 We should probably get going. So, because I usually forget to announce this, at the halfway break I have your essay questions here. They should be posted online soon. Yes, or maybe now, soon. Today, sometime today, they will be up online, but they are in hard copy here if you want to come get them at the break or at the end. Okay, so today we are talking about the vindications of the rights of women. And I'm going to explain my title, kind of as we go through this, Virtue, Power, and the Hyena in Petty Coats. Because in order to understand this book, we also have to understand a lot about what was happening in the time period, some of which we already know from Christina's discussion on pain and from some of the other historical stuff we've done, but some of which is very particular to Wilson-Craft herself. But first I want to start with what I think is Wilson-Craft's main point in this essay. So the vindications of the rights of women tend to repeat themselves a little bit. You may or may not have noticed that. She has pretty much one big argument that she repeats over and over again. And I think the main point is this, this rebuttal to Rousseau that happens on page 79. Rousseau says, educate women like men. And the more they resemble our sex, the less power they will have over us. Wilson-Craft's response, this is the very point I aim at. I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves. So why she wants this and why she thinks it's good, not only for women, but for men, and for society in general, is something we're going to talk about today. And I will again be sending around the link to the Prezzi, so if you don't get everything written down, don't worry about it. Okay, so I want to start with a general background to the text. We are talking about here, European womanhood, European women in the 18th century. So here, oh my little pointer is not working. Oh yes it is. There's a picture of Marie Antoinette. Anyone know anything about Marie Antoinette? Really? Nothing? Let them eat cake. Which actually she didn't say. But it's important to keep in mind because it was how she was represented in the media as somebody who was so frivolous and so thoughtless and so unintelligent that when people were suffering and starving because they couldn't get bread, she said, well who cares about bread, let them eat cake. She didn't actually say that. But Marie Antoinette, at least until things went kind of sour in France, was also kind of very revered as a French woman and people copied her style of dress and copied her lifestyle. And her life went through a lot of peaks of very, very popular and lows of a lot of ridicule and very unpopular. So keep that in mind. But this is kind of an iconic figure of womanhood in the 18th century and the media would go back and forth on her quite rapidly from saying she was like the height of fashion and the best possible woman to ridiculing her and mocking her as completely unintelligent and unfeeling and uncaring. So we have two traditional female roles that we're going to be exploring a lot as we work through this text. One being motherhood and the other one being chastity and submissiveness. And I want to argue, oh, I should talk about the chastity picture for a minute first. This is William Blake's The Temptation of Eve and it is an illustration that accompanied Milton's Paradise Lost. And if you've read Wollstonecraft, you know she's very widely read and she actually references Milton's Paradise Lost in a few places. So here we have The Temptation of Eve. You've also read Genesis. So you know what happens here. What's kind of the Temptation of Eve? Does anyone remember? This is asking you to remember back to September. Of course, your final is cumulative, so. Yeah, it was knowledge, The Tree of Knowledge. And who tempted her? The serpent who was a personification of Satan, yeah. And so Eve was tempted, Eve ate from The Tree of Knowledge and then Eve tempted Adam into also eating from The Tree of Knowledge and then what happened? Yeah, they were both kicked out of Eden. So some interpretations of this, especially historical interpretations of this have pretty much said that it's all Eve's fault that we no longer live in the Garden of Eden and that we no longer have eternal life blessed with God's presence and innocence. So we have women as this traditional role of motherhood and also women as having to be chased and submissive because you can't really trust them not to be. Okay, so a lot of this comes from the Bible and we know that Christianity was a huge influence in England and in Europe in general at this time period. So we have images of women as virtuous and saintly wives. Okay, we're okay. Sounded like the sound went out there for a second. Virtuous and saintly wives and mothers and in particular this is chases back to the Madonna image. So we have the Virgin Mary and her son Jesus. And many of the stories of the Virgin Mary actually will maintain that she maintained her virginity and her chastity even after Jesus was born such that she was always chased and a virgin. So we have this kind of image of women iconized in the Virgin Mary as being pure and better and more innocent than men. As women as something to for men to strive for. Women as kind of up on this pedestal as above men as pure as saintly and especially represented in the Virgin Mother. But we also have women as the vicious temptress representing original sin. So here's another picture of the temptation of Eve. They are more conniving and more devious than men and because they're not that smart they're easier for Satan to trick. And through tricking women, Satan also can trick men so we can't trust women. They have to be under men's thumb, they have to be under men's control at all times because they just aren't that trustworthy. Satan can easily tempt them. So we have this paradox. Between women as virtuous and women as inherently sinful and vicious. And it's borne out in the traditional roles of the virtuous mother and the need for chaste and submissiveness in part because women can't be trusted. But there's another reason why motherhood that I think is really interesting. It's always been important for ideals of womanhood but it takes on a new importance especially with the creation of childhood which if you guys were here a few weeks ago I realized actually most of you I haven't seen in this format since October. But if you did make it to the hacking supplement lecture we talked a little bit about the creations of categories and in that text hacking references the idea of the category of childhood as a created category in the Victorian period. So we have childhood taking on this new responsibility and this new, not responsibility, this new role. And there are a few reasons people have hypothesized why that happened. One is we are seeing the rise of the Industrial Revolution which in Britain means the rise of textile production. So we have an ideal. The ideal now is the separation of public and private spheres of work. Women relevated to the private sphere and this is thought to be more efficient. Men go out of the home and they work in the city possibly as overseers in the factory or things like this. Women stay in the home, they care for the home, they do the shopping, they manage the servants if you have a number of servants and they manage the meals and manage the governance who is watching the children. So women are at home managing the home and men are out making the money. This is the ideal. It can be contrasted with a pre-industrial revolution where we have small scale agricultural production and women and men often working together either in the home or in the fields sharing the roles of planting, harvesting and animal husbandry. Not sharing perfectly. There were still men's roles and women's roles but there was a lot of more interaction between men and women because it was happening in the same area. So we didn't have men leaving and women staying. It was all still happening in the same place. Of course these are the ideal. The reality, which you probably know, is that women and children did work in the factories but Wollstonecraft restricts much of her discussion to middle and upper class women. So she is rarely speaking of working class women. There is one place where she references working class women and she says something like their lives actually have more purpose because they make the clothes that their children wear instead of just making kind of pretty needle point things that serve no function. And they actually go out and earn money and that this is also beneficial because they have this kind of purpose. So she thinks they're in a slightly better position than middle and upper class women. You can think about whether you think that's true or not when they're working 12 hour days. Anyway, so that's one reason why we get this kind of idealization is that we get a separation, much more of a separation between men's and women's fears. But there's this another interesting thing which is that motherhood was necessary in order to help fuel colonial expansion. So here I have a picture of the British Empire circa 18th century. We have the suggestion of motherhood as a national duty. So in some of my research around Wollstonecraft texts I came upon this little story which I wanted to tell you. Don't worry about writing it all down. Again, I will send this around if you're interested. So John Hanway who is the governor of the London's Foundling Hospital. Foundling Hospital, this is hospitals for babies that have been found, have been abandoned or otherwise lost their parents. So he was the governor of the Foundling Hospital in 1756. And he argued that England needed to protect her children. So he was arguing for more resources to take care of these Foundling children because the infant mortality rate was quite high for these children in the Foundling Hospital. Part of his strategy in doing this was to argue that the nation needed more hands to hold muskets to help expand the British Empire. So we had to keep these children alive because they would grow up to be soldiers to help expand the Empire. So as a result of this argument, thousands of women were mobilized as surrogate mothers and wet nurses for these children. Serving in these roles was seen as a patriotic duty to the Empire but these women were paid. They were paid half of what a male would be paid for a full day's work but even so, the state could not sustain to pay these women to look after the children in London's Foundling Hospital. It was way too expensive. And so a new strategy was needed to get women to care for children without payment. Emphasizes motherhood as a sacred and national duty seemed to help in this area. So motherhood takes on a new significance, a new role that being a mother actually is something you can do for your country, for your empire. So caring for your children becomes synonymous with serving your country. Sound familiar? I think it sounds a little bit familiar. Okay, so that's another suggestion of why