We’ve written about the slings and arrows of outrageous ragebait before, as well as what the patriarchy actually is. We explored how Angela Davis wrote about some of the gaps in feminism, when it comes to class and race. Today, we’re going to bring some of this together as we talk about a woman many would call the mother of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797).

The Mother of the Mother of Frankenstein

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in England in the 18th century, just prior to the French and American revolutions. An author and intellectual, Wollstonecraft penned a variety of works, but is best known for two things. The first of these is the fact that she gave birth to a girl the world would later know as Mary Shelley, the original goth girl and author of the game (and genre) changing novel, Frankenstein. While Wollstonecraft would give birth to the lauded author, she also gave birth to a pioneering feminist treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Wollstonecraft succumbed to complications from the birth of a daughter who would haunt her grave for years after, leaving behind a body of work curtailed by the toils of labor. While the world would revere her daughter for the next few centuries, Wollstonecraft’s work would sink into the margins for a while.

Vindicating Women: A Philosophical Treatise

It’s the turn of a new century. There is a heck of a lot of talk about freedom, equality, about brotherhood. You have people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau setting down the foundation for revolutions against aristocratic tyranny. Freedom, though often bought in blood, hangs in the air like a fresh floral scent in spring. All men are created equal.

Men, yes, sure (though, as we’ve said, even this is conditional). In the meantime, however, you have the spouses and mistresses of these free men acting as ornamentation, laboring in the bedroom and plying their trade of being pleasant. The women of the upper classes are trained to be porcelain companions to these free men.

Enter Mary Wollstonecraft, relentless in her pursuit of equality among the sexes. It is important to understand that the term “gender,” as we use it today, was not used in the same way when Wollstonecraft put her pen to the paper. The term “sex” would have been used to refer both to biological aspects of male/female and to the roles that men and women take. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Wollstonecraft, a woman with a life that sounds more like a novel than IRL, was born to a family in dire financial straits. She lived as a governess, an educator, and traveled Europe, including France during the bloodiest days of its revolution. Not one for convention, she embarked on several love affairs that did not include marriage.

With education and a disinclination to submit to common hierarchies in her background, it is no wonder that Wollstonecraft pens a fiery yet highly rational work on why women should partake in these very equal rights that men in Europe have been proclaiming lately.

The Art of Playing Roles

If you think clapback videos go viral fast, imagine writing a book-length manuscript that contradicts the oh-so-common stereotypes embraced in Georgian England. In Vindication, Shelley has already read such philosophers as David Hume, Adam Smith, and the conservative Edmund Burke. She knows their arguments, knows their tactics, and the stereotypes on which they play. Men such as these, she entertains, complain of women being unequal to any intellectual pursuits, and certainly not intellectual equals to men.

Women are expected to be decorative, especially in the upper classes. They are made for pleasure, and by pleasure, she means to please. 

The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1767. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Consider, if you will, even many of the female “intellectuals” in the 18th centuries are often involved in sex work. Madame de Pompadour, noted literary patron and mistress of Louis XV, the father of the king who would soon lose his head. A demimonde of courtesans who secured their livings from being cleverer than the wives of their keepers, just as much as being sexy.

Even these women who are able to subvert the traditional roles of women as wives and helpmate must subject themselves to a different kind of preening, in taking on the role of sexual plaything.

In assuming these guises, women trade their freedom and equality for a precarious amount of safety. Sometimes this is because they do not understand any differently, given generations of doing this same performance in their family and their friends’ families, etc. Sometimes, they recognize, but are unable to take steps to procure a freedom that is not easily won.

The Bluestocking and the Georgian Manosphere

In truth, though, when men accuse such women of being vain, rococo Marilyn Monroe types, they are merely spouting a role that they and the society they control perpetuates. The condescension in daily interaction with which men treat women comes from myths that women should only be companions to women, adjacent to them, but not sharing in their full humanity.

We see similar far later in Simone de Beauvoir and others in 20th century feminism who, again and again, assert that women cannot be and are not simplified to the role of mother or the role of wife. The physicality of women, their sentimentality, is juxtaposed during the 18th century, with the rationality of men, with their natural intellectual superiority. To desire an equal education or any modicum of equality with these intellectual powerhouses in heels would be tantamount to proposing a revolution.

A member of the Blue Stockings Society at one point, Wollstonecraft advocated for the formal education of women to bridge the gap in equality. Sound familiar? In 1700s England, she advocated for education, just like Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz did in 1600s Mexico, and Malala Yousafzai in 2000s Afghanistan. Like the other two, she came to the conclusion that an educated woman is an empowered woman. The term “bluestocking” would come to mean an educated woman, later often in a mocking way.

The sneers were real, certainly. While these manly, bewigged men laughed at Wollstonecraft and others for wanting to assert their rights, they understood that, to keep their place on the top of the hierarchy, it was necessary to keep women away from education, landowning, and other markers of the autonomy that men of the time celebrated.

The Manosphere and the Dulling of the Modern Mind

Wollstonecraft didn’t make it to 40. Her husband, saddened at her death and potentially ready for some delicious publicity for himself, wrote a memoir of her life, talking quite openly about her suicide attempts, love affairs, and other not-so-conventional aspects of her life. Many would-be feminists cringed hard and noped out of that.

Today, we celebrate Wollstonecraft for her bravery to pen such a tract, for the building blocks she’s given 20th century feminism, and for her gift of a daughter who would write a very creepy yet philosophical book.

The concept of the manosphere has gotten far more press than it deserves. It’s a bunch of guys with very weird gender issues coming up with ideas that are stranger and stranger. Just so you know, you really should wipe your butt. It is important. You do not want hemorrhoids.

What is concerning to the author here is the way we collect the shortform content, whether in its original form or in the clapback videos as responses, we are not by any means offered any means to understand any of this in its larger context. 

Us older people can laugh and roll our eyes at the antics of men who talk about women as though they are sheep for breeding or for shearing, and we can get angry at the outright hatred that these men clearly have for women, to the point of violence. We can try to temper our own frustrations at being brought this content by whatever algorithm, and maybe even hopping into a comment section (good luck). 

But unfortunately, we have a whole new generation of future adult humans who have been brought up on short form video content. I’ve even watched a former work colleague a generation younger than me scroll through video after video while we were engaged in conversation. I worry for my sister’s tween godson who was addicted to his smartphone before 10.

The truth of things is, short form video content has become an education of its own, whether for better or worse. While adults may laugh at the absurdity of judging the female body this way, or perpetuating stereotypes about women, such as the pornographic “goth girl” videos making the rounds right now, as children, the critical thinking and the judgment is not there. The stops we have as adults do not exist.

Could these manfluencers (is that a word?) create a generation of openly misogynistic men, outside of the once niche incel community? I really hope not, but I, for one, am tired of consuming junk food in the form of short form videos, and was glad to crack open my copy of the Vindication for this article.

Education is valuable. Never forget those who spent their lives fighting and clawing for something we take for granted, but something that appears to be slowly, slowly slipping.