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.’
Consider, she argued, the cruel double standard. A man’s lapse from chastity was forgiven or even admired; a woman’s ruined her utterly, casting her out of respectable society with no path to recovery. Why? Not because female chastity was morally more important than male, but because a woman was treated as a kind of property whose value lay in her sexual purity, to be transferred from father to husband. Her ‘virtue’ was, in truth, her market value - and the obsessive cultivation of female modesty was the maintenance of that value, not the pursuit of moral excellence. This explained the otherwise baffling fact that women were taught to make modesty and chastity almost their whole moral concern, while the great virtues of justice, courage, and wisdom were treated as no part of their business. The system did not actually want women to be virtuous in the full human sense; it wanted them to be chaste and obedient, which served men’s interests, and it dignified this narrow and self-interested demand with the name of female virtue. Wollstonecraft’s exposure of this counterfeit was among her sharpest blows: she showed that the very thing held up as the crown of womanly virtue was in fact the badge of women’s reduction to property, and that genuine virtue, the same for both sexes, was something the system of ‘feminine virtue’ actively prevented.
Wollstonecraft’s claim that the soul has no sex was not only a philosophical but a deeply religious argument, and understanding this dimension is essential to grasping her thought. She was a serious, if unorthodox, believer, and she grounded the equality of the sexes in their equal standing before God. Every human soul, she held, was created by God as a rational and immortal being, destined for moral improvement in this life and accountability in the next. The purpose of human existence was the cultivation of virtue and reason, the perfecting of the soul in preparation for eternity. But - and here was the decisive point - this purpose, this destiny, this accountability belonged equally to women and men, because women had souls equally with men, souls of the same rational and immortal nature, answerable to the same God by the same standard.
From this followed a powerful religious indictment of women’s subordination. To deny women the education and freedom necessary to develop their reason and virtue was to obstruct them in the very task for which God had created them - the cultivation of their immortal souls. To define women’s duty as pleasing men rather than serving God and perfecting their own virtue was to make a woman’s husband, rather than God, the object of her existence - a kind of idolatry that subordinated the eternal to the earthly. A woman’s first duty, Wollstonecraft insisted, was not to her husband but to herself as a rational creature and to God - the duty to develop the soul she had been given. A system that made women into the dependents and ornaments of men, by stunting their reason and confining their virtue to the art of pleasing, was therefore not merely socially unjust but a violation of the divine purpose, a frustration of God’s design for half of humanity. This religious grounding gave Wollstonecraft’s feminism a depth and an unanswerable moral force: she was not merely claiming social rights for women but insisting that women, as immortal souls created by God for the cultivation of virtue, had a sacred duty to develop the reason and independence that their subordination denied them - and that no human authority, no husband, no father, no custom, could rightly stand between a soul and its Creator, or between a rational being and the perfecting of the virtue for which it was made.
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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