Mary Wollstonecraft, from Paris to Scandinavia

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, the Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), inspired by the French Revolution, called for a revolution in “female manners.” Middle-class women have become “the toy of man, his rattle,” but she wants them to become independent, rational, and moral creatures (45). This revolution is to be peaceful, propelled by education and resulting in a better society for men and women alike.

Wollstonecraft positions herself as a future-oriented thinker: “Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally; a crowd of authors that all is now right; and I, that all will be right” (23). By the time she writes Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in 1796, Wollstonecraft’s “all will be right” optimism had been diminished by her personal trials and the backlash against the French Revolution in England and France. Her outlook on what should happen has not changed, but experience has taught her that the “revolution in female manners” that her Vindication called for may take far more time than she had anticipated. Maybe real change can happen only gradually. That means that her daughter might not, as Wollstonecraft had hoped, grow up in a society where women are treated as rational and moral equals to men.

During the travels she describes in A Short Residence, Wollstonecraft reflects on the Scandinavian people she encounters and their customs, and the contrast with her experience in Paris a few years earlier while reporting on the Revolution. By the time she set out for Scandinavia, Wollstonecraft’s initial enthusiasm for the Revolution, reflected in both her famous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and her earlier Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), had been all but extinguished by the horrors she witnessed during the Reign of Terror. Surrounded by “unmarked simplicity” of the Swedish and Norwegian people (1796, 61), her time in Scandinavia made her realize that she even misses some of the manners traditionally associated with the ancien régime. In the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she derided the polished, superficial manners of middle-class women and courtiers alike, but in Scandinavia she finds rather too little polish and refinement. Wollstonecraft remains convinced that the situation of women must change for society to flourish, but she comes to recognize that manners may be more important than she had previously argued and that progress needs to happen gradually and naturally.

Localized Ladies and the French “Nation of Women”

In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft argues that middle-class women are “localized,” hemmed in by manners and customs that prevent them from developing their moral and rational abilities (75). They have been taught from a young age that their looks and superficial graces are all that matters and that this is what their virtue consists in. These women—Wollstonecraft mockingly calls them “ladies”—are like caged birds proud of their plumage, too preoccupied with the praise they receive to realize that they are locked up (72). She argues that women should become morally, intellectually, and economically independent so that they may be afforded the same respect as men and become useful members of society:

Middle-class ladies no longer distinguish between true moral virtue and the manners they are taught by the conduct literature of the time (e.g., Darwin 1798; Fordyce 1767; Gregory 1796; Richardson 1741; Wilkes 1766). These conduct books were the self-help literature of the eighteenth century, teaching young women how to behave in order to enhance their marital prospects. Wollstonecraft takes issue with both the authors of these books and the women who model their behavior on them. A woman’s life should, just like a man’s, not be reduced to her outward appearance but be dedicated to developing intellectual and moral virtue. Wollstonecraft believes that the revolution she calls for can be brought about through a simple yet radical change in the way boys and girls, young men and women are raised: they should be educated together, receiving the same moral and rational instruction.

In their vanity and preoccupation with keeping up appearances, the ladies that Wollstonecraft derides resemble “the rich of both sexes” (76). We are generally ready to praise and flatter both ladies and the rich without giving much thought to their character. We do not expect great virtue from either group and generally hold them to a different standard than we do those of middling and lower stations. The analogy that Wollstonecraft establishes between women and the rich in the Vindication lays the groundwork for the observation in her later work on the French Revolution, in which she suggests that the Revolution fell short of what it was meant to accomplish because the French are too much like the ladies Wollstonecraft held in such low esteem: “The French may be considered a nation of women… [S]o passive appears to be their imagination, it requires to be roused by novelty; and then, more lively than strong, the evanescent emotions scarcely leave any traces behind them” (1795, 89). Like the frivolous women she condemns in her Vindication, the French are too dependent on fleeting emotions to act decisively and follow through. They are, in short, “not properly qualified for the revolution” (1795, 172). This suggests that revolution is not itself problematic but that not everyone can be trusted to carry it out successfully. Under Louis XIV, “politeness took place of humanity” (14). Manners took the place of virtue: “all the vices and graces of false refinement; forming the taste by destroying the heart” (16). In the Vindication, Wollstonecraft had already drawn the comparison between the Sun King and the morally stunted ladies in England who cared only about flattery and of whom nothing virtuous was ever expected (73). These ladies certainly never could carry out a Revolution, and so, following this logic, neither could the French—“a nation of women” (1795, 89).

