Mary Wollstonecraft's Enduring Views on Education

Mary Wollstonecraft, often hailed as the first feminist, passionately advocated for women's rights in 18th-century England. Her work as an author, novelist, philosopher, and feminist activist challenged the social order, particularly concerning women's education and roles in society. A keen and vital concern with education, especially the education of girls and women, runs throughout Mary Wollstonecraft's writing and remains a dominant theme to the abrupt end of her career.

Early Life and Influences

Born on April 27, 1759, in Spitalfields, London, to John Edward Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Dixon, Mary experienced early hardships. Her father's financial instability led to frequent family relocations, and she often defended her mother from his abusive behavior. This fostered her independence and adaptability, crucial traits that shaped her later work.

One of the most formative experiences for Wollstonecraft’s subsequent work and activism was her close female friendships. Away from the biting masculinity at home, Wollstonecraft sought comfort in her close friends, explicitly citing Francis “Fanny” Blood as her closest friend. Her relationship with Blood and the devastating aftermath of her death inspired Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary: A Fiction.

Wollstonecraft's formal education was minimal, primarily consisting of reading and writing skills. However, she was largely self-taught, driven by an insatiable curiosity and a desire for knowledge.

Developing Educational Philosophy

After leaving home, developing a school in Newington Green in 1784 and leaving it due to financial struggles, Wollstonecraft relocated to Ireland to work as a governess in 1785. In this position, Wollstonecraft refined her approach to women’s education. Though she only spent a year with the children of the Kingsborough family, Wollstonecraft was able to understand further the problems with 18th-century education, which inspired her to write a children’s book, Original Stories from Real Life.

Soon after, Wollstonecraft moved to London to pursue an author career, a bold move for a woman at the time. While working in a liberal publishing house, she learned German and French. She familiarised herself with philosophical and politically activist writing, leading her to review books for The Analytical Review.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: A Cornerstone of Feminist Thought

In 1791, Wollstonecraft expanded on the themes from that work with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In this powerful treatise, which was published the following year, she argued, with both passion and wit, that the education women received was designed to make them merely glittering ornaments in the lives of men-an undignified way to spend one’s life and not conducive to developing critical thinking skills. According to Wollstonecraft, this inadequate education impeded women’s intellectual development, trapped them in limited societal roles, and led to them living constrained, unhappy lives.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a sprawling undertaking that examines the treatment of women through a philosophical lens, considering the notion of a woman from a scientific and theoretical perspective. Wollstonecraft addressed the ‘scientific’ beliefs of a woman’s fragile constitution. Unlike popular belief, the essay was well received upon its publication; it was, after all, a well-written, original piece of political-philosophical thought from a well-respected source. Immediately upon publication, it was sent to the United States and translated into French.

Challenging Societal Norms

Wollstonecraft challenged the prevailing societal norms that confined women to the roles of wives and mothers, arguing that such limited education reduced them to "gentle domestic brutes." She believed that women were capable of intellectual and moral development equal to that of men, but were held back by a system that prioritized beauty and subservience over reason and virtue.

The Importance of Reason and Virtue

As an Enlightenment thinker, Wollstonecraft had faith in reason, individualism, self-determination, and the natural rights doctrine, and she thought that women and men were the same intellectually and spiritually. She was angered by how women were educated to believe that the most important thing they could be was beautiful and that the most important thing they could do was marry and serve their husbands. Men, on the other hand, were educated to think and create in their chosen professions, with marriage and family being lesser considerations. She called marriage a “legal prostitution,” since it was only by marriage that women could acquire a secure economic future for themselves and their children, as their inadequate education prepared them for nothing other than being wives.

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With rights come duties, Wollstonecraft argued, but if women’s natural rights were not respected, society could not expect them to fulfill duties in a way that was complementary to living a virtuous life. Instead of education bent on bestowing “charm” and “refinement,” girls should receive an education in critical thinking and reason. According to Wollstonecraft, this would allow them to think rationally, to develop their own interests, and to be less easily fooled into being the playthings of men. It would also enable girls to look after their souls, because with reason they would be able to tell right from wrong instead of having to depend on others to make those determinations.

In the late eighteenth-century treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft agrees with some of her contemporaries that women do not seem to attain the same level of virtue as their male counterparts. However, she determines that this deficit is not due to some inherent weakness in women, but rather to the inadequate system of education that most middle-class English girls are subjected to. Wollstonecraft argues that women are typically only taught to attract husbands, with the result that their mental and moral faculties are never fully developed-an injustice that will only be rectified if girls are educated according to the same system and toward the same goals as boys.

Wollstonecraft demonstrates that insofar as women are educated at all, they are mostly taught to value maintaining beauty and securing a man’s love above all else. These superficial goals have harmful consequences for women’s minds; they are not trained to provide for themselves or to be resourceful. Wollstonecraft writes: “The conduct and manners of women, in fact, 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.” This “barren blooming” can be attributed, in part, to “a false system of education,” due to which “the civilized women of the present century … are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.” In other words, women are taught to care only about finding husbands, so it’s no surprise that they don’t earn any other kind of respect.

