Mary Wollstonecraft · Politics
Wollstonecraft’s boldest metaphysical claim was that reason and virtue have no sex - that the human soul is one, and that any ‘separate’ female virtue is a contradiction in terms.
Beneath Wollstonecraft’s arguments about education and rights lies a bold metaphysical foundation: the claim that the human soul, the rational and moral self, has no sex. Reason is reason, whether it inhabits a male or a female body; virtue is virtue, the same excellence of character in a woman as in a man; the moral law is one, binding all rational beings alike. There are not two kinds of human excellence, a masculine and a feminine, but one - and it is the excellence of a rational creature who governs herself by reason and chooses the good freely. This is the deepest root of Wollstonecraft’s feminism, and the foundation on which all her other arguments rest. If the soul has no sex, then there can be no justification for a separate, lesser education, a separate, lesser standard of conduct, or a separate, lesser set of rights for women.
This claim cut directly against the dominant view of her age, which held that men and women had fundamentally different natures, suited to different spheres, and therefore governed by different virtues. Men were rational, active, public; their virtues were courage, justice, wisdom, independence. Women were emotional, passive, domestic; their virtues were modesty, chastity, obedience, self-sacrifice, the arts of pleasing. To each sex its own nature and its own excellence. Wollstonecraft attacked this doctrine of ‘separate spheres’ and ‘separate virtues’ at its root. There is, she insisted, only one human nature and one human excellence; the apparent differences are the manufactured products of education and oppression; and the doctrine of distinct female virtues was not a recognition of women’s nature but an instrument for keeping them subordinate, by defining their ‘virtue’ precisely as the docility and dependence that served men.
Wollstonecraft reserved special scrutiny for modesty and chastity - the qualities most insistently demanded of women and most central to the ideal of female virtue in her age. She did not reject genuine modesty, which she understood as a real virtue: a becoming humility and purity of mind that should belong to both sexes alike. What she attacked was the counterfeit modesty demanded of women - an external propriety of dress and manner, a anxious guarding of sexual reputation, a self-effacement enforced not by inner conviction but by the iron necessity of a woman’s situation, in which her entire worth and prospects depended on her reputation for chastity. This was not virtue but its simulation, produced by dependence rather than reason, and it revealed the whole hollowness of the system of ‘feminine virtue.’
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 denied there could be separate male and female virtues. In your own words, why did she think the idea of a special ‘feminine virtue’ was a trap?
Leads to Catharine Macaulay.
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