Mary Wollstonecraft And Jane Austen: Early Feminism And Gender Equality

There are many points in history during which people rebelled against society, politics, and the status quo of the time that they lived in. However, the most prominent of these times might just be the Romantic period. This was a point that new ideas flowed for those with a creative bent. Many of these artists had radical ideas and idealistic attitudes. They embraced nature and looked for the best in revolutionary ideas and social justice. This was also when feminist ideas began to come to the forefront of the minds of women. Predominant among these social justice issues was equality between genders, races, and classes.

As pioneers of early proto-feminist thought, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen questioned the boundaries between constructions of masculinity and femininity. The call for gender equality was complicated due to the society that they lived in and the position that the society allowed women to take. Mary Wollstonecraft’s political intent is overtly stated in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman which provided a space for the ideas of equality and rights to be discussed in a patriarchal society. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park presents a more covert representation of 19th century feminist ideology, through Fanny Price. According to Anne Mellor, Romanticism was “a literary movement that was constructed and defined by a masculine ideology and discourse”. Even nature itself was reassigned as male as to make “her” silent and take away “her” voice. While men did have a bigger platform for writing and getting published, women were only able to publish their work if a man was willing to do it for her, or she had to do it anonymously. Before the idea of feminism existed – feminism is the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men – there was the concept of the “pure” and “ideal” woman. This woman stayed at home to tend to the children, she needed to be “protected” by the men in her life, and she passed her time with sewing and other “womanly” pursuits. She was expected to “obey” the head of her household, which was in most cases a man, and had no legal rights to her children or any property.

Women in general were considered to be inferior both physically and mentally to men. If they were educated in anything other than music, sewing, painting, and making themselves attractive to men, they were considered to be a “bluestocking”. “Reading (especially novels) was considered to be one of these “genteel” pursuits. Since women had more time on their hands than men did, the majority of the reading public was female. Thus, a feminine discourse was present in all of the literary genres in the Romantic period” which made it difficult to maintain gender barriers between genres. These ideas were the “essence of what a woman should truly be” and lasted between the years of 1780 through to 1914 when the First World War changed the structure of society completely. During this time, men believed it was okay for women to read fictional novels, they did not like the idea of the fairer sex becoming authors. That was a title that was supposed to stay with the men. As the numbers of salons and associations for women writers, critics, and readers grew, women’s literary self-confidence grew too. Byron, Keats, and Thomas Moore openly detested these ‘bluestockings’ and denounced them in their own work. As disliked as they were by these larger names, these women were recognized by the broad public because they wrote for the general public instead of only the upper class. It was difficult for women to be published. Many of them either had to publish their work anonymously or have a man publish it for them. There were a few women who knew male publishers that were radical enough to print the woman’s work under her name directly. One such person was Mary Wollstonecraft. Sometimes known as the “mother of feminism,” Wollstonecraft wrote a number of essays including A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in which she demanded that “every person should be entitled to enjoy and dispense the fruits of his or her own labors, inequality of rank should be eliminated, and in place of an exaggerated respect for the authority of our canonized forefathers be substituted the cultivation of an independent understanding and sound judement”.

Wollstonecraft’s belief was for every man, woman, and child. When the French Minister of education made the new Constituent Assembly and proposed a state-supported system for men only, Wollstonecraft immediately composed a lengthy response.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman called for education for girls and women. In it, Wollstonecraft claimed that the gender inequality at the core of both the revolutionary French nation and of the British society threatened the development of a genuine democracy. She recognized that denying women a true education was to deny them their basic rights of their identity and their participation in the natural and civil rights of mankind. In this, Wollstonecraft tried to establish her own type of revolution – one that was grounded in manners and the belief in the “rational capacity and equality of woman”. She was one of the first to explicitly attack society’s definition of the female. She questioned why women were expected to be overly-emotional, intuitive, illogical, capable of moral sentiment, but not rational thought. Her argument was that women should be held morally and legally responsible for their sins or crimes that they committed. If women were to be considered human and have a soul, then they should also have the mental capacity to think rationally like men. Wollstonecraft stressed that women who lack education will “do today what they did yesterday merely because they did it yesterday without questioning why”. She pointed out that women who thought rationally would be able to have a friendship with their husbands. Women who were only taught the frivolous things, such as how to inspire passion, would have loveless marriages in the long-term. She confronted these issues with rational thought and spoke from a platform that was able to permeate the female – male boundaries of the time. However, her essay was not representative of a universal opinion, though she was able to do what women in her time were told they could not do: have a political voice in the patriarchy of the 19th century. Even though she was able to accomplish such a feat, her work would not be endorsed by the men of her society because doing so would support the notion of women’s writing with a political view which threatened masculine Romanticism.