motherhood, which was always important for womenhood, takes on a new importance here and gets forged with a kind of sense of national duty or national pride, that being a mother was a national role and Wollstonecraft actually picks up on this as well. So finally have the tension between motherhood and sexuality. We know from my brief discussions of the Virgin Mary that motherhood is enshrined now as selfless and pure. And in fact, this was part of the rhetoric enabling a mobilization of motherhood, of mothers to take care of children. You are selflessly giving yourself for your children. So this selflessness, this living for your children, the virgin mother was supposed to be without sin precisely because she was without sexuality. She didn't have sexual urges. So we get mothers who come to be seen as selfless and asexual with no desires of their own sacrificing for their children. But there's a tension here because in the second creation story that you read in Genesis, woman was created for man as a helpmate. So women are still, even though they are now asexual, seen as objects of sexual desire for men. They are now sex objects with no sexuality of their own. And this is especially true if we contrast it with earlier ages, particularly the middle ages, where it was perfectly fine to speak of women as having sexual desires. So the 18th century saw the denial of the female orgasm and a female sexual pleasure. Women just don't have these things. They're not interested in these things. Yet women as men's helpmates are meant to be pleasing men. Men's sexuality hasn't been denied. So we get this kind of tension between women who don't have sexuality now or who are thought of as being asexual in some way. And yet still full of filling the role of sex objects for men. Okay, so that's a bit of the general background of how womanhood was being constructed and being thought of in this time period. But as I said, I also want to tell you some particulars about Wilsoncraft, her life and her reputation. So it matters a lot for understanding how this text was treated and how it was received. So, Wilsoncraft actually grew up with a fair amount of responsibilities. She was the second eldest of seven children and she was the eldest daughter, which meant she spent a lot of time in kind of a pseudo mother role to her younger siblings. Her father is an interesting character. He wanted to be like a gentleman farmer. He wanted to own an estate and practice a pastoral lifestyle. This actually makes me think back to Marie Antoinette who I've told my seminar, but I don't think I've told you guys. At one point went into this pastoral period in her own life where she would move out to a country farm and practice a pastoral lifestyle and she dressed as a shepherdess. I mean a really, really well-dressed, very, very clean shepherdess, but a shepherdess nonetheless. A shepherdess with those giant flowing skirts and hoops and so not really like a shepherdess, like an idealization of a shepherdess. And she would herd sheep and she would also collect eggs, but because she was Marie Antoinette and so therefore French monarch, she couldn't actually go out and take the sheep or collect the eggs because sheep and eggs are gross. I mean they're covered. Sheep are disgusting and eggs are covered in mucus and stuff and so what would happen is the servants would go around before her and clean up the sheep and I'm not even kidding, wash off all the eggs and put the eggs back in the nests and then Marie Antoinette with her daughter would go and collect the eggs. So there was this, and we talked about this a little bit with Rousseau too, I think, this kind of glorification of a pastoral lifestyle, going back to a simpler time, all these romantic feelings in the air, romanticizing the past, romanticizing something simpler. And it seems that Wilsoncraft's dad was kind of taken up with this. So he wanted to be a gentleman farmer and he wanted to live this pastoral lifestyle and in doing so he lost most of the family's modest fortune trying to do this. It turns out he wasn't a very good farmer and so basically they only had enough money to send one child to school. Her elder brother was educated as a lawyer but this actually didn't affect Wilsoncraft that much because she probably wouldn't have received the formal education anyway because she was female. So if there had been more money it probably would have gone to her younger brothers and not to her. But in any case only one of the children received a formal education. However, Wilsoncraft herself befriended a clergyman and his wife while they were living in Yorkshire while her father was trying to farm. And the clergyman and his wife actually helped her begin her education. So church being one of the ways in which people were often educated. People in the church could read, could write, were encouraged to think about, not, yeah, think about biblical paradoxes and things like that. And so she began her education kind of through this pastor or this clergyman and his wife. So what I want you to think about as you examine this text is that the person who wrote it is a largely self-taught individual. She received virtually no formal education. She was a prolific reader, as you can tell, from the number of things she references in this text. And she was fiercely proud of the education she was able to give herself. But it is mostly an education that she got through her own efforts with somehow, but nothing formal. Okay. So Wilsoncraft reaches adulthood and her younger sister, Eliza, her favorite and closest sister was married off. She, Wilsoncraft, as I said, was very close to Eliza and they exchanged a lot of letters. And she went to stay with Eliza and Eliza's husband upon the birth of their first child. So when Eliza was expecting, Wilsoncraft went to stay to help. This is a little bit unclear. Different biographers suggest different things, but for some unclear reason, possible spousal abuse, possible postpartum depression, possible combination of the two. When Wilsoncraft was staying there, she saw that the home she did not believe was a good place for her sister. And she convinced Eliza to abandon her husband and as a result, abandoned her child because at the time, children rarely, if ever, were sent with the mother. And so Eliza abandoned her husband and her child and left with Mary Wilsoncraft. The baby died eight months later and public opinion blamed Wilsoncraft for this death. So that's one thing to keep in mind in her past. So what did Wilsoncraft do for work? She exercised almost all of the legal options available for a non-working class woman. So she is middle class, upper middle class, though they don't have a whole lot of money. So she was at various times in her life, a lady's companion, a governess, a teacher, a writer, and also a translator, again, self-taught. So as a writer, she wrote novels for a living, but as you know, if you've read this text, she was deeply conflicted about the novel because she worried about the moral ramifications of novel reading, even of high-brow novels, even though she wrote novels. So she wrote novels for a living, she wrote novels to make money, but she's deeply conflicted about the effects that novels have. That might sound familiar. Yeah, Wordsworth is definitely one, and she is actually influenced by Wordsworth's style of writing. So she wants to be direct the way she thought Wordsworth was. I was thinking of another one, too, though. Yeah, Austin, where there's a discussion between Catherine and Mr. Thorpe, and then later, Catherine and Mr. Why am I forgetting his name? Tilney, thank you, for talking about the merits or demerits of the novel. So you'll notice that a lot of this text is about education. Wollstonecraft actually had a lot of experience in different methods of education, and in trying to educate, and she and Eliza and another close female friend and another sister began a school for girls in England, which for a while was actually pretty good. It was working, it was promising, but eventually the school failed. It was not bringing in enough money, and they had to close it down. Prior to writing this piece, Wollstonecraft also wrote the vindications of the rights of man in response to Burke, who you heard about last day. She rushed that piece out, and it was actually the first thing published in response to Burke's piece, even before Paine. She initially published that piece anonymously, though. I think I have another slide about that. Oh, not yet. She initially published it anonymously. What can I tell you about that? After she published it, people who are in support of Burke, and she published this in England, she is English, people in support of Burke pretty much slammed the piece. And then it turned out that Wollstonecraft had written it, and everyone went, oh, I'm sorry, I said such things about a woman. She didn't have done that. I thought it was a man. Ladies sensibilities, I apologize. So that's kind of interesting. Okay, Wollstonecraft in love. I haven't told you much about her love life yet. She met and fell very hard for an American Gilbert Imley. He was a merchant and an author and spent most of his time traveling in France. She would travel with him. And in fact, while in France, you have to remember, France is not that keen on England right now. While in France, she posed as his wife. So she didn't pose as American. She spoke with a British accent, but she posed as Imley's wife. And she claimed this was because the French were hostile to the British, but welcoming of the Americans. And so posing as Imley's wife just allowed her to kind of avoid a lot of tension. But she wasn't married to him. They were just pretending. In fact, Imley never married to her. Married her and he also had numerous affairs and was unfaithful to her. So what would typically happen was that Imley would pick up and leave, often not bothering to tell her where he was going or what he was doing. And Wollstonecraft would pack everything up and follow him. She had one daughter out of wedlock by him. This is a huge sin in this time period. A daughter out of wedlock, Fanny Imley. And she would pack up her and her daughter and chase Imley around, around France and around England. In fact, after having her daughter, she was so distraught that he still was not committing to her and was still cheating on her that she attempted suicide twice. She eventually broke things off with Imley in 1796. And she stated that he had taught her that passions are not always curbed by reason. Which is something interesting to think about in relation to this text. So she broke things off with Imley in 1796 and in spring of that year, she remet William Godwin, who she had also met before, actually. So they did kind of know each other. I think the first time they met was 1790. And reportedly Godwin and Wollstonecraft didn't think very much of each other in 1790. They were both like, eh, eh. So anyway, 1796, things have changed. And Godwin was a philosopher and a writer and they became