Bastilled by Nature

But Wollstonecraft modifies her judgment of the French after traveling to Scandinavia where she experiences what she comes to view as the drawbacks of simpler cultures. The excessive refinement of the French does not seem so bad in comparison to the lack of polish and refinement in the Scandinavian countries. The Swedes are proud of their politeness, but it does not compare favorably to French polish: “far from being the polish of a cultivated mind, it consists merely of tiresome forms and ceremonies” (1796, 15). The Swedes are nothing like “the well-bred French,” who make you feel “instantly at your ease” (1796, 15). What is more, the Swedes’ lack of good breeding is not compensated by a “just conception of rational equality.” The men act like tyrants towards both their servants and the women (17). The women lack both refinement and common sense: “A mistaken tenderness… for their children, makes them, even in summer, load them with flannels” (22). Wollstonecraft even suggests that the practice explains why she saw so few children on her travels and why the ones she did see did not look healthy: “Why did I not see more children in the villages I passed through? Indeed the children appear to be nipt in the bud, having neither the graces nor charms of their age” (22). She meets a few young beauties, but overall Swedish ladies are too stout because of the unrefined, rich food and the lack of exercise (23; 53). Their minds are uncultivated, which is why it is perhaps a blessing that Wollstonecraft cannot understand what they are saying. The beds they offer Wollstonecraft to sleep in are “like graves” (26). All in all, it is clear that the customs and manners condemned in the Vindication are lacking in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The women are not like the vain caged birds described in the Vindication. But they too are “localized,” unable to fully develop their moral and intellectual abilities. They are closed off from education and the rest of the world, closed off by both custom and nature (75). They are, to use Wollstonecraft’s word, “bastilled”—locked in place with no way out.

While in Paris reporting on the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft naturally was aware of the Bastille and all it symbolized. The Bastille continued to loom large in Wollstonecraft’s thought after she left France, cropping up in A Short Residence, and her unfinished novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1798). “Talk not of bastilles!,” she writes about a remote Norwegian village, “To be born here was to be bastilled by nature—shut out from all that opens the understanding, or enlarges the heart” (1796, 69). Wollstonecraft spends considerable time reflecting on the baleful influence of commerce on the moral character of the individual, but she also repeatedly observes that some degree of “refinement,” the consequence of commerce, would benefit the more “primitive” places she visits in Scandinavia: “nothing so soon wearies out the feelings as unmarked simplicity” (61). She even admits that she may have been too hard on the French in An Historical and Moral View on the French Revolution (1795): “I believe I should have been less severe in the remarks I have made on the vanity and depravity of the French, had I travelled towards the north before I visited France” (108). Much as Wollstonecraft despised the excesses of the ancien régime, the total absence of polish and manners can make a society as unlivable as France under Louis XVI. The barrenness and desolation of the Scandinavian landscape even leads Wollstonecraft to speculate that Eden was not located in a southern climate as was commonly assumed, but somewhere up north, “to tempt [man] to run after the sun, in order that the different parts of the earth might be peopled” (1796, 30). Eager to escape so desolate a place, “Hordes of barbarians always poured out of these regions to seek for milder climes, when nothing like cultivation attached them to the soil” (1796, 30).

Change Is a Gradually Ripening Fruit

The remote villages of Norway and Sweden do not represent some kind of primitive golden age of the kind sketched by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but rather a kind of prison. Wollstonecraft’s stance is therefore more moderate than Rousseau’s, who wrote in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782): 

Wollstonecraft shares Rousseau’s desire to escape from oppressive society, but rambling through the remote parts of Sweden and Norway she comes to the conclusion that a middle ground is necessary to develop one’s intellect, one’s morals, and one’s taste. In the case of the Scandinavian women, stubbornly wrapping their children in suffocating flannels, outside help is needed to pull them out of their state of ignorance: “The changing of customs of a long standing requires more energy than they yet possess” (1796, 55). The women merely respond to Wollstonecraft’s reasoning by saying that “they must do as other people did.” What they need is “[a] person of sense, with a large fortune, to insure respect,” who might induce them “to treat their children, and manage their sick properly, and eat food dressed in a simpler manner: the example, for instance, of a count’s lady” (55). Change in Sweden will not come from the people themselves in the form of revolution but should be induced gradually with help from the monied aristocracy.