Mellor calls “feminine Romanticism” the space in which women were able to enter the public sphere through writing. It is also indicative of the containment women suffered from not being able to engage in the rational discourse that was preserved only for men. This was a paradox that Wollstonecraft addressed by calling for the education of women. It should be noted that there were men, such as Francis Hutcheson and John Miller, who agreed with Wollstonecraft’s call for education for women and also wrote in favor of greater equality and opportunity for the fairer sex. However, the two pamphlets that were written with an identifiable feminine argument were done so under the pseudonym “Sophia” and were not widely read. It also didn’t help that the women of the “Blue Stockings Society” did not argue for more than educational opportunity for women, therefore allowing for the continued oppression” of men. This was the platform that Jane Austen stepped into when she began writing. Though there is no clear connection between Austen and Wollstonecraft, many of Austen’s novels are based on the ideas of the education of women. Her protagonists are intelligent, yet ignorant girls who learn to perceive the world more fully through rational thinking and observation. Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price is one such character. She is an uneducated girl with a large capacity for intelligent understanding, though to her cousins, she appears to be “prodigiously stupid.” However, what she lacks in “proper education,” she makes up for in being an acute observer of the world around her. “She looked on and listened, not unamused to be to observe the selfishness which […] seemed to govern them all.

Mansfield Park presents to the 19th century what the rational thinking female mind would be like. While the other women in Mansfield Park are made up of the constructs of the patriarchal society and masculine Romanticism, Fanny Price is the epitome of female Romanticism. Through this character, the reader is able to question the structures of the society in which they live. There are some people who would posit that the true heroine of Mansfield Park is Mary Crawford. She has radical ideas, flirts with the idea of marrying for love, and is somewhat out-spoken for someone of her class. She is also “worldly,” which one could assume to mean that she is probably educated in things beyond the simple things that would make a woman attractive. Mary, however, is simply a foil for Fanny’s love interest, and it is quickly revealed that she (Mary) is all talk and would never marry for love. Material and property are the driving force in her search of a husband. When she learns that Edmund is to be a clergyman, she scoffs and turns out to be a fraud.

Mary Crawford is much like Maria Bertram whom Wollstonecraft’s argument is expressed through. A woman’s survival in the 19th century depended on her marrying well. Without an education, the possibility of owning property for themselves, or the wealth of a husband, many women found themselves in the poor houses or worse. Women therefore had to rely on the marriage market for survival, which was perpetuated through the propriety of women such as the Bertram sisters and Mary Crawford. These women became complicit in selling themselves for property by choosing to behave in a way which made them a desirable commodity for men to buy and sell on the marriage market. Austen uses this to parallel the slavery that is also going on at the time. Sir Thomas owns a plantation in Antigua that is run by slaves. Austen draws the two ideas together when Edmund tells Fanny that Sir Thomas is pleased with how well she has grown, and Fanny turns the subject away from her and discusses the slave trade. The two ideas are juxtaposed and the relationship between slaves and women as a slave to marriage is reinforced in this reminder of the subordination these people faced every day. According to R.S. Neale, patriarchal society is reinforced with the way their “propriety would keep everyone in their right place and ensure that everything would be done as it ought to be. Mariah’s affair with Henry Crawford highlights the fragile position that women of this society were in. Since women were property of men, their survival relied on an adherence to a propriety that was set forth by men. The threat of losing a home or being abandoned and left with no security was ever-present for women making them “slaves” to the expectations of the society that they lived in.

The negative effects of this type of behavior are seen in Lady Bertram and Aunt Norris who are both indolent, classist, and horrible mother figures. Neither of them cares for anything more than money and having a roof over their heads. They also do not want Fanny to marry either of her male cousins due to her position as a “poor-relation.” Austen uses this metaphor of master-slave relationship between women and men to juxtapose Wollstonecraft’s argument that there is such a relationship found within gender politics. After Wollstonecraft’s death, her husband, William Godwin, published a memoir of her life. The memoir detailed parts of her life that were considered uncouth for the society they lived in. Things such as her affair with the American businessman, George Imlay, attempted suicide, and her pregnancy out of wedlock with Godwin’s child caused Wollstonecraft to be considered a radical and labeled a prostitute.