lovers in 1796. They married in March of 1797 in secret to hide the fact that Wollstonecraft was pregnant with their first child. So she did not want to have another child out of wedlock. So they married, but they married in secret so that nobody would know she was pregnant. Her child, you might know something about. Mary Shelley. Sorry? Frankenstein, yes, exactly. So Mary Shelley, named Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin was born in August 30th, 1797. And this was a very difficult labor for Wollstonecraft. There were complications with this birth compounded by the common disregard of the importance of physician hygiene. In fact, there was at this time, I don't think really any theory of germs. And a few years after this, in the 19th century, when the theory of germs came into being, a lot of physicians ridiculed it. Oh yeah, right. How can tiny microscopic, we can't even see them, germs actually be harming and killing us. That doesn't even make sense. So physicians didn't really bother to wash their hands. They didn't really bother to change the, they wore these cuffs over their clothes so that they wouldn't get blood and stuff on their sleeves. They didn't really bother to change the cuffs between patients. There was not a lot of hygiene. And so Wollstonecraft had, I believe, some internal bleeding and I don't wanna get too graphic and tearing and things that happened during the labor. Her doctor, we think, did not wash his hands, which was completely typical of the time period. And in any case, Wollstonecraft contracted an infection and she died on September 10th. This is 11 days after giving birth. Her death was very long, very slow and quite painful. William Godwin was devastated at the loss of Mary Wollstonecraft. And he went on, one year later in 1798, to write memoirs of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. So what you were reading is the text she is most known for. This memoir Godwin stated was meant to honor and celebrate Wollstonecraft's unconventional lifestyle, but it ended up damaging her reputation for over a century. Some said it was unnecessarily frank on aspects of her life, such as her involvement with her sister's marriage and possibly contributing to the death of her, I can't remember if it was a niece or a nephew, her sister's child, her own affairs, proposing to be married when she wasn't, her child born out of wedlock, her other child conceived out of wedlock. In general, this text pretty much laid it all out. And people have criticized Godwin, even subsequently people are still criticizing him. For Lane this all out and what he said was a tribute to her, but in which kind of backfired it ended up with people basically discounting her. So what happened? She writes about virtue. If you've read any part of the text, you know that's true. But her life was seen at least in the 18th century and the 19th century to be very far from virtuous. So she was dismissed as immoral and as a hypocrite. In fact, Horace Walfhole, who was a member of British nobility, a politician and an art historian, actually used Wolstoncraft as kind of an insult in his correspondence. And he wasn't alone in doing this as far as I know. So in a letter to his sister, he was writing personal correspondence to his sister, he ended the letter by praising his sister with the highest form of praise he could. Adieu, thou excellent woman, thou reverse of that hyena in petticoats, Mary Wolstoncraft, Adieu, Adieu, yours from the heart. So her name kind of became synonymous with the lowest that women could fall. And thus saying that your sister is the reverse of Mary Wolstoncraft is saying she's kind of the greatest person ever. In general, her work was largely ignored and ridiculed until the 20th century. And this was largely because of her scandalous personal life. So people thought, why should I have to listen to her about the virtues of women when she is not a virtuous woman? Okay. So that gives us the general background and Wolstoncraft's life and reputation. Now I wanna talk a little bit about the project about the text. But before I talk about what I thought about this text, I wonder a little bit what your reactions are. How was reading this? Yeah. I know a little. Mm-hmm, yes, yes. Yeah, I think it's really impressive when you look at the number of things that she's quoting. And I'll leave for your seminar as how relevant or irrelevant some of her arguments are today. Any other reactions to this text? How about, oh, yeah. Yes. Oh, yes, a lot of it is contingent on religion. Did Wolstoncraft die an atheist? This is actually something that's debated. It is, it's a huge part of Godwin's book. So if I go back to Godwin, there he is. Godwin says that she is an atheist. It's one of the things he said. Now we don't know for sure, but some scholars have said that actually Godwin was the atheist and Wolstoncraft wasn't. And so he's not actually representing her accurately. Perhaps he's representing her as he wished that she was or as he thought she was. But some people have said actually Godwin was the atheist, Wolstoncraft wasn't. It's not known, I don't think definitively whether she was an atheist or not when she died. But I think it's pretty clear that either she's not an atheist right now or she's willing to entertain religious foundations for her arguments at this time. I think she's not an atheist right now. I don't know if she became an atheist when she died. So the vindications are published in 1792. Perhaps between 1792 and 1797, something changed. I don't know. Or Godwin is just saying she's an atheist because he wished she was or he thought she was. But it is another thing that damages her reputation. And actually something that may not be true. Unlike many of the other things that were true that damaged her reputation. Okay, what about the style in which this is written? The prose. Any similarities between this and pain? In particular, I'm thinking of her treatment of some of the people she talks about. I'll get to the one you're probably laughing at in a minute. But a little bit more background. She took on two intellectual powerhouses of the day. Hugely influential intellectual figures. So this is kind of impressive that Wollstonecraft did this. One was Tally Rand who you read a little bit about because you have the excerpt of Tally Rand in your book. And the other one is Edmund Burke who you learned about last week. So I wanna tell you a little bit about Tally Rand's position and his proposal here. So he was an official who served under Louis the 16th. That is Marie Antoinette's husband. What happened to Louis the 16th? Yeah, he was beheaded. He was beheaded by the guillotine which was actually thought to be a democratic form of punishment. Everybody gets the same form. Right, it applies to everyone. So he was beheaded and then a few months later Marie Antoinette was also beheaded. So Tally Rand was an aristocrat and he served under Louis the 16th. So you might think he also was gonna end up under the guillotine because that happened to most of the nobility towards the end of the French Revolution. But curiously he made himself indispensable to the French government. And so while he was apparently never entirely trusted he was also never beheaded. So he kind of found a way in which to make himself really indispensable and I don't know a lot about him to know exactly how he did this but it is kind of interesting. He became kind of this Machiavellian character. So Tally Rand says as you will know education, this is his proposal for how the French government should manage education going forward after the revolution. Education should be available to both sexes. Yeah, so far so good. That is very plain. Since it is a common good on what principle could one of two be disinherited of it by society which protects the rights of all. So it's a common good to be educated. So there's no reason says Tally Rand to not extend education to half of the population just because they're female. All right, so why does Wilson-Craft have a beef with this? This sounds pretty good. Ah, the education of women. First of all the question relative to their education that is the education of girls cannot be separated here from the investigation of their political rights. For in bringing them up it is very necessary to know what they are destined for. If we acknowledge the same rights for them as for men then they must be given the same means of making use of them. What does that mean? If we acknowledge the same rights for them as for men they must be given the same means of making use of them. What kind of rights do you think he's talking about? Yeah, the rights to be independent and also specifically that is one of them to be independent to carry on an independent life. But also he's worried about extending them things like rights in government. If we think however that their lot should only be domestic happiness and the duties of inner life they must be formed early to fulfill this destiny. We should shape them to be creatures who serve the duties of inner life. So which do we think says Telleran? Do we think that they are meant to have the same rights as men? Or do we think that their lot is only domestic happiness? Well, here's his answer. It seems incontestable to us that the common happiness especially that of women, we're doing this for your own good ladies, requires that they do not aspire to the exercise of political rights and duties. That is all of us society will be happier and especially women will be happier if women are not encouraged to enter the public sphere. So we're back here, public spheres and private spheres and women are encouraged to view their lot as domestic happiness as opposed to men who are encouraged to enter the public sphere. So Telleran argues that yes, both men and women should be educated but they have different roles to fulfill in society and so their education should be different. Men are destined to live on the stage of the world. That sounds awesome. A public education suits them on the stage of the world. A public education suits them. It early places before their eyes all the scenes of life, only the proportions are different. So as they grow, they will see things in different proportions. The paternal home, not parental, I'm sorry. The paternal home is better for the education of women. They have less need to deal with the interests of others than to accustom themselves to a calm and secluded life. Destined to domestic cares, it is the bosom of their family that they should receive their first lessons and first examples. So where should men be educated? School, somewhere public, right? A public institution of some kind. Where should women be educated? In the home, in the paternal home, under the guide of their parents, probably their dads. So men's education is public, women's education is private and this mirrors what will happen when they grow up. Okay, so Wollstonecraft is also motivated in response to Edmund Burke. So Wollstonecraft's vindications of the rights