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4. A Statue for Mary

3. Vindication of the Rights of Women

2. Her life

1. Context

Mary Wollstonecraft (1750-1797): the founder of feminism

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03 A sculpture to honor Mary Wollstonecraft?

Read about the sculpture and reactions to it

What about Maggie Hambling, the artist who made the sculpture, how do you imagine she responded to the criticism?

REACTIONS

HELP: LEVEL A2+

Everyman or Everywoman: a person or fictional character regarded as representing the human race or the common person. Likeness (noun): a ressemblance

OPTIONAL WORK (B1-B2)

How does Maggie Hambling respond to the critisism?

CEveryman or Everywoman: a person or fictional character regarded as representing the human race or the common person. Likeness (noun): a ressemblance

The accompanying plaque states clearly that the statue is for Wollstonecraft, not of her. It's not a conventional heroic or heronic likeness of her. It's a sculpture about now, in her spirit. Clothes define people. As she's Everywoman, I'm not defining her in any particular clothes

THE ARTIST'S REACTION TO THE CRITICISM (A2+)

Newington Green, London, since 2020

Statues of other political thinkers in London

Statue of Mary Wollstonecraft

Legislation, women's rights

Document 2. Selling a wife

Document 1. The scold's bridle

Mind-map

I.Surprising facts

1497 1882 1928 1970 1991

(from 6:12 to 7:20)

Watch and find out what these dates correspond to

LEGISLATION PROTECTING WOMEN'S RIGHTS

3. THE EXTRAORDINARY MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

Death

Ideas, publications

Private life / love life

Early professional life

Education

Background

PDF timeline

QUIZ

RESSOURCES AND STUDENT WORK

Timeline TANG G1

rankled

While

squandered

a drunk,

A woman's place Mary was born into prosperity but her father, a drun , squandered the family money. Like her mother, she often suffered abuse at his hands. Whil her older brother, Ned, received an extensive formal education, Mary spent just a few years in a day school. The disparity rankled. Why should she be denied the opportunities given to her brother just because she was a girl? She resolved, with characteristic determination, to educate herself.

01 Background and Education

1759

By the age of 25, Wollstonecraft had opened a small girls’ school with her two sisters and her friend Fanny Blood. It was a financial struggle. Yet Mary’s intellectual horizons expanded. She befriended Richard Price, a Presbyterian minister, fellow of the Royal Society and a committed advocate of political reform. Price counted Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin among his clique of radical friends. Wollstonecraft discovered a forum for debate among this group of enlightened thinkers, grasping the opportunity to shape her own ideas.

1784

The school closed after Mary’s friend Fanny died in childbirth. Wollstonecraft reluctantly took work as a governess. Her employers were the Irish aristocrats Lord and Lady Kingsborough in Cork. Mary soon came to despise her mistress. In Lady Kingsborough she saw everything she disliked in fashionable femininity, describing her as ‘frivolous’ with ‘neither sense nor feeling’. Restlessly ambitious, Wollstonecraft also yearned for the company of her intellectually curious friends back in London. After a year of quarrels and depression, she was fired.

02 Early professional life

1786

A ship had been stolen from him by a Norwegian ship captain and he wanted compensation. Mary was unsuccessful and returned to London to discover Imlay had betrayed her again. Distraught, she threw herself off Putney Bridge into the Thames only to be saved by the intervention of passing watermen. This episode led to her finest literary work – a travelogue of her Scandinavian journey told through an imaginary correspondence with Imlay

Wollstonecraft emerged from the depths of her despair and found personal happiness with an unlikely partner. William Godwin was a famous radical philosopher. Wollstonecraft first met him at a dinner held by her publisher, Joseph Johnson, in 1791. Godwin had attended excited to meet Thomas Paine. Instead, Mary and Godwin argued all evening and he left, irritated. In 1796, with typical disregard for convention, Wollstonecraft took the lead and renewed his acquaintance. They fell in love. Although Godwin was opposed to the principle of marriage, when Wollstonecraft fell pregnant they wed in March 1797.

