual affection but on need and dependence on one side and power on the other. A woman in this situation must make herself attractive and agreeable to secure a husband, must please and submit to keep him, and must endure whatever follows because she has no alternative and no escape. Her whole life becomes oriented around the winning and keeping of male support, which corrupts her character, her education, and her relationships. The degradation of women that Wollstonecraft diagnosed throughout her work had, at its economic root, this brutal fact: that women were denied any means of independent survival, and so were forced into a dependence on men that made genuine freedom, virtue, and equality impossible.
From this analysis Wollstonecraft drew a conclusion that places her among the most far-sighted of all feminist thinkers: that the liberation of women required, above all, their economic independence - the ability to support themselves by their own work, without depending on a man. As long as women had no means of survival but marriage, they would remain in a position of dependence that made genuine freedom and virtue impossible, however much their formal rights or education might improve. A woman who could leave a bad marriage, refuse a distasteful suitor, or simply live independently if she chose, would stand in an entirely different relation to men and to marriage itself - able to enter marriage from free choice and affection rather than economic compulsion, able to leave or refuse it, able to negotiate as an equal because she was not at the mercy of her partner for her bread.
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 attacked the dependence at the heart of marriage. In your own words, why did she think a woman who had no choice but to marry for support could not be free or virtuous?
Leads to John Stuart Mill.
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