It’s International Women’s Day today and I’ve been
thinking about the women who inspired me. On Friday I was at the unveiling of a
Blue Plaque to one very inspirational woman – Bristol-born suffragette Emmeline
Pethick Lawrence. She was brought up in Weston-super-Mare and
the Plaque was placed on her childhood home, Lewisham
House, 80 Bristol Road Lower, Weston-super-Mare.
Afterwards, I spoke at a panel event which was part
of Weston-super-Mare Literature Festival. Writer and explorer Jacki Hill-Murphy told us all about some
remarkable women travellers, including Isabella Bird whose biography she’s just
written. Biographer Kathryn Atherton, author of Suffragette
Planners and Plotters: The Pankhurst/Pethick-Lawrence Story, shared
Emmeline Pethick Lawrence’s remarkable story with us.
I gave a
short talk about one of my own Inspirational Women – Mary Wollstonecraft. Here
is the text of the talk, in which I explain why she is, for me, such an
Inspirational Woman.
In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote: “I may excite
laughter, by dropping an hint, which I mean to pursue, some future time, for I
really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being
arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the
deliberations of government.”[1]
Today
Weston-Super-Mare has recognised Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, one of the women
who turned Mary Wollstonecraft’s hint into a reality. Mary Wollstonecraft was
one of the first women who dared to imagine the possibility of women having a
say in government. It’s no wonder, then, that she is, for me, an Inspirational
Woman. But that’s not the only, or even the main reason, why she is so
important to me.
Mary
Wollstonecraft was an author, a radical, and a campaigner for women’s rights.
In 1792 she published one of the earliest manifestos for gender equality – A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman. But she was more than a theorist: she
insisted on living her life on her own terms and if society wouldn’t give her freedom,
then she’d claim it for herself.
At
an early age she decided she’d support herself by her own work in spite of the
limited options available to women: companion, teacher, governess, writer. She
tried them all until she finally settled into her vocation as a writer.
But
not for Mary the pigeon-holing into mere “romance” that was considered suitable
for a woman’s pen. No, when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a novel she put into it unpalatable
realities: domestic violence; child neglect; rape; women condemned to low paid,
low status drudgery; men who got women pregnant and then deserted them; women who’d
been in prison; women driven into prostitution. All the things that women
weren’t supposed to know, that they certainly weren’t supposed to write about.
She
was an advocate of women’s right to education. Unlike her brother, she and her
sisters didn’t get much at all in the way of schooling. Since women were
expected to marry, what education they had was driven by the need to make them attractive
to husbands. But Mary thought women should be allowed to develop their potential.
Their education shouldn’t be all about making them docile, meek, and biddable, teaching
them to hide their true feelings, teaching them not to rock the boat. Women are
still taught not to rock the boat: brought up to believe that if we’re
assertive, we’ll only make ourselves look aggressive; if we’re ambitious, we’re
just being selfish; if we’re angry, we’re too emotional.
She
was an unmarried mother who proudly adored her baby, her beloved “Fannikins”, her
“cherub”, her “sweet” child. And she feared for her daughter’s future too: “I feel
more than a mother’s fondness and anxiety,” she wrote, “when I reflect on the
dependent and oppressed state of her sex”.
Even
when she eventually found love and married William Godwin, she refused to accept
the wifely role that society would have forced on her. Together they tried to
forge a new kind of marriage, a marriage of equals. She didn’t give up her work
or become his secretary. She carried on writing, and she never for a moment let
anyone think her work was less important than his.
Of
course, it didn’t always work: it was still Mary who worried about the laundry.
I don’t think we can pretend we’ve come much further than the Godwins in that!
She
was a deeply religious woman who accepted no creeds: her religion was based on
a direct, personal experience of the Divine. In every aspect of her life, Mary Wollstonecraft
was a woman who believed nothing at second hand. She had a kind of truth, a
kind of integrity that came from deep within her own heart, her own mind, her
own experiences. Above all she had the courage to express those truths.
And
so patriarchy tried to silence her. She was accused of going where women were
not allowed to go, of trespassing on the male domain of serious literature and
serious politics and serious business. She had a “masculine” mind, said the
critics, and it wasn’t a compliment. Her books were dismissed as indecent,
irreligious and immoral. She was an “Amazonian terror”, a fright to look at. She
was a whore. Her very death proved what an unnatural creature she was. She died
after eleven terrible days of suffering following the birth of her second
daughter, Mary. And she deserved it, trolled her critics: she’d rebelled
against the role allotted to women, and she’d paid a woman’s price for it.