1795

Like many prominent reformers, Mary left for Paris. She was embraced by the radicals shaping a new social order in France.The execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 swiftly dispelled her euphoria. In the terror that followed, more than 25,000 people were guillotined. Wollstonecraft despaired at the corruption of the revolution’s ideals. That same year, she met the American Gilbert Imlay. Defying moral convention, they became lovers and, in 1794, she gave birth to her first child, Fanny, out of wedlock. The relationship proved both short-lived and devastating for Mary.

1793, 1794

Wollstonecraft learned Imlay was having an affair, but she was desperate to save the relationship. Imlay persuaded her to go to Scandinavia.

03 Private life and love life

1797

A more equal society seemed within reach with the revolution unfolding across the channel in France. It was the change Mary's radical set longed for. I i

Wollstonecraft had written passionately in defence of the revolution's ideals. Now she went further and claimed equality for her sex. How could true liberty and equality be achieved if restricted to men alone? In her best-selling book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft took the principles of the revolution to their logical conclusion. Wollstonecraft outlined a vision of equality between the sexes. If women were afforded the same opportunities and education, she wrote, they could contribute as much to society as men. The book made Wollstonecraft’s name.

1790

Wollstonecraft returned to London (from Ireland) broke and miserable. But she soon found new purpose as an author.The radical publisher Joseph Johnson agreed to publish Wollstonecraft’s first book – the didactic Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Mary went on to become a regular contributor to Johnson’s new literary magazine, the Analytical Review. At Johnson’s weekly dinners Mary met and shared ideas with radical thinkers including Thomas Paine, Anna Barbauld and William Godwin. She thrived in this vibrant intellectual circle.

1787

In England the prominent politician Edmund Burke condemned the social upheaval in his conservative tract, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Mary was incensed by his writings. She quickly penned a furious defence of the revolution's egalitarian ideals: A Vindication of the Rights of Men. This was the first shot fired in a critical war of words, known as the Revolution Controversy, which would include the publication of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man a year later.

04 Ideas and writings

1792

her reputation was killed in the scandal following the revelation of her unconventional life and loves. Overnight she became toxic. The shockwaves were massive, and lasting. Wollstonecraft’s enemies couldn’t contain their glee: here was proof irrefutable that she was a whore, a “hyena in petticoats” as Horace Walpole described her.Scurrilous poems did the rounds, including an exceptionally unpleasant piece of work called The Un-sex’d Females. This was poetry functioning as an 18th-century Twitter: mocking Wollstonecraft as a “poor maniac” a “voluptuous” victim of “licentious love.” The author also wrote that “she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are liable.” In that oldest of misogynistic chestnuts: she was asking for it. She was a trouble-maker, and she died a woman’s death. Take note, ladies! Even Wollstonecraft’s friends and allies stepped back; silenced, shaking their heads. Wollstonecraft’s legacy was trashed for well over a century

Godwin, still grieving, wrote her first biography. And in doing so, he unwittingly brought about Wollstonecraft’s second death:

On 30 August, Wollstonecraft went into labour and after about 18 hours she gave birth to her second child, a daughter, also named Mary (who went on to write Frankenstein aged 21). But there were minor complications which the surgeon mishandled (Wollstonecraft wanted a midwife, who should have known what to do) and she suffered acute haemorrhaging. Infection followed. Eleven days later, Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38.

1797

05 Death

1798

1.Find information: watch and take notes.

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1 THE SCOLD'S BRIDLE

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Grammar

VOCABULARY

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Pre intermediate, A2

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1. Find information: 03'30-:06'16: could men really sell their wives in the 18th century?

selling a wife.

6. What is YOUR favourite part of the text? Choose your favourite lines from the extract.

5. See how The Wollstonecraft Society reacted to Mary's ideas being quoted on the hit Netflix series The Bridgerton Chronicles

5. Summarize. How would YOU explain Mary Wollstonecraft's ideas to someone who has never heard of her work? Use your own words.

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4 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

[...] In the government of the physical world it is observable that the female in point of strength is, in general, inferior to the male. This is the law of Nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman. A degree of physical superiority cannot, therefore, be denied, and it is a noble prerogative! But not content with this natural preeminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow-creatures [...] My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt. [...]Dismissing, then, those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence,[ ...,] I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a hurnan being, regardless of the distinction of sex. . . .

The conduct and manners of women, [...], evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity. One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers; and the understanding of the sex has been so hobbled by this specious homage, that the civilised women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect. . . .

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