of man was rushed into print as I told you. It was the first reply to Burke's book and it was published anonymously. When her identity was revealed, everyone was astonished that a woman would write in the most masculine of genres, the political treatise. So this is the most masculine of genres and you read an example of this also last week from Paine. So you can consider how well is Wollstonecraft's or how different is Wollstonecraft's prose, her style from Paine's? Or is she fully assuming this role? Of writing the political treatise. So the first vindications, the vindications of the rights of man deals with men and women, though it frames itself in terms of men, in practical terms. So we didn't read it, but you do have it if you want to look at it. And it addresses class differences, social problems, and in general talks about practical issues in terms of equality of men, though it's framed in terms of men. The second vindication, so when you did read, deals with women and men, though this time it's framed in terms of women. In the abstract, where do these rights come from? How should we protect them? How should society allow them to flourish? So the two are seen a bit companions to each other. One concrete, one more abstract. She is also answering Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ah, we know Rousseau a little bit. So Wollstonecraft is motivated as a response to Rousseau's Emmaus and Sophilia, a new system of education, which he wrote in 1762. So these are, most of the book is actually talking about how to properly educate young men. But in book five, or chapter five of this text, he digresses to talk about the proper education of the companion for men, this being Sophia. It's interesting that Rousseau chose the word Sophia, because I think, did we tell you this? Philosophy, Phyla Sophia is love of wisdom, Sophia is the goddess of wisdom. So it's kind of this wisdom goddess, women on a pedestal, better than men type of figure that he picks for his companion for the man, but she is not educated the same way as a man. So book five, here's a little bit of what he says so that you know, although Wollstonecraft cites from him quite extensively, so you may have a pretty general idea of what he says about the education of Sophia. Here's what he says in book five. It is not good for a man to be alone. And Emil now is now a man. We have promised him also a companion who must therefore now be given to him, the companion is Sophia. So women come into this once men are men. There isn't a lot of discussion of motherhood or sisters or friends. Okay, in the union of the sexes, both pursue one common object, but not in the same manner. From their diversity in this particular arise from the first determinant difference between the moral relations of each. The one should be active and strong, the other passive and weak. It is necessary that one should have both the power and the will and that the other should make little resistance. The principle being established, it follows that woman is expressly formed to please the man. So they are completely opposites of each other. The man is active and strong, the woman is passive and weak. The man has the power, the woman provides little resistance. We'll talk about this power and resistance once more. He actually also says in another passage that while women should be educated and encouraged to please men, it is not necessary for men to practice how to please women because men are strong and strength itself is pleasing to women. So, good enough. Men just in their nature are pleasing. Okay, Rousseau on female sexuality. She is by nature constantly coy. What does it mean to be coy? Do you guys know? Anyone not know what it means to be coy? Oh, yeah. Yeah, to pretend, to want, to act like you don't want, to know, to act like you don't know. So they're kind of deceptive. Another way of putting this might be to say they're a tease in modern language. Women by nature are coy and betray a seeming reluctance to yield to his embraces. In order for the assailant to be victorious, the assailed should permit or direct the attack. That is, I'm sorry, that was an awesome expression. In order for the assailed to be victorious, that is the man, the woman must permit the attack and direct the man how to attack her without like overly directing because men have the power. So this is why women have to be kind of coy and subtle. Okay, for how many artful means is not the latter possessed to compel the former to exert himself? That is, while women cannot in this time period go up to men and say, hey, I like you, let's go dance or something, they have a number of indirect ways to encourage men to attack them or pursue them, pursue might be a better way to put it. Okay, the most free and delightful of all actions admits not of any real violence. So he's not actually arguing that men should attack women. Both nature and reason are against it. Nature and reason don't actually want men to attack women just to like really strongly pursue them. In that nature has provided the weakest party, that is women, with sufficient force to make an effective resistance when she pleases. That is if the advance is really, really not wanted, Rousseau thinks women are able to fend it off. But you might wonder exactly how this is going to work when a lot of the time women are supposed to be pretending to fend it off but not really fending off the attack. This looks a bit complicated to me. So I've suggested that Rousseau on female sexuality that he views female sexuality as actively passive, which should sound familiar. So in terms of female sexuality, we now have reason to believe not a lot changed from the 1700s to the early 1900s. Okay, Rousseau on motherhood. There is no parity, there is no equality that is, between men and women and the consequences of their sex. That is both the consequences of engaging in sex and the consequences of being the sex that you are. I think he means both of those things. The male is such only at certain momentary intervals. That is to say, the consequences of being a male and of engaging in sex as a male, only inconvenience you as a person occasionally. Whereas the female feels the consequences of her sex all her life. So being female and engaging in sex as a female is much more weighing on yourself as an individual. At least during youth, before menopause I assume he means I don't know. And in order to answer the purpose of it to fulfill the consequences of your sex requires a full and suitable constitution. So what he's essentially saying is it is basically a full-time job to just be a woman. And there are a bunch of suggestions he makes in this text about how women should prepare for this. So his sedentary life aids women in the child bed according to Rousseau so you shouldn't be too active. And it aids while nursing her children so when you're caring for your children again, don't be too active. And at all times, women must be treated gently and carefully by men because otherwise they may not be able to fulfill their duties of their sex which is to be mothers. Women are designed by nature to be nothing other than mothers. That is all they can handle basically according to Rousseau. And in fact, Rousseau also echoes this idea of motherhood as kind of a national duty. What would become of all our populous towns if in the distant countries where women live in great chastity and simplicity, they did not compensate for the sterility of our young town ladies. That is women move into towns, they might get jobs as writers or translators or something and they get kind of busy in town life and they are not having children. At least women in the country still are having children. But we need to think about the sterility of our young town ladies because this is not okay. So that brings me back to here. Although Rousseau wasn't talking about the British Empire but you might see some similarities there. So basically Rousseau's general point is that women need to be educated to be submissive and pleasing to men. In order to have power over men, he actually thinks that this will bring women power over men and that this is right and natural. Okay, so there's another thing that you should know working in the background of this text. As was pointed out in the back row by Asia, Wollstonecraft is resting a lot of her argument on the importance of God. That's not God though, that's Plato. We'll come to that in a minute. And this is because she is resting a lot of her argument on moral absolutism. That is that she argues that virtue is singular and eternal. There's one type of moral virtue and it is the same for everyone, men, women, British, French, whatever. And it is eternal at all times. So she's arguing against the idea that there's one way for men to be moral or virtuous and a different way for women. There's only one measurement for all humanity according to Wollstonecraft. And this makes sense for her because there's only one God. God created us in his image. Whatever is virtue for God is virtue for all of us. What is virtue? She never comes right out and defines virtue from having read this text a few times. I think what she's aiming at is some kind of abstract idea of perfection or excellence, which is both intellectual and moral. And she also seems to, this is why Plato is here, rest on the Platonic and Socratic idea that to know the good is to conform to the good. That is, once you understand intellectually why a lie is just or why an action is virtuous, you will naturally conform to the law or the action. So you can't say, yes, I know this is the good thing to do, but I'm gonna go do this instead because I want to. Once you really understand intellectually why something is virtuous, you will naturally conform to that. This is something that if you remember way back with the allegory of the cave, we talked about really briefly. For Plato, only philosophers get to do this. But Wollstonecraft, like Payne, is interested in equality and she thinks all of us have the opportunity to do this. So it is impossible to be virtuous without understanding or knowing what is virtuous. That is without cultivating your intellect or reason. Okay, so I'm going to talk about one more thing before I kind of start diving into specific arguments. Wollstonecraft also, as noted, appeals directly to God. This is in a few places where she says, she actually talks about, and I couldn't find this again when I went back to look at it, so I don't have a page number, but she talks about the creation myth which you read about Adam and Eve and she says, okay, look, we can't actually take this literally because I don't think anyone really believes that women are created out of ribs. That just doesn't seem plausible, she says. So what does the text show us if it doesn't show us that women are created out of ribs? Well, she says, what's important about the text is that it shows us that both men and women are created in God's image. Therefore, if women are by nature inferior to men, their virtue must be the same