Mary Wollstonecraft

Josh Landy
Is virtue possible when society is so unequal?

Ray Briggs
How does sexism distort the way we relate to each other?

Josh Landy
What can we learn from Mary Wollstonecraft about freedom?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, it’s the latest episode in our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We’re thinking about the life and thought of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Josh Landy
Wollstonecraft was such a fascinating philosophical figure. I mean, partly because she didn’t just write philosophical treatises. She wrote pamphlets and even novels—like Margaret Cavendish, from one of our earlier episodes.

Ray Briggs
And she campaigned against all kinds of inequality, not just sexism, which is the one that everybody knows about, but also slavery and monarchy.

Josh Landy
Right, she was a big fan of the French Revolution, and also the American Revolution. Her thought was, if we don’t have social and economic equality, none of us can be genuinely happy. We can’t even be good.

Ray Briggs
Wait, wait, we can’t be good? So I get that if you’re oppressed, it’s hard to be happy. And I get that if you’re oppressing others, it’s hard to be good. But why can’t depressed people be good? They didn’t do anything wrong?

Josh Landy
Well okay, Wollstonecraft isn’t criticizing the oppressed. She’s just saying that society owes everybody the chance to make a real contribution.

Ray Briggs
Oh, so the chance to max out their virtue points.

Josh Landy
Right, exactly. But to do that, to max out your virtue points, you’re going to need to understand the world around you. Wollstonecraft said virtue to deserve the name must be founded on knowledge. But if you’re constantly in thrall to a husband or a monarch or a slave owner, you’re never going to get the chance to have that knowledge.

Ray Briggs
Hold on. Are you saying oppressed people can’t know things?

Josh Landy
Well, they can know some things, but they’re prevented from knowing the important stuff the stuff you’d need to know if you’re going to make a significant contribution to society. Take women for example. Walston craft said society makes them focus on things like next season’s frock, if that’s all you’re thinking about, how are you going to change the world?

Ray Briggs
Okay, so maybe they’re not going to change the world. But can’t they still be virtuous? Can’t they at least be kind and charitable?

Josh Landy
Well, you can be nice to the people around you. But you don’t really have the opportunity to help people you don’t know, you’d never get to be a stateswoman or build a school or develop a vaccine for smallpox, to make a real impact you need power of your own life.

Ray Briggs
I don’t know, does power really make anyone a better person? Lots of people with power are pretty awful. Maybe most of them?

Josh Landy
Well, well, Starcraft would actually agree with you on that. She said, Men in general seem to employ their reason to justify prejudice. In other words, instead of seeing what’s wrong with society and trying to fix it, people act like inequality is good and rational. So yeah, you know, power over others is not a road to virtue. We’re talking about power over your own life.

Ray Briggs
Okay. Yes, it’s good to have control over your own life. But how do we give that control back to people who don’t have it?

Josh Landy
Well, through education. Wollstonecraft wrote an awful lot about that, both in her treatises and in her fiction, she thought the right thing to do is to set up a public school system for everybody. And she reckoned that educating women that was the key to liberating them.

Ray Briggs
Well, that’s great and everything, but how are you going to get the powerful to just give up their power like that? They’ll just tell you, Oh, things have always been this way. And traditions are really important, you know?

Josh Landy
Well, yeah. Well, Starcraft was not a fan of that way of thinking. She totally slammed Edmund Burke, for saying tradition plays some ineffable role in holding society together. She thought traditions were often just an excuse for some people to hug all the power.

Ray Briggs
Oh, but that still doesn’t answer my question. How do you get people to give up their power? Not by asking nicely.

Josh Landy
Well remember, she did favor the French and American Revolutions and the abolition of slavery. And look, France no longer has kings and queens. The US no longer has the Atlantic slave trade. Some things really have changed for the better in exactly the ways Wollstonecraft would have wanted.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but the UK still has a monarch and the US still has prison labor and sexism. I’m afraid to tell you that hasn’t really gone anywhere.

Josh Landy
Well, maybe our guests will make you a little more optimistic. It’s Silvana Tomaselli, from the University of Cambridge, author of “Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics.”