Because
trolls are nothing new!
But
Mary Wollstonecraft wouldn’t be silenced. She insisted that women had a right
to be heard.
A
violent, abusive father couldn’t silence her. She didn’t fear him, she despised
him. She allowed herself anger, when what was expected of wives and daughters
was submission.
Great
men couldn’t silence her. Her first major publishing success was A Vindication
of the Rights of Men, a defence of the French Revolution against the
criticism of Edmund Burke. What was she thinking? Here was the great Edmund
Burke – and there was Mary, a female author who had yet to achieve very much. No
matter: she had an opinion, and she was going to voice it.
When
her lover, Gilbert Imlay, deserted her, leaving her with a daughter to bring
up, she was heartbroken – and she didn’t see why she should let him get away
with it. In letter after letter she demanded an explanation. What is it you
want? How can you not care for your child? Why didn’t you come to meet me when
you said you would? How can you choose another woman over me? She followed him
to Le Havre, to London, demanding answers; she made him look at his daughter. He
said her questions were “extraordinary and unnecessary”. She disagreed – and
she kept asking them.
She
didn’t believe that women had to sit in silence while great men pontificated.
When Godwin went to a dinner party to meet Tom Paine, the influential author of
Rights of Man, he was disappointed to find that it was Mary who did all
the talking. Paine, never a great conversationalist at the best of times, hardly
said a word, while Mary argued with Godwin. “I heard her”, Godwin wrote, “when I wished to hear Paine”.
What’s
always fascinated me about that story is the way Mary gets the blame. No one
ever wonders why Paine made so little effort to talk to people who had come expressly
to meet him. And if Mary was arguing with William, isn’t it also true that
William was arguing with Mary, and so he must at least share the responsibility
for what happened?
In
fairness to Godwin, he did admit that he was partly to blame. But that’s not
usually how the story’s been retold. Rather, we are left with the image of a
noisy, garrulous Mary Wollstonecraft, butting in where she’s not wanted,
interrupting the real conversation, the men’s conversation, with her trivial remarks.
Mary
Wollstonecraft couldn’t have been an easy person at times. Gilbert Imlay’s
heart must have sunk when another envelope with her hand writing appeared at
his breakfast table. She often made a mess of her personal life: the end of the
affair dragged on for months, and reading her letters you just want to say, ‘oh
for god’s sake, leave him, he’s not good enough for you!’ She even made two attempts
to kill herself because of it.
She
loathed commerce and the obsession with money making which she thought had
ruined Imlay, but when he asked her to go to Scandinavia on a business trip for
him, she agreed. She handled the business side of things very well, too.
She believed
in equality and loathed hierarchies of class and wealth. Yet she was pleased
when she was recognised – by the softness of her hands – as a lady, and her appeal
for women’s education was made on behalf of middle class women. But it was Mary
Wollstonecraft who gave a voice to a working class woman in her novel, The
Wrongs of Woman.
She was
critical of the institution of marriage, but she took Gilbert Imlay’s name. Then,
when she found out she was pregnant with Godwin’s child, she married him. In
fact, when she took the name Mrs Imlay, she and Gilbert were living in Paris
and if she hadn’t agreed to pose as his wife, she might have been arrested as
an enemy alien: Imlay was American and his nationality protected her. Besides, as
far as she was concerned, they were married. True love didn’t need empty
ceremonies.
As
for marrying Godwin, well, we’ve seen that she’d already been left with one
child to bring up and how she feared for that child’s future. Maybe she felt it
was time to find a bit of security.
So
she wasn’t always consistent. She wasn’t afraid to change her mind – and nor
was she afraid to speak it. Her voice rings out in her writing: strong and
clear and honest. She had dark moods, and she could be irritating, opinionated,
self-pitying, didactic. But she was also charming, ambitious, witty, loving,
honest, vulnerable.
And above
all, whatever she wanted to say, she never stopped claiming her right – the
right of all women – to say it. And
that’s why for me Mary Wollstonecraft is such an Inspirational Woman.
Do
you have an Inspirational Woman? If you’d like to share her story and why she’s
so inspirational, please leave a comment below.
[1] Mary
Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, 1792 (London: Penguin Classics, 2004) p 228.