in quality if not in degree. That is, even if it is true, and Wollstonecraft is not saying it's not true, even if it is true that women are naturally inferior to men, they still are aiming at the same type of virtue at the same moral truths, so they have to be taught the same way. It has to be the same in quality if not in degree where virtue is a relative idea. Consequently, their conduct should be founded on the same principles and have the same aim. So she says, okay, let's say, I don't know, let's try and pick this down. Say men and women are running a race, and okay, maybe women are never going to beat men, but it's not like women shouldn't run at all because they can't beat men. They should still try and be as fast and as good as they can. So she's saying the same thing about the intellect. Let's say women can never be as virtuous intellectually as men. She doesn't know whether that's true or not, but what's important is that women still be as good as they can be, and that we not encourage them to become even worse. Let's try and maximize the virtue here. So again, surely there can be but one rule of right if morality is to have an eternal foundation. This is an absolutism. Morality is not relative to the individual. It is not relative to the sexes. It is not relative to the nation. There is one rule of right, and it's founded in God, an eternal foundation. And how is this connected to reason? Reason is consequently the simple power of improvement or more properly speaking of discerning truth. Every individual in this respect is a world in itself. I love that line. Every individual in this respect is a world in itself. All you need to discern truth is within you. More or less may be conspicuous in one being that another, some of us may be better at discerning truth than others, but the nature of reason must be the same at all if it be an emanation of divinity. The tie that connects the creature with the creator for can the soul be stamped with the heavenly image that is not perfected by the exercise of its own reason. That is reason is what connects us to God. She says this in another place too where she says reason is what differentiates us from animals. Reason connects us to the divine and we all have reason even though some of us may have more reason or be better able to use our reason than others. We all still have reason and we have to exercise that reason otherwise we can't be perfected. We can't come closer to God. So this is very, very grounded in a Christian God which is what makes me suspect the claim that she's atheist, at least in this time period. So I've kind of simplified it. Men and women were created by God. Reason is what connects us with our creator and how we perfect our souls. So both men and women as images of God must use reason to attain the perfection of the soul. So I want to briefly talk about some similarities between most in craft and pain. We get an origin story for women's rights to exercise reason that is origins in God. So just like pain, most in craft seems to be going deep back into the history, past all of our written history back to this origin story to found her claims about women's virtue. If you like back here. So she says, many people aren't looking back far enough when they say that women are naturally submissive. So she takes on this question, are women naturally submissive? Well, look back in history and it looks like there are a lot of times and places, maybe all times and places that women have been subordinate to men. As to the argument respecting the subjection in which the female sex has ever been held, it retorts on man. So she says, look, if you're gonna say it's natural for women to be submissive because in history they've always been submissive, it's also natural for men. Why? Because the many have always been enthralled by the few. For is it not acknowledged that kings viewed collectively have ever been inferior in ability and virtue to the same number of men taken from the common masses of mankind? And yet somehow men become subordinate to kings. So if women are naturally subordinate, it turns out a lot of men are naturally subordinate to. So she doesn't think that the idea of looking back in our history to prove the naturalness or nateness of women's subordination works very well. Because if you're going to argue as the French Revolution was, in the American Revolution prior to that, that when men are equal, you're still arguing against this whole claim about how men have been subordinated to kings for a really long time. But most of the craft is also looking forward in a way that I think is a little bit different, perhaps from Payne's argument, that you guys can think about it for yourself. So in comparing herself to some of the people she's responding to, she says, well, Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally. And you can actually think back to what you read on Rousseau to think about whether this is true. I think that is what he argues, right? Nacent man is a lot better off than we are now. Things have just been getting worse and worse. Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally. The crowd of authors that all is now right and I that all will be right. So Wilsoncraft is saying we have yet to reach this point where things are okay. She's looking forward, but she's using an origin story to help herself do this. So on female equality, in a number of places, she acknowledges and accepts that women are naturally weaker than men physically. But she says that's kind of the only difference that she can discern. She also admits and acknowledges that women may have different duties to fill, but she says the important thing here is that they are human duties. And the principle that should regulate the discharge of them, Wilsoncraft's totally maintains must be the same. And this is the line she's going to return to again and again. If women are humans created in the image of God, then their path to perfection is the same as men. So she also says we have to give women a chance to try, so much of this I already said, that women actually look a lot weaker than men right now in the 1800s. Or 1700s, 18th century, because they have been encouraged to make themselves even weaker than they actually need to be. So it may be the case that women are weaker than men, not just physically, but also mentally and virtuously, yeah. That's kind of a word. But she says what's happening right now is a society that is encouraging women to be weaker and weaker and weaker. And that's not good. It's not actually good for anyone, according to Russo, or to Wilsoncraft, oh dear. Now I'm doing what you did last week. And we'll talk about that more. Okay, so before I talk about what Wilsoncraft thinks about the state of women in Britain currently, let's take about a 10 minute break, and then seven, can I say seven minute break? A seven minute break. So I wanna try and get us out of here on time. And then we'll talk about what women in Britain look like in the 1700s. So let's begin with Wilsoncraft's assessment of what women in Britain are like in the 1700s, late 1700s. So she has some fairly unflattering things to say about women actually in this time period. They don't come off looking very good. Keep in mind though she's talking about women in general, she really seems to be focusing in on upper middle class and aristocratic women. So she says the false notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of their limbs and produce a sickly soreness. So that is women are encouraged not to be very active, they have to be sedentary, right? Because being a mother is so taxing on your body, being a woman in general is so taxing on your body, you should be really sedentary. So false notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of their limbs, and they're kind of sickly. In fact, Wilsoncraft argues not just for education in terms of mental development, but also for physical education for women. She thinks it's very important that women be active and that they try and be as strong and as fit as possible, even if they can never be as strong or as fit as a man. So other things we should know, the only power women have, according to Wilsoncraft in this time period, is a power over men. And so they try to manipulate men pretty much all the time because that's the only way they can get anything. So near the end of this text in chapter 13, I think it is, Wilsoncraft basically says women are essentially rakes who manipulate others' sensibilities in order to get what they want. So she says it's not really that surprising that women fall for rakes. Does anyone know what a rake is? That's like a bad boy. So they're the men who manipulate you basically just to get into bed with you and then they run off and leave you. So she says it's not really that surprising that women fall for rakes because women are rakes. So why shouldn't they fall for rakes? They're falling for what's most like them. Women manipulate men. They use sex to manipulate men. So she says I am afraid that morality is very insidiously undermined in the female world. Women are not very moral. That is because the attention is being turned to show, not shoe, this is an archaic spelling of show, attention is being turned to the show instead of the substance. Women learn that the way they appear is much more important than the way they are. It is important to appear moral, to appear chaste, to appear modest. It's not that important to be any of those things. And it's only important to appear those things because it makes men do things for you, basically. Okay, so this is where and we're gonna return to this one more time because I think this is really interesting. She compares women to soldiers. Or anyone, she says, who learns manners before morals. Women learn to behave, so do soldiers. Women learn to obey, so do soldiers. But they don't learn to think according to Wilson-Craft. And if you can't use your reasons as Wilson-Craft, then it's weird that we hold you responsible because you shouldn't be held responsible. If you're only obeying orders, you shouldn't be held responsible. So she gives us an either or a dilemma. Either we educate women and hold them responsible for their actions, or we don't educate them and therefore we can't hold them responsible because they can't think for themselves. So women are therefore to be considered either moral beings or so weak that they must be entirely subjected to the superior faculties of men. Those are our two choices, she says. But that's not what's actually happening in her society. So she says these are the two choices that make sense. Either women are actually fully fledged moral beings, in which case you can hold them completely accountable for any action good or bad that they do. Or they can't think for themselves and you can't hold them responsible. It would be like holding an animal responsible. When my cat woke me up at four in the morning meowing for breakfast, yeah, I might be mad at him, but I don't hold him morally responsible for disturbing