Ray Briggs
But in the meantime, let’s hear a little bit about the turbulent Life and Times of Mary Wollstonecraft. We sent our roving philosophical reporter, Mary-Catherine O’Connor, to investigate. She files this report.

Poor Things
This is Bella. She’s an experiment.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
The film “Poor Things” follows the life of an extraordinary woman named Bella. Think Frankenstein, except this creation is curious, benevolent and smart.

Poor Things
I’m reading Emerson. He speaks about the improvement of men and do not know why he does not give advice to women. Perhaps ge does not know any.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Bella refuses to accept societal inequalities between men and women. That’s one of the parallels between this character and Mary Wollstonecraft. Another connecting thread: Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley,wrote “Frankenstein.”

Eileen Hunt
I personally thought when I watched the film that Wollstonecraft is as much an inspiration for that film as is Mary Shelley.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
That’s Eileen Hunt, a professor of political science at Notre Dame University. She’s currently writing a Wollstonecraft biography.

Eileen Hunt
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London in 1759. She was born to a family that had been prominent in the garment industry.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
But her father lost the family as well. And worse…

Eileen Hunt
Wollstonecraft’s father was an alcoholic. He also was a gambler, and he was abusive towards Wollstonecraft and mother.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Despite having almost no formal schooling, Mary Wollstonecraft read voraciously, and did so under the guidance of ministers who are the fathers of her female friends.

Eileen Hunt
They saw that she was precocious and said she had a philosophical theological mind, and that it was basically untutored. And so this was raw intelligence.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Her future prospects were not many. Marriage was one option, but not her preference.

Eileen Hunt
She for a time worked as a governess for our rich aristocratic family. She also worked as a lady’s companion, and she also tried to establish her own career as a teacher.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
In fact, she founded her own school, along with her best friend, Fanny Blood. And here in the late 1780s, is where Wilson craft hid intellectual paydirt. She taught boys and girls in the same classroom. The school ended up failing, but her convictions about co-education did not.

Eileen Hunt
It is my view that Wollstonecraft is the first philosopher to make a systematic philosophical case for the absolute importance of free public co education provided by the state for all children regardless of background, we’re whether we’re talking about class, race or gender.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Wollstonecraft and Fanny, with whom she’d founded the school, were extremely close. Academics debate actually whether they were lovers. In either case, Fanny married, and then died during childbirth, leaving Mary Wollstonecraft deeply bereft.

Eileen Hunt
I’ve come to see Fanny is in some ways, her raison d’etre. She was always that for her even as she moved on, and, and had some very strong, passionate sexual relationships with men.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
One of the most significant was with a man named Gilbert Imlay.

Eileen Hunt
When word got around that she had had a child with Gilbert Imlay, but had never formally married him, that became scandalous.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Wollstonecraft Imlay Emily had a tumultuous relationship, during which she wrote him many beautiful and melancholic letters. More than once he was unfaithful, and she became suicidal.

Eileen Hunt
She jumped off the Putney bridge in London into the cold water.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
She’s pulled from the water and survives and then leaves Imlay. Later she publishes the letters she’d written him.

Eileen Hunt
I think this is Wollstonecraft’s attempt to use writing to resurrect herself from the dad and to reclaim her independence as a woman writer.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
When that book was published in 1796, the writer William Godwin said it was calculated to make a man fall in love with the author.

Eileen Hunt
And that’s in fact what happened. The greatest anarchist political philosopher of the period, William Godwin, and the greatest In this political philosopher that period, Mary Wollstonecraft, get married about a year later.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
She was already pregnant with her second child when they wet but the union was short lived.

Eileen Hunt
She died 11 days after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley in September 1797.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Everything she knew of Wollstonecraft, Shelley learned from Godwin, who wrote her first biographies—and from her mother’s work.

Eileen Hunt
We think of the incredible influence of Mary Shelley in multiple areas of life, everything ranging from literature to film, we have to credit Wollstonecraft as being the maybe the propelling force behind that.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
In “Poor Things,” a scientist creates Bella.

Eileen Hunt
And yet it’s Bella who raises herself up teachers herself to walk teaches herself how to be independent. I think that’s very much a Walston crafting a narrative about a woman against all odds raising yourself from the dead.