In the appendix to A Short Residence, Wollstonecraft reflects further on the Scandinavian societies she has seen on her travels. Though she witnessed inklings of change, hinting at bigger developments to come, she does not think a revolution along the lines of the events in France is the right way forward. She writes: “An ardent affection for the human race makes enthusiastic characters eager to produce alteration in laws and governments prematurely” (132). The words “ardent” and “enthusiastic” are adjectives that describe Wollstonecraft’s own tone and intentions in her Vindications, both written before her travels to France and Scandinavia. To ensure that the alterations in laws and governments are “useful and permanent,” “they must be the growth of each particular soil, and the gradual fruit of the ripening understanding of the nation, matured by time, not forced by an unnatural fermentation” (132). These moderate observations are foreshadowed in An Historical and Moral View. Maybe it was not just the character of the French that prevented the Revolution from being the success that Wollstonecraft and others had hoped for: “A change of character cannot be so sudden,” she remarks. True change takes time and cannot be forced: 

Conclusion

In 1794 Wollstonecraft writes to her sister Everina about her time in France: 

In a letter written about two years prior in December 1792 to her friend and publisher Joseph Johnson, Wollstonecraft describes seeing Louis XVI on his way to the guillotine: “I can scarcely tell you why, but an association of ideas made the tears flow insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach going to meet his death, where so many of his race have triumphed” (Wollstonecraft and Todd 2003, 216).

Her experiences in France remain with her as she travels through Scandinavia and initially keep her from fully enjoying the natural beauty of the landscape: “the horrors I had witnessed in France… cast a gloom over all nature” (1796, 10). The sublimity of the natural phenomena she witnesses eventually help her transcend this “gloom,” if only for a while. The wilderness is liberating but also confronts her with the insight that she actually enjoyed at least some of the refinement she encountered in Paris: “My thoughts fly from this wilderness to the polished circles of the world” (1796, 61). Manners should not be the focal point of one’s existence, as it is for the ladies described in her Vindication, but the absence of manners forestalls moral development: “improving manners will introduce finer moral feelings” (1796, 71). She even meets a man who has emigrated from France, a former courtier, who surprises her with his pleasant manners and very welcome refinement (1796, 81).

“Taste and cultivation of mind,” manners and virtue, go hand in hand (1796, 98). This balance cannot be forced by revolution but must come about gradually—and in this gradual process, there is a place for both philosophical, politically engaged women like herself and “a count’s lady” to influence and educate people of “unmarked simplicity” (1796, 55, 61).

Wollstonecraft did not live long enough to see how the gradual changes in society would affect her daughters. Fanny, the infant who accompanied Wollstonecraft to Scandinavia, was only three years old when her mother died a few days after giving birth to her second daughter in 1797. Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft, now better known as Mary Shelley, studied her mother’s work and defended her legacy. She would go on to become even more famous than her mother as the author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

Roos Slegers is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Her research lies at the intersection of philosophy, literature, and pop culture. She explores how developments from the late 18th century continue to influence the 21st century, with a focus on themes such as vanity, shame, and gender politics.

This essay is part of the AdamSmithWorks series Just Sentiments curated by Daniel B. Klein and Erik Matson. New essays will be published on the fourth Wednesday of most months. You can read more about the series in this Speaking of Smith post, "Just Sentiments- Welcome!". Klein and Matson lead the Adam Smith Program in the Department of Economics at George Mason University, in association with the Mercatus Center. In the program, they study big ideas in jurisprudence, politics, ethics, and economics as they were pursued during the original arc of liberalism, especially in the 18th century in Britain.


References 

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Gregory, John. 2008 [1796]. A father's legacy to his daughters. By Dr. Gregory. Facsimile edition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Text Creation Partnership.

Richardson, Samuel. 1981 [1741]. Familiar Letters on Important Occasions. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques and Goulbourne, Russell. 2011. Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilkes, Wetenhall. 1766. A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady. Facsimile edition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Text Creation Partnership.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1999 [1790]. A Vindication of the Rights of Men. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; an Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——. 2004 [1792]. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. New York: Penguin Books.

——. 1795. An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect it Has Produced in Europe. London: J. Johnson. The Online Library of Liberty.

——. 2009 [1796]. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——. 1975 [1798]. Maria: Or, the Wrongs of Woman. New York: Norton.

Wollstonecraft, Mary and Todd, Janet. 2003. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, New York: Columbia University Press.