my sleep because I don't really think that morality factors into his decisions. So either women are like men and they can be held responsible or they're more like your pets and they can't be held responsible. In fact, we'll talk about women and animals later. Okay, but what's actually happening in society at Wilsoncraft's time is not one of those two things. What's happening, she says, is that men are holding women responsible while simultaneously saying women are not intelligent enough to be moral. So she asks, why do men halt between two opinions and expect impossibilities? Why do they expect virtue from a slave? From a being whom the constitution of civil society has rendered weak, if not vicious. Why do men blame women for doing all these horrible, reprehensible things that we've said women do to manipulate men when society has created women who cannot be moral? So far, so good? So that's kind of our dilemma. If you don't give me the skills to cultivate virtue, you can't be upset when I'm not virtuous. And yet what's happening right now is society is not giving women the skills to cultivate virtue and is being upset that women are not virtuous. So we get the situation of women on pedestals in this time period. Exalted by their inferiority. Women are exalted by being inferior. Sounds like a contradiction, says Wilsoncraft, kind of is. So exalted by their inferiority, they constantly demand homage as women. The experience should teach them that the men who praise them are the most inclined to tyrannize over and despise the very weaknesses they cherish. So men praise women in public for being weak, for being a little bit silly and frivolous, but then they turn around and make fun of them at the same time. And this is exactly what happened to Marie Antoinette, for example. It's also something you might see in the exchange between Mr. Thorpe and our heroine in Northanger Abbey. And also Mr. Tilney, actually. She's praised for being a little bit silly and also ridiculed at the same time. The passions of men have thus placed women on thrones, exalted by their inferiority, on thrones, until mankind become more reasonable. It is to be feared that women will avail themselves of the power which they attain with the least, sorry, that should say least, not east, my apologies, of the power which they attain with the least exertion, and which is the most indisputable. So there is a genuine power over men here. Women are on thrones, women are on pedestals. They exert power over men. But it's a power that is dependent on men putting them on those pedestals, and those pedestals themselves are at prison. The minute women stop acting in the ways in which men at this time period wanted them to behave, they lose all their power. So let's move to some arguments for why women should be educated. I've given you the theoretical argument, which is that women and men are created in the image of God, and both given reason, and therefore should both be allowed to exercise their reason. But Wollstonecraft also gives us several practical arguments, appealing to men, appealing to men's reason about why it's gonna be good for men if women are educated. One of them is the role of motherhood. So Wollstonecraft accepts that women's greatest role is to be a mother, and she argues that women will be better mothers if they are educated and therefore virtuous. One of the arguments she gives, actually, might remind you a little bit of a fairy tale. So how many people are aware of Snow White? You guys know this fairy tale? Okay, did you know that prior to the Victorian era, it was Snow White's mother and not her stepmother who sent her out into the woods? Because it was. It was her mother. Why did her mother send her out into the woods? With the Huntsman to have her heart cut out, her mother sent her out because Snow White was getting too pretty. And what are we learning here? The power of women is in their ability to be sexual objects to men. So as the daughter became prettier, the mother became more fearful of her role and of her power, and so she decided to have her daughter killed. This gets changed when we get kind of the sanctity of motherhood in the Victorian period such that it becomes a stepmother. In fact, many of the fairy tales we know where it was a stepmother, it originally was a mother. Interesting. So we get the mother pulled out and the stepmother put in, and then to resanctify the role of motherhood, the introduction of godmothers, which were not many of the original fairy tales. So, women are not good mothers, says Wollstonecraft, if all they're doing is trying to manipulate men and be pretty. They're not making good mothers. They're not educating their children well, they're not setting good examples for their daughters, and they may become jealous of their daughters in time, says Wollstonecraft. As their daughters take on the flower of youth while mom keeps getting older and loses her beauty, she probably won't go to the extent that Snow White's mother went to, but she will become jealous of her daughter. And this is not a good or harmonious relationship in which to raise children. Also, the role of the wife. The woman who strengthens her body and exercises her mind will become the friend and not the humble dependent of her husband. So she'll be a more interesting companion if she's educated. You'll have better conversations with her. She'll be your friend, not just your dependent. She will not find it necessary to conceal her affection to excite her husband's passions. Remember all that weird stuff Rousseau said about how women have to be coy and passive and kind of like subtly direct men into approaching them and asking them out. A woman who's educated won't have to do any of that. She'll just be able to say, hey honey, I like you. This is a good thing, says Wollstonecraft, and it would be better in a marriage. If the woman could just come right out and say, let's have sex tonight. Instead of coyly trying to get the man to notice without really saying anything because she's not supposed to be sexual. Okay. So Wollstonecraft also says that over time, they remember divorces pretty much never happened in this time period. So once you get married, you're with this person. Over time, she says love and excitement fade. They do for everyone. If your wife has been taught that all of her power and appeal comes from being able to excite you sexually and you've now been with her for 20 years and maybe aren't so interested in her anymore, Rousseau says she'll be much more likely to have an affair because all of her worth comes from being able to excite a man. So women who actually have intellectual virtue will be less likely to cheat on their husbands, says Rousseau, or says Wollstonecraft, not Rousseau. So she also says that your marriage will be stronger because you will be friends. In friendship, she says is better than love because it lasts longer. There's one more. Practical argument, the unmarried woman. What happens to an unmarried woman in this time period? Well, it's not good. There are very, very few options for women making income of their own. And so unmarried women, especially of the upper class in the aristocracy, generally ended up being a burden on their male relatives because they could not eke out any kind of living of their own and they were never going to inherit. So they couldn't live as heads of household inheriting grand swaths of land where other people paid them tides. That wasn't gonna happen. So girls who have been less weekly educated are often cruelly left by their parents without any provision because all of them only went to the first born son. And of course, are dependent on not only the reason but the bounty of their brothers. So this is quite taxing. Not only do you have to pay all of her bills, your sister's bills, but you also have to kind of look out for her because she's not that bright. So you have to keep an eye on her all the time and pay for everything. It's like having another kid, basically. But if women were educated, they might not be such a burden, even if they were unmarried. So it's good. She also argues though, this isn't the focus of this text that educated women would be able to participate fully in politics and possibly hold jobs, both of which she sees as good things. Where the practical and the theoretical meet, there's one more reason 18th century men that you should want are 18th century wives and sisters and daughters to be educated. This is because Wilsoncraft agrees, like Rousseau, like many of the other people we've read, that there's a relationship, like Tally Rand, that there's a relationship, a mutual relationship between men and women. And so she argues the two sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other. Uh oh, the two sexes mutually corrupt each other. That's not so good. If we intend to pursue virtue as a species, we better allow both sexes to pursue virtue as fully as possible because as long as we're not encouraging women to pursue virtue, they could be corrupting men. And that's not good. Women will hold men back if they are not encouraged to pursue virtue. They will do so as mothers to their sons, as wives to their husbands. They will corrupt men if they are not educated, basically. So she says this quite early on, contending for the rights of women, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue. For truth must be common to all or it will be inefficacious with respect to, sorry, there's an extra E there, I think, with respect to its influence on general practice. So basically, women have to be educated, otherwise they're going to stop the progress of knowledge and virtue. Because men and women rely on each other and work together, it is necessary for all of us to be properly educated in order to continue to have progress. Okay, so there's a few more points specific to this text that I want to talk about. One is some connection to pain, which is that both Wilsoncraft and pain are stressing the importance of individual freedom and equality. So Wilsoncraft says, how can women be expected to cooperate unless she knows why she ought to be virtuous? Unless freedom strengthen her reason until she comprehend her duty and see in what manner it is connected with her real good. So it's back to the idea that you need to understand why a law is just or why an action is moral in order to follow it. Otherwise you're just kind of going through the motions to make someone else happy and the minute that person isn't happy, you probably are going to stop going through the motions. Back to soldiers and women. They're both bad according to Wilsoncraft because they are taught to blindly submit to authority and they are not taught or encouraged to think for themselves. If you are taught to blindly obey, you are never given freedom. And in that case, you really can't be held accountable for your actions and yet we do hold them accountable. And this is complete paradox according to Wilsoncraft. So there's a lot of places in which she compares women to soldiers