Poor Things
I’m a changingable feast, as are all of we.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Mary-Catherine O’Connor.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that fascinating piece of history, Mary-Catherine. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about the philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Sylvana Tomaselli. She’s Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and author of “Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics. Sylvana, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Sylvana Tomaselli
Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
So Sylvana, we just heard a little bit about Mary Wollstonecraft’s life. Can you tell us a bit about how that shaped her philosophical thought?

Sylvana Tomaselli
Yes, she responds to events in the world. One of the things that’s very interesting about her makes her interesting is that she doesn’t have a set of principles from which she never finishes, she has a variety of experiences, and she reflects on them and therefore, her life did very much shaped her philosophy or her philosophical views. For instance, the fact that her brother, her elder brother, inherited what was left of her grandfather scorching, so male prima Progenitor, and the fact that the other children, there were seven of them in in all her siblings, and her herself didn’t inherit anything. This is primogeniture property, is features very prominently in her writings.

Ray Briggs
Wow, so that was definitely a custom of her time that hasn’t aged well. And I guess hasn’t really come down to us. What were some of the other political circumstances that she was reacting to?

Sylvana Tomaselli
Well, you might think that she embraced the French Revolution, or what had happened in America wholeheartedly, but she’s a nuanced thinker. So in relation to the beginning of the French Revolution, with the French Revolution, it’s important not to think of it as one thing. It’s a little bit like a loaf of bread, it’s sliced, and the different moments in it will generate different reaction for everyone in France, on the continent, and of course, also in Britain. And so when she seems to be at her most favorable to that what is happening in France, it’s very much the beginning. It’s very much prior to the tower. And it’s very much in relation to Edmund Burke’s view of the French Revolution, as it had happened then.

Josh Landy
Right. So she writes “A Vindication of the Rights of Men” in 1790, as part of that conversation, but then in 1794, she wrote “An historical and moral view of the origin and progress of the French Revolution.” So was there a big change between those two volumes? What what in her thinking had shifted between times?

Sylvana Tomaselli
Well, in the Vindication of the Rights of Men it’s more about an attack on book. Burke, was until she published the reflections on the revolution in France deemed to be one of their own, that is a friend of liberty. He had been very supportive of American beliefs he had tried to make Parliament conciliator understand the case for America. So the UK was sought to be, you know, a friend of liberty and then he produces this work. And I think most of the people that also knew and she very much, were were absolutely shocked. And he looked like a fellow traveler, he looked like a traitor to what they thought was the cause. So that is, how it how reaction is really a passionate reaction. And of course, what Burke had done is criticize the head of the dissenting community by the Reverend rich twice, in his praise of the French Revolution price had linked the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, and the French, as if they were the same phenomenon, part of the forward march of freedom of reason, and also pretty much fight against what he deemed to be the Antichrist, the Catholic Church.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the life and thoughts of Mary Wollstonecraft with Sylvana Tomaselli from the University of Cambridge.

Ray Briggs
How does inequality distort our personalities and relationships? When some of us are oppressed? Can any of us really be free? What do Wollstonecraft’s social critiques teach us about freedom?

Josh Landy
Liberation from tyranny—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

George Michael
Freedom, you’ve got to give what you take.

Josh Landy
If I belong to you, and you belong to me, is either of us really free? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft with Sylvana Tomaselli, author of “Wollstonecraft: philosophy, passion and politics.” It’s the latest episode in our “Wise Women” series, which is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities

Josh Landy
Got questions about Wollestonecraft’s life and thought? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or you can comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Sylvana, some people think of Wollstonecraft as an anti monarchist. But you’ve argued that that’s an oversimplification. Why is it an oversimplification?

Sylvana Tomaselli
Well, because it’s not true. The point is, she like pain. And a number of people who comment on books thinks that he’s totally infatuated with macchiato net, which to be sure he probably was. And they think about the way parliament has treated the Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George, during his madness, the madness of King George, so they think, you know, this is doesn’t make sense. You take him one queen, but you might have treated another or is didn’t give her any sufficient money to to help her court. So you have to know the context in which also Congress right, so when she’s writing against third, she goes for his scene, seemingly mindless and infatuation. But that doesn’t make her an anti monarchist.

