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 why Wollstonecraft called for opening the professions and employments to women - why she imagined women practicing as physicians, running farms, managing shops and businesses, pursuing the careers that economic necessity and legal exclusion denied them. The demand was not merely for the satisfaction of meaningful work, though that mattered; it was for the economic foundation of all other freedoms. Political rights, legal equality, even education would remain hollow, she saw, so long as women’s survival depended on attaching themselves to men. Economic independence was the material base on which the whole edifice of women’s freedom had to rest. This insight - that formal rights mean little without the economic power to exercise them, that the dependence of survival is the deepest form of subordination, and that the liberation of women therefore requires their access to independent livelihood - was extraordinarily prescient. It anticipated by more than a century the recognition, central to later feminism, that the entry of women into paid work and economic independence would be the great engine of their liberation, transforming their position in marriage, in the family, and in society. Wollstonecraft saw to the economic root of the matter: that she who cannot feed herself cannot be free.
Wollstonecraft’s vision of marriage as friendship between equals was not a cold or passionless ideal but a deeply considered theory of what makes love endure. She observed, with characteristic realism, that the marriages of her day were often founded on passion and the attraction of beauty - a man captivated by a woman’s charms, a woman trained to excite and capture his desire. But passion, she noted, is by nature transient; beauty fades; the intoxication of desire cools. A marriage founded on these alone has no foundation for the long years after they have passed, and decays into indifference, irritation, or the pursuit of new passions elsewhere. The woman who has been valued only for her beauty and trained only to please finds, as both fade, that she has nothing left to hold her husband, and the marriage becomes a hollow form or a quiet misery. The very system that trained women to be alluring mistresses thus undermined the marriages it was meant to secure.
The alternative, Wollstonecraft argued, was to found marriage on something that does not fade: friendship, mutual respect, and the esteem of one rational being for another. Two people who are friends, who respect each other’s minds and characters, who share pursuits and converse as equals, who have built their union on understanding rather than mere attraction - such a couple has a foundation that endures and even deepens as passion cools, ripening into the steady, profound affection that is the real treasure of a long marriage. But this kind of love is possible only between equals: one cannot be the genuine friend of a dependent inferior, cannot respect the judgment of someone kept deliberately ignorant, cannot converse as an equal with someone trained only to flatter and obey. The companionate marriage Wollstonecraft envisioned therefore required the equality and education of women; the degradation of women made true marital friendship impossible, while their liberation would make it possible for the first time. In this way Wollstonecraft turned the conservative fear on its head once more: the equality of women was not a threat to marriage and the family but their salvation, the only foundation on which the lasting love and genuine partnership that everyone claimed to want could actually be built. She wanted not to destroy marriage but to make it, for the first time, a union of two free and equal human beings - which is, very nearly, what marriage has since become.
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.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.