and in particular because soldiers are subordinate to generals, women are subordinate to men. So they're taught to follow orders and to not think for themselves. She also, similar move to pain has some inflammatory remarks regarding the British monarchy. Though unlike pain, I don't believe Wilsoncraft was ever brought up in any trouble on this. At least not the kind of trouble that pain was. She wrote this while living in England and other than her travels following Imlay when she settled down with William Godwin. She was back in England. So here's what she has to say about Kings. Surely it is madness to make the fate of thousands depend on the caprice of a weak fellow creature whose very station sinks him necessarily below the meanest of his subjects. After attacking the sacred majesty of Kings, I shall scarcely excite surprise by adding my firm persuasion that every profession in which the great subordination of rank constitutes its power is highly injurious to morality. So similar to pain, Wilsoncraft thinks that absolute power corrupts. Kings cannot help but sink below the meanest of their subjects once they are invested with this much power. She also thinks subordination corrupts that if you are subordinate to somebody else's will, you stop thinking for yourself and you don't really have any sense of what's good morally. So morality requires equality and freedom because being subordinate or being superior is both bad. Injurious to morality. I wanted to spend another minute talking about novels because I've told you, Wilsoncraft is in this paradoxical relationship where she writes novels. Many of the novels she writes have a kind of message be it a political message or a moral message. So she's not writing novels that she thinks are empty. But even so, she thinks even novels that carry a message, novels that are intelligent, novels that make you think are still not the best way to exercise your mind intellectually and not the greatest use of your time. So she was deeply conflicted about her own participation in novel writing. Novels at this time were largely consumed by women, especially upper middle class and aristocratic women because they didn't have a lot of else to do with their day. So they did needlepoint, they read novels. They're not supposed to exercise. They don't have a job. They have somebody watching their children. They have somebody cooking their meals. They have somebody cleaning their house. They have to manage those people. But a lot of the time they spend not with a lot to do. So they read a lot of novels. There's no TV, right? So if you're gonna be sedentary and there's no TV and there's no video games, I guess you read novels. So it's mostly women consuming novels and there are a lot of novels written for women in this time period. So there are women who are amused by the reveries of the stupid novelists who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales and describe meritic scenes are all retailed in sentimental jargon which equally tends to corrupt taste and draw the heart aside from its daily duties. So novels because of their nature as escapist fiction corrupt your taste and draw you away from the world, from your duties. Draw you away from morality. They're bad for you. So I think maybe novels are kind of like, I don't know, reality TV. Well, St. Kraft is really, really concerned especially in a few places here. Not just with what you read but with the way what you do affects who you are. So if you don't have any duty to perform with your life, if you don't have any job, if you don't have anything that makes you feel fulfilled, what happens to you? If all you do is read novels or watch reality TV all day, what happens to you? What kind of person do you become? But also I think, doesn't she sound a bit like Mr. Thorpe here? Like part of me wants to be like, no, Wilson Kraft, but I like novels. Oh, what's happening to me? Okay, Wilson Kraft on modesty. I want to talk about modesty and I want to talk about chastity and sexuality. So a woman's most important, not just her most important but actually her only virtue was her modesty, chastity and effon married her virginity. This ensures that her husband will protect her and her children. Rousseau actually makes this argument that her virginity and her modesty and chastity will ensure her husband's protection. Why? Any ideas? Yeah, it could be although curiously it's usually viewed that she corrupts him. She's teasing him into attacking her. It is an ownership thing. Yeah, she has property. In fact, the original reason that she would take her husband's name was part of a symbolic move in which the marriage contract wasn't made between a woman and a man but between a man and a woman's father. She is traded as property as you might sign away a land or sell, I don't know, like a car. And so she takes his name because she is his property now and she used to be her husband's property. So she is property. She could hold no property of her own. Any money she makes or any money that comes with her say that she got some inheritance from her parents becomes her husband's money. That is all true. So why would you care about your property being modest or chaste? Did you have a question? No, I don't have any. Yep. Yes. So he will protect her as the mother of his children and he will protect his children because he knows they're his. This is before any kind of paternity. You are the baby's father kind of test. So she has to be modest. She has to be chaste. In fact, it's way less important for men to be modest or chaste but very, very important. This is where a woman's power comes from. It is in sexually exciting her husband and in providing her husband with heirs that are his. So this is kind of a paradox, isn't it? Women are taught to be modest and chaste but their greatest power is as sexual beings or at least sexual objects that probably shouldn't say sexual beings. This is a paradox. In fact, this is really weird. A lot of women in this time period and even up into the 1800s are taught how to entice men a lot of their education goes into you are going to be presented to society. You are coming out into society. We're gonna buy you these dresses. We're gonna teach you how to look through your eyelashes. I've never figured that one out. I don't know how to do it. Look, tilt your head down and look up through your eyelashes. I don't know how to do it. Maybe my eyelashes aren't long enough. Flutter your eyelashes. Blush on command if possible. Now you can't wear rouge because that means you're a hooker but you can pinch your cheeks to bite your lips so that you look kind of flushed because that usually means sexual excitement. Swaying your hips, right? Sticking out your chest. All these things that women are taught to do to give, as Rousseau says, these subtle signs to men that they are available, right? On the other hand, you're supposed to be modest and chaste. So you learn all of this stuff to, as we say, catch a husband. And then you can just put all of that aside. You don't need it anymore. Don't do it because you can't catch another man. Isn't that weird? So women would spend years perfecting this and then get rid of it all. So, Willsterncraft tells us everything that women see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions and associate ideas that give a sexual character to the mind. Women in this time period are taught over and over and over again that there's a sexual character to everything that they do or at least there should be and that their value is in their sex. For they then perceive that it is only through their address to excite emotions in men that pleasure and power are obtained. It is only through being able to catch that husband to get him really excited about you because now he has to marry you. He can't have sex outside of marriage. There, now you have power, you have security, you have secured a future for yourself. But be modest at the same time you're doing this. Not quite sure how that's supposed to work. So what's Willsterncraft say? Well, it doesn't work. What happens is that women fake it. They aren't really modest, they fake being modest. Women don't know how to reason so they don't know how to cultivate any virtues so they do whatever they think will please men. Which means that they probably are not that modest but they're pretending to be modest because that is what men expect from them. Willsterncraft says instead, we should just let things naturally run their course. So she says nature and these respects may safely be left to herself. Let women only acquire knowledge and humanity, knowledge and humanity, knowledge of humanity, I think it is. And love will teach them modesty. So all they have to do is learn about the world, about their fellow humans and they will naturally become modest. There is no need of falsehoods disgusting as futile for the study, studious roles of behavior only impose on shallow observers. A man of sense soon sees through and despises these affectations. So if a man is really sensible he can tell when a woman is faking modesty but most men don't bother according to Willsterncraft. They like to be pulled in by the lie. So what she says would be better is for everybody to just be educated to love their fellow human being and modesty will naturally follow. Would she or my sisters really possess modesty? You must remember that the possession of virtue of any denomination is incompatible with ignorance and vanity. And this is where the rub really is. If you're really gonna be modest you shouldn't care about how your hips are swaying or how your chest is pushed up by your corset or how much you've pinched your cheeks to make them red. But of course you do care about all those things because you want him to be interested. So you aren't really being modest, you're only pretending to be modest. So she says if you really want to be modest you have to get rid of your vanity and get rid of your ignorance. Okay, sexual virtues. I got this because I think it's pretty cool. Oh, I wish it wasn't doing it like that. If only I could figure out how to get it to run the whole gambit. Oh well, so we're looking about here. 1880, 1890 up to 1903. There are a few things you should notice everybody's wearing a corset. And a few of these, the rear is quite accentuated. They're wearing bustles. They're all wearing hoop skirts. They're all pushing up the bust, cinching in the waist. I once had a professor in a women's studies class say to some degree you can kind of track the rise and fall of equality between men and women by how much the dress accentuates sexual difference between men and women. So for example, around here, women started dressing a lot more like men and there actually was more equality in the interwar period. Anyway, we're back here. So you can see what they're wearing. I have another. Oh yeah, this one actually really shows the bustle. The accentuating, and then when you walked that would, I can't do it, bounce around quite a bit. Accentuating your natural movements even more