Josh Landy
This debate between Burke and Wollstonecraft, I find really interesting, right? So she’s, he writes, reflections on the revolution in France, she responds with A Vindication of the Rights of men. Can you tell us a little bit about that disagreement? It seems to me that Burke’s pushing for a kind of gradual reform, a slow evolution of society, where you don’t just kind of sweep away institutions, traditions, practices, but you just make slow, incremental changes. And Wollstonecraft seems to have a different view. Can you can you tell us a little bit about that?

Sylvana Tomaselli
Well, the viewing the Vindication of the Rights of men is really a argument against Burke, it tries to vilify him, he is not the champion of liberty that everybody thought he was. He is the worshipper of the golden calf. He wants property and then she says, you know, anyway, you’re not independent minded. You in you have a pension, which wasn’t true at the time. So you’re kind of client to the aristocracy. But the main issue is that in trying to criticize him, she goes back to his earliest texts published a big, significant publication called an essay on the origins of ideas of the sublime and beautiful and in it, a Burg talks about beauty and identifies beauty with the delicate To do weak, the fragile and says women know this. And since they know we love beauty, they pretend effectively, they mimic the weakness, fragility. And most of the craft reads this and of course, she’s the very opposite of this in herself, but all her writes on education about making women as well as men, resilient, strong in mind and body. So the whole idea that women are somehow pretending to be we can need in order to be loved or essential, right up the wall.

Ray Briggs
So we’ve gotten kind of from monarchy, which like, at least in some of Walston, crafts writings looks like she thinks of as a form of unjustified tyranny, to the domination of women by men, which looks like another unjustified kind of tyranny for Walston craft. So what what does she have to say about that?

Sylvana Tomaselli
Well, there’s ignorance on both sides. Everybody’s saying, everybody’s thinks that women are one way or should be one way that and everybody thinks that the purpose of life is to appear to worry about your appearance, what you wear, is social status, and she thinks we’re all misguided. But insofar as women are concerned, because they’re denied formal education, they have very little resource to rectify this to help themselves to see the world and values including Christian values for what they are. Now, it’s also important to know that going back to this anti monarchy thing, one of the women she does admire is Catherine the Great the Empress of Russia. So why don’t you because study woman and body strengths, resilience. she admires Catherine McAuley, she’s stolen again, a woman who made her win in the world and right, so she doesn’t think all women are oppressed. She doesn’t. Do you see? That’s the nuance. And that is why she remains interesting. If she just made this wide, wild agenda genuinely say she nobody would read her anymore. It’s just propaganda.

Ray Briggs
So one thing that is kind of interesting to me about the relationship between her life and her work, is how important a lot of her like friendships and relationships with other women were so in the ribbing, philosophical report, we heard about her best friend, Fanny blood. But also, it seems like she spent a lot of effort and energy caring for sort of her sisters, so she helped her sister flee from an abusive husband. Can you say a little bit about how that might have shaped her her views on the rights of women?

Sylvana Tomaselli
Well, it’s what have shaped them, insofar as helping others is something she thinks is natural and should be instinct, instinct to the fact that women are abused, or some women are abused or an abusive relationship is so few, it doesn’t shape her that his house use, so she puts it on the table. And even if this hadn’t been the case, even if her sisters had not been in the situation, if her mother had not been in her situation, she would still have the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, because women, even when they’re not abused, in her time, at least, don’t have the means to help them selves to she wants women to be able to have control of themselves. And for this, you have to have the possibility of reflection, self reflection, self awareness, and all of that is denied to women because we, in her view, we compete with one another, we just slip to be the most beautiful person in the room. And as was said earlier, that life is about getting through the the latest fashion, right?

Ray Briggs
So this ideology that women just want to be pretty which we’ve heard a little bit from Edmund Burke earlier, Walston craft just objects to this. And she points out that if all of the men around women are kind of raising them to, number one, be super concerned about their appearance because that’s what men reward and number two, not get any education, about the stuff that really matters. Of course, they’re going to be very focused on their appearance and frivolous things. But she thinks this is not inevitable and she has some proposals for for getting around it. So what She think that we should do in order to stop women from being sort of frivolous and not focused on the really important things in life which she, she thinks is like neither good nor unnecessary.