because of how far it stuck out. Okay, so, Wollstonecraft here gets pretty angry against men. So while earlier she is pretty angry against women for kind of going along with all this and being caught up in vanity and being rakes and being stupid, when she comes to talk about women and sexual virtue, she gets pretty angry towards men. So she says, men are not aware of the misery they cause and the vicious weaknesses they cherish by only inciting women to render themselves pleasing. They do not consider that they thus make natural and artificial duties clash because women are artificially making themselves pleasing instead of following their natural duties towards God. So they sacrifice comfort and respectability of a woman's life to voluptuous notions of beauty which, while in nature, these all harmonize. A woman who is following a respectable life is naturally beautiful according to Wollstonecraft. So valuing women only as sexual objects imprisons them in their sex. It actually literally imprisons them. So yes, a lot of these styles do sacrifice comfort for the sake of beauty, like a lot. If you're wearing a corset, why did women faint all the time because they couldn't breathe? They couldn't breathe because this was all cinched in. In fact, if you had a waist that your husband could put his hands around like this, that was considered quite sexy. His hands, so my hands are small. It would be bigger than that, but not very big. To cinch in. Okay, she also argues that chastity should not be just a female virtue. It's actually to your pinky. Your thumb to your pinky. It's not very big. Okay, chastity should not be just a female virtue. Men should actually aim to be chaste too. For I will venture to assert that all the causes of female weakness as well as depravity, which I've already enlarged on branch out of one grand cause, want of chastity in men. So she says if men could be more chaste, women wouldn't be as depraved. To satisfy this genus of men, women are made systematically voluptuous. And though they may not all carry their libertinism in the same height, yet this heartless intercourse with the sex, which they allow themselves to praise both sexes, because the taste of men is vitiated and women of all classes naturally square their behavior to gratify the taste by which they obtain pleasure and power. So the more men treat women as sexual objects, the more men are actually brought down from the level of virtue by this, because all they're concerned about is sex. And the more women are brought down because all they're concerned about is appearing sexually enticing to men. One more. Moist and craft denies the existence of sexual virtues at all in a few places. So while she argues that modesty and chastity are good things, she actually argues that these aren't virtues we should aim at directly. They indirectly arise from aiming at other virtues. Once you lose the need for vanity, you will become more modest. So as you cultivate your intellect, modesty and chastity follow. So here she says, there are no sexual virtues. And I think her argument for this is really interesting and actually perhaps still pertinent today. Virtue is cultivated using reason. And it is degraded, says Moist and Craft, through your own choice. That is, if you lose virtue, it has to be through an act you willfully did. If you are seen as immoral, it's because I blame you for something, which means that I say you had the choice to do otherwise. So we hold people responsible because they are responsible. So far so good. So there's a relationship between having the freedom of choice and whether or not you are viewed immoral. If you had no choice, you can't be viewed as less virtuous. So she says, one's virginity cannot be a virtue because it can be lost against one's will and without one's consent. For miserable beyond all names of misery is the condition of a being who can be degraded without its own consent. Losing your virginity according to Willston Craft, whether through rape or through manipulation, she talks about both, cannot be something that costs you your virtue for a few reasons. One being, it was not your consent, it was not your choice. And the second being that any other time when you lose virtue, there are ways in which to redeem yourself to regain your virtue. But when you have lost your virginity outside of wedlock, either through rape or through some kind of manipulation or coercion, there's nothing that a woman can do to repair that in this time period. She's become a fallen woman and her only course of action is basically to become a prostitute to support herself. Families will cast her out, no one will care for her, no one will marry her. So, Willston Craft says this can't be a sexual virtue or this can't be a virtue because virtues are something that you can cultivate, you can work towards. And if you become less virtuous, you can still become more virtuous, it's a back and forth. And it has to be your choice and your will. Okay? This one, as you can imagine, was not that popular in her time period. So that's the project. I wanna take the last five minutes and talk to you about how this was received. So reactions to the text. In general, many of the reactions to the text were actually surprisingly favorable, although many of the favorable reactions came from other women authors who are arguing much along the same lines. But I wanna talk about some of the unfavorable reactions. And I want you to remember that especially after Willston Craft's death, so five years after this text was published when she died, the reactions became even worse. Because people's read William Godwin's memoirs. So here's an anonymous review from 1792 following the publication of this text. Anonymous, I don't know who said it. We are infinitely better pleased with the present system and in truth, dear young lady. For that appellation seems sometimes prefects to your name that is the appellation of miss, we must suppose you to be young. So the idea is obviously, Willston Craft is a young woman because she is unmarried. We are infinitely better pleased with the present system and in truth, dear young lady, we must suppose you to be young, we suggest you endeavor to attain the weak elegance of mind, the sweet facility of manners, the exquisite sensibility, the former ornaments of your sex. We are certain you will be more pleasing and we dare pronounce you will be infinitely happier. Mental superiority is not an object worth contending if happiness be the aim. So what is this reviewer saying? Yeah. Yeah, she should be stupid and docile, why? Yeah, she'll be happier. Also, she'll be more pleasing. You'll be more pleasing to us and you'll be more pleased. So don't mark the vote, the present system is fine, basically. Here's another one. This is from Benjamin Silliman, an American who became, this is all I could find out about him, though I'm sure there's more to find out, the future professor at Yale University. So writing about this in a serial publication that appeared in the New York commercial advisor. This female philosopher indignantly rejects the idea of a sex in the soul because she says that men and women are equal before God. Pronouncing the sensibility, timidity, and tenderness of women to be merely artificial refinements of character introduced and fostered by men to render sensual pleasure more voluptuous. So basically she takes all the things that are of value in women and says they're artificial. She indeed professes a high regard for chastity but unfortunately the practice of her life was at war with her precepts. So this is 1801 after the publication of Godwin's memoirs. She admitted one sentimental lover after another to the full fruition of her charms and proved the attainment of reason to be in her view sources of pleasure far inferior in value to the pleasure of the senses. So she didn't practice what she preached. She couldn't live up. In short, polluted as she was by the last crime of woman, Mary, and it is in the capitals like that, stepped forth as the champion and reformer of her sex. She wished to strip them of everything feminine and to assimilate them as fast as possible to the masculine character. I want you to remember this, especially as you read Beauvoir for next week. Basically he's saying that everything that she's doing is turning women into men. They're losing everything that's good about them and they're becoming like men. And also her reputation means we shouldn't listen to her. Here's one that I was really hoping we should get time for because this one is hilarious. Thomas Taylor, a philosopher, so I should like him, specializing in Plato, wrote a vindication of the rights of Brutes in 1792. We may therefore reasonably hope that this amazing rage for liberty to will continually increase, that mankind will shortly abolish all government as an intolerable yoke and that this will universally join in vindicating the rights of Brutes as in asserting the prerogatives of man. What is he saying? Yeah, basically we reasonably hope this amazing rage to liberty will continue now that we've extended rights to women, let's keep going and extend it to animals. This was meant as a satire of Wollstonecraft's work. As if Brutes have rights. Oh, oh, maybe they do. So, Thomas Taylor wrote this as a satire. Like, isn't it ridiculous to extend rights to women? What will happen next? We'll have to extend rights to animals. Oh, I guess we do. Okay, well maybe he looks kinda stupid now. Last, I wanna talk about a favorable one. Just, this is it, I promise. Mary Hayes, 1793. She was a woman of letters in England, so she wrote. And she was a friend to Mary Wollstonecraft's. She wrote this after Godwin's memoirs came out. But the vindicator of female rights is thought by some Sagesus married men to be incompetent to form any just opinion of the cares and duties of a conjugal state from never having entered the matrimonial lists. That is a lot of people didn't actually know that she got married, because it was in secret. To be sure, those who are eagerly engaged in play with all their self-interest up in arms are much better judges of the game than the cool and partial lookers on. And a West Indies planter must understand the justice of the slave trade for a better than an English House of Commons. So she's parodying this. Okay, so you think Wollstonecraft can't know what the duties of a wife are because she's not married? Yeah, just like I can't know that slave trade is wrong because I don't own slaves. What? What nonsense this? Does it need serious refutation? From such notions, most devoutly, I repeat a part of the liturgy, good Lord deliver us. So I wanna remind you of what the main point is to stop women manipulating men and give them rights over themselves. In other words, hey 18th century men, stop putting women here on this pedestal. It gives them power over you, not over themselves. And that's not good for anyone because no one can be virtuous without freedom and I should add equality. That's it, thank you, I'll see you next week.