Sylvana Tomaselli
It’s important that men change, because it isn’t the case that she thinks that men are not prey to the desire to appear and worded the most fashionable, right terms. So, in the 18th century, it’s a commonplace that the sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other. And she believes that so nobody is going to change unless we all change, the whole of society has to change the whole ethos of society has to change. We got to stop being so materialistic, we have to stop and then these are the fertile salts. So at the next level, we have to stop commercial society, the intensification of the division of labor, which means that people are separated, they don’t work together. And they don’t do it lessens companionship, companionship between members of the same sex they don’t know between men and women.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about 18th century English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft with Savannah Tomaselli from Cambridge University. And we’ve got an email from Martha in Batesville, Arkansas. Martha asks how similar Wollstonecraft arguments are to the later arguments in John Stuart Mill’s book, the subjection of women? And also whether these arguments hold up. So So what do you think Sivanna? Are there similarities between Walston crafts arguments in favor of gender equality and those in John Stuart Mill?

Sylvana Tomaselli
Yes, it’s a very good point. John Stuart Mill’s mentioned Swardson. Kraft is clearly wet hub. And it does share views the certainly the view that mill has of marriage, so the kind of friendship between the husband and wife is very much Woolston house. So it’s difficult to put some differences between them, except for the fact that men actually specifies the civil and political rights that he thinks we can indeed campaign for, that women should have was also qualified, doesn’t do that. It doesn’t do that for a variety of reasons. One of which is that she never did quite the work that she promises in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, namely, a work on rights. But she does think that women should, or at least we should consider that women should have their own representatives, political representatives.

Josh Landy
That’s super interesting. Is that something that also sets her apart from her predecessors, people like Margaret Cavendish or Mary Estelle, these are people that we’ve actually spoken about on on previous shows. I’m just curious, you know, if we if we situate Mary Wollstonecraft in the tradition of English philosophical thinking about feminism, what is it that sets her apart from these predecessors?

Sylvana Tomaselli
Well, that’s another good question. It’s in a way easier to start with what they have in common, they have a lot of things in common, but one of them is that life is not a bed of roses, and that there are ways of coping with dark which are morally appropriate and ways that aren’t. And so the question is, how do we ensure that women but not just women, human beings are at put as best prepared as society can make them for the vicissitudes of life? Remember, a lot of women die in childbirth, or they still do but in that period in in England, more than they do now. children die in infancy. So, you know, it’s, it’s a hard world and still does she would care about old US release writing to ladies, ladies who might not have to marry and have the means to retire into a community of ladies in the similar condition and reflect on Love of God on poetry Did you know live on intellectual life and one could say similar things about Cavendish. So, Wilson kind of is it she addresses very specifically the middle classes. She thinks that the aristocracy is not going to is beyond the pale and will change and then the poor don’t have the opportunity to change in the first instance this is not in the long term when society will he she hopes to be changed entirely everybody will be different. But in the first instance, she wants to address middle class women who she thinks try to eat the aristocracy, and that increases their stupidity. Who is the vanity shallowness.

Ray Briggs
So Silvana we got an email from Chiara in San Francisco, who writes, Virginia Woolf wrote wrote of Walston craft, it was 1000 Dipity is that the woman who could write like that, whose mind was tuned to nature and reflection, should have been forced to anger and bitterness, but how could she have helped herself and so Chiara asks, Is this very question sexist? Or did Walston crafts emotional sensibilities make her a strong female thinker? How does the field of philosophy intersect with the world of emotions? So what do you think, Sylvana?

Sylvana Tomaselli
Well, wants to cause a response to a particular situation or situation in which would middle class women who can read it, spend a lot of time reading novels, romantic novels, and then gives them the idea of passionate love, and attention. That’s what we all want in a perfect passionate relationship. And she thinks that this completely warped ideas of what relationships should be anyway, while still reading all these novels. And we remember Wilson had trouble trying to earn a couple of herself, but once a week that they’re not reading history, they’re not learning about politics. And they they miss out on reading texts that could make them more rational, or to quote the title of your series, wiser.

Josh Landy
So I’ve been very curious about this because of course, she herself right so novel, Mary, a fiction in 1788, which has so much to give seems like a kind of a counter novel to to Russo’s book a meal. So she herself writes a fictional story about a kind of a self taught child. So how do we square these two things? The fact that on the one hand, she writes a novel that clearly she thinks is a kind of an improving work of fiction. But on the other hand, she’s very critical of novels in general.

Sylvana Tomaselli
When I think your question, contained its own answer.

Josh Landy
I like that kind of question!

Sylvana Tomaselli
She thinks that her novels are going to be improving because they talk about you know, it’s not about princes and princesses and knights and Shining Armor, it’s about real issues in in, in women’s life, including, of course, being abused my husband being pursued by men being incarcerated. So it’s realism, in her view, and that kind of novel is not going to distort emotions, and relationship between men and women or women would amongst themselves, to the contrary in Have you contribute to awareness and then with awareness to possibility of reform and improvement. But the other thing to know this, you know, she needs to earn a living, and uses all she can possibly do to make ends meet.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re exploring the life and thought of Mary Wollstonecraft with Sylvana Tomaselli, author of “Wollstonecraft: philosophy, passion and politics.”

Ray Briggs
What would Wollstonecraft: think of today’s consumerist society? Would she think we’re distracting ourselves to death? And how would she recommend we go about improving life for everyone?

Josh Landy
Drawing on the past to make a better future—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second philosopher, when philosophy taught continues.

Lily Allen
I’m being taken over by the fear.

Josh Landy
Does the modern day rat race have you not knowing what’s right and what’s real anymore? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Sylvana Tomaselli from the University of Cambridge, and we’re thinking about the philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft as part of our “Wise Women” seriesm supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can find all the episodes in the series at Philosophy Talk dot O R G slash wise women.

Josh Landy
And we’ve got an email from James in Corvallis, Oregon. James notes that Wollstonecraft connects virtue to freedom. So where does this leave religious belief, James says, as, as long as religion and its superstition has arbitrary say, in forming our moral codes, our thinking will stay in prison to where true virtue can never arise. So what would Wollstonecraft say about that, Sylvana?

Sylvana Tomaselli
She would say that it’s a mistaken view of the world because she believes, as far as we can tell, from her waking, that we are God’s creatures. And I think this is important to her philosophy, because why are we not God’s creatures, it would be more difficult in her view, if not impossible, to claim that they’re, that we have frites by virtue of eternal universal justice. So it could cause a methodological and epistemological or philosophical problem. If one were not to believe. Now, or at least if one were a philosopher, and not have a co centric framework framework, which has described a few wishy washy a creationist framework now as to being imprisoned by a religion, which is a different thing from the leaf and, and God. Just leaving that will stop. So organized religion is much more problematic for her, she does not like anything that reeks of Catholicism, whether it’s in the Anglican Church or anything else any, you notice smells and bells, and, and all of that, and, and her friends, our closest friend, and her publishers, are dissenters, they do not subscribe to a decrease in the Anglican Church, and therefore they’re penalized for that, because they’re excluded from universities and certain positions. So religion and being free from accept accepted beliefs that no one can possibly question that she’s absolutely at one which you listener. But that’s different from faith in God, which I think she maintained to her dying day.

Ray Briggs
I’m interested in sort of her defensive dissenters and her questioning of religious authority, because it matches up so well with a lot of her questionings of other authorities, like monarchs and like husbands, who she doesn’t think should be authorities. Do you think there’s kind of a general view of authority being questioned there? Or is it something a bit narrow, or like only certain kinds of authority you mentioned, not thinking that she’s an egalitarian exactly?

Sylvana Tomaselli
I do wish to stop thinking that she is an an anti monarchist per se, she might not like certain monarchs. But that doesn’t make her an anti monarchy. It doesn’t make her poor monarch item. She wants us to be in a position to reflect on any belief we have, whether it is a matter of religion, or politics, or social assumptions, or assumptions about a good marriage or parenting. So there’s nothing that she would not want us to reflect on. And indeed, she encourages us to reflect on that.

Ray Briggs
Now you’ve got me thinking about reason and reason. And Wollstonecraft, which she thinks is a very important human capacity, and much better than, say, tradition. And I know that some later feminists have criticized her for placing so much emphasis on reason like Genevieve Lloyd and Moira gadens. Do you think that she thinks of reason is kind of the primary human capacity? And do you think that that’s a problem of so?

Sylvana Tomaselli
No. Again, you have to remember the context. If you’re waiting in what you think is a world in which women have driven By nonsensical passions are ignorant, then you’re obviously going to prevent the trees. And you’re going to privilege an education that develops it and strengthens it. So the impression one might get. And I remember having that myself, when I first studied also, it’s all reason, no feeling, no passion, but as an individual, for one, and as a whiter after do Vindication of the Rights of Woman sought after 1792, there is every reason to think that she pays a great deal of attention to the emotions and feelings. But above all, the faculty that emphasize perhaps predictably at the end of the 18th century that she focuses on is the imagination.

Josh Landy
So that’s very interesting. That brings me to a broader question about education. What does Wollstonecraft think, is the ideal strategy for educating our children, it sounds like imagination is going to be involved, but also reason you were talking earlier about resilience. What’s your to an ideal education look like?

Sylvana Tomaselli
When we could start with the body, it’s very important to have physical exercise, it’s very important to go to nature, she liked walking very much she had, she was effectively an outdoor person if she wishes, and that doesn’t always come through given that we know her to help her right. So physical education, and for very importantly, for girls, as well as boys. How you strengths and develop reason, she’s less clear and less specific. Again, we must remember that her life was short and not easy. Had she lived longer, and possibly more comfortable, secure circumstances, she might have written a great deal more about this. But any exercise that could involve enhancing self awareness about one’s beliefs, once assumptions about the world, she would have welcome. She would like us to live in a world in which there was no need for charity. She thinks charity, the fact that we need to exercise charity is a terrible thing. However, we live in the world that we do. So one of the things that she thinks one needs to encourage is children to be charitable. And for this, they have to be given something that they can give, in turn. So the practical elements, but again, everything has to be contextualized. In an ideal world, as I said, you wouldn’t need to educate children actor because they wouldn’t be poverty and therefore no need to cherish.

Josh Landy
So we’re in the ideal educational situation, we’re being encouraged to live to be a not to appear, we’re being encouraged to take control of our lives are being given the tools to do that. We’re being encouraged to be charitable to be virtuous. We’re being trained to be self sufficient. Women are being trained to potentially go, you know, become full fledged citizens potentially run for office. And if the society changes sufficiently, what’s the what’s the place in this of coeducation? That’s something that Wollstonecraft felt fairly strongly about, if I understand correctly, that boys and girls should be educated together. What’s the what’s the place of that in her overall view of education?

Sylvana Tomaselli
But it’s interesting, you mentioned that because she has a view, which is surprising. Perhaps, she thinks and this might strengthen the view that she’s always in an edge LT motion, but I don’t think it should. Anyway, she thinks that men and women become more or less CPS, more interested in sex when they are separated. So coy education, and in adults life working together, not doing the same job necessarily, but on a farm, a small shop, a poultry, a small manufacturing, anything that men and women work together. That’s so important. So her conception of life is one like this is a cool education, cool work throughout. But that doesn’t mean to say that everybody has to do the same job. And therefore, it’s not the case that everybody needs to have the identical education, even as a child apart from the basic reading, writing, mathematics and so forth.

Josh Landy
Well, Sylvana, this has been a real education for us. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Sylvana Tomaselli
Pleasure.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Sylvana Tomaselli, Professor of History at Cambridge, and author of “Wollstonecraft: philosophy, passion and politics.: So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I just loved Sylvana’s last point about the value of friendships between men and women, even apart from lasciviousness, I don’t think that you should see your fellow human beings as only a source of sex. It’s just there’s just a lot of value in these cross gender friendships. And I’m glad that one thing that has changed since Walston crafts time is that we’ve got so many more of them.

Josh Landy
Yeah, here here and we’ve seen indeed coeducational, education flourishing. We’ll put links to everything we mentioned today on our website, Philosophy Talk dot org, where you can also become a subscriber and liberate yourself in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot orgm and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now a man so fast he has no equals—It’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… When her short life had ended, age 38, after giving birth to her daughter, who became the woman who created Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft was known more for her lifestyle than her writings. The father of that child, William Godwin, wrote a biography of Wollstonecraft, unread by me, but the Stanford Encyclopedia claims it was an “arguably unnecessarily frank” account of her life that was blamed for most of her disrepute. He put it all in there, out of wedlock child, affairs, suicide attempts, all written out of his awestruck love for her and her no holds barred approach to life. All of which dismayed her family, and various pundits of the time, some of whom described her behavior as illustrative of Jacobin morality, and we all know what that means. Pernicious, is what. He threw her reputation into a cocked hat, of which there were many in the 18th century. Well okay, what’s done is done. Later, however, Godwin, something of a radical, took young Percy Shelley under his wing, hoping to procure funding from the rich kid; instead young Percy took Mary Godwins virginity on her mother’s grave. Godwin withdrew his support for Mary, who married Shelley and wrote Frankenstein. Why was he so dismissive of his daughter where he was so understanding of his wife? Percy wouldn’t give him any money. My guess. At any rate, the shade of Mary Wollstonecraft hovers over all proceedings. Her defense of sense and her attacks on so-called sensibility, all that simp and swoon, so hated by so many feminists in years to come, was overshadowed in her own life, by financial disasters, bad love, bad choices, the failure of both reason and emotion. On the other hand, today we call this sort of thing slut shaming. Sometimes cancel culture comes into play, but for the most part today, we roll our eyes and move on. It has been deployed on everybody from Fani Willis to Hilary Cliton. Also Stormy Daniels, Johnny Depp. From the beginning a woman’s sexuality has been misunderstood and feared, often it seems by women themselves. An early fear of feminism was the fear of free love, you might recall, which means if you don’t want orgies in the nunnery, better lock up the women, pour them into corsets, and generally stay away from them unless it’s procreation time. Do your duty but no more. But Mary Wollstonecraft clearly formed passionate attachments with men, and women, and her writing came from passion as well, actually traveling to France for the Revolution, and being a witness as King Louis XVI was led to his death. She was surprised to find herself weeping! But she rebuked Edmund Burke who called the angry women surrounding Marie Antoinette, “furies from hell.” She wrote, “Probably you mean the women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had any advantages of education.” VINDICATION FOR THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN does not talk about the pain of losing a child or why we even need to be married in the first place. She never talked about lust at all. You know where that can lead. She certainly did. But how could women even talk about that in the 18th Century? Half the vocabulary was closed to women, much less the places where those kinds of words were used. She wrote about education, she wrote a children’s book, she wrote a novel, she dreamed of being an author. She had gone to France with Gilbert Inlay, an American merchant and adventurer, uninterested in marriage. So of course she fell for him hard. After France he rejected her, but saved her from suicide. In an attempt to win him back, foolish woman, she traveled to Scandinavia on his behalf, hoping to find a Norwegian sea captain who had absconded with silver Inlay had been trying to get out of France. Her many letters to Inlay on this journey became her final book, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, which became her most famous work at the time, an inspiration for Romantic poets and for travel writers for decades. All from letters to a man who no longer loved her, if he ever did. When she got home, it was time for one last suicide attempt, and then on to Bill Godwin. In the 19th Century, she was discovered by Elizabeth Barret Browning, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, George Elliot. Then on to Virginia Woolf, Emma Goldman, and a symbolic seating in the late 20th century at Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. It takes a while, but Jacobin morality can eventually get you a seat at the table. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2024.

Ray Briggs
our executive producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
And from the members of KALW local Public Radio San Francisco, where our program originates. Support for this episode and all the episodes in our “Wise Women” series comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed—

Josh Landy
Or mis-expressed!

Ray Briggs
…on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. That conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Only Lovers Left Alive
What about Mary? What was Mary Wollstonecraft like? Tell me, what she like? She was delicious.