Advocating for Systemic Change

Wollstonecraft advocated for an improved educational curriculum and for the government to establish a national educational system that girls and boys would attend together. A proper education would treat women as fully human-the equals of men-and would equip them to be better wives, mothers, and citizens, Wollstonecraft asserted. Women’s sense of self-worth would come from learning and the application of reason, not from their appearance. When women had agency, and were therefore happier, society would improve.

Wollstonecraft appealed for the equal treatment of women in other areas besides education. She supported suffrage for women, writing “…for I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.” She also advocated for women to be allowed to train for and enter numerous professions, including medicine, nursing, and business. Men, and society at large, would benefit from the full inclusion of women in the public sphere, she maintained. Not only would society have the benefits of women’s contributions, but, since they would now be able to support themselves, women would be able to marry out of true affection rather than for economic interest. Marriage, she said, should be based neither on finances nor on appearances but on friendship.

Key Arguments in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The Detrimental Effects of Superficial Education

Because girls tend to “learn … by snatches,” and learning is secondary to external beauty in their upbringings, “they do not pursue any one branch with that persevering ardor necessary to give vigor to the faculties, and clearness to the judgment.” That is, girls’ education is never sufficiently deep to allow for mastery of subjects, or even the maturation of natural intellectual abilities. Because of this inadequate education, women tend to stagnate, both intellectually and morally, early in life.

Wollstonecraft argues that when marriage is the only option available to women for elevating themselves in the world, and they’ve only prepared themselves for securing a suitable marriage, it shouldn’t be surprising that they act like children after marriage. And how, she wonders, can such an immature woman “be expected to govern a family with judgment?” Youth is a brief part of a woman’s life, and once it has passed, many women discover that no “provision [has been] made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes place of sensation.” At best, then, married women’s lives become occupied with frivolous trifles, and at worst, some become mistresses, having only been taught the art of pleasing men.

Education as a Path to Perfection

The solution to this infantilizing and morally debilitating state of affairs, according to Wollstonecraft, is to develop higher aims for women’s education. Women should be educated in such a way that they’re able to develop enduring virtues and make their own judgments. Wollstonecraft claims that there is a common error of viewing education for both sexes as “only a preparation for life” and not as “the first step to form a being advancing gradually towards perfection.” In other words, education shouldn’t just be concerned with one’s employment or station in life, but with training one’s soul with an eye toward eternity.

Furthermore, Wollstonecraft argues that a large part of training in virtue is having opportunities to struggle with adversity oneself. When girls are insulated from such challenges (and instead encouraged to make pleasure the primary occupation and goal of life), they never develop these capacities. Thus, little can be expected of them in later life. Unless virtue is conditioned on sex-a notion Wollstonecraft dismisses as ridiculous-then girls should be educated according to the same foundational principles as boys. The “grand end” of women’s fulfillment of moral duties should be “to unfold their own faculties and acquire the dignity of conscious virtue,” just as it is for men.

The Importance of Equal Education

Wollstonecraft observes that women are often mocked for their limited capacities and poor choices, but that these sorry circumstances are often the results of inadequate early training. “Rendered gay and giddy by the whole tenor of their lives, the very aspect of wisdom, or the severe graces of virtue” hold little natural appeal for women who’ve been brought up this way. Wollstonecraft adds: “[T]ill women are led to exercise their understandings, they should not be satirized for their attachment to rakes [womanizing men]…when it appears to be the inevitable consequence of their education.” This claim leads into the Vindication’s next major theme, which directly concerns relations between men and women.

Eradicating Sexual Virtues

I wish to sum up what I have said in a few words, for I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty. For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same; yet the fanciful female character, so prettily drawn by poets and novelists, demanding the sacrifice of truth and sincerity, virtue becomes a relative idea, having no other foundation than utility, and of that utility men pretend arbitrarily to judge, shaping it to their own convenience.

Other Works and Perspectives on Education

The title of her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, speaks for itself; her single most important work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, begins as a plea for the equal education of women and includes an ambitious and farsighted proposal for a national schools system. Both of her novels, Mary and the unfinished Maria, centrally address the self-education of their heroines while seeking to fill a pedagogical role in relation to their female readers. More directly, Wollstonecraft produced a book for children (Original Stories) in the innovative, progressive mode of the day, edited an innovative reader specifically designed for the use of girls, and frequently commented on children's books and educational treatises for the Analytical Review.

Among the projects left unfinished at her death were a treatise on the “Management of Infants,” barely begun, and a primer, provisionally entitled “Lessons,” that, if completed, might have changed the early history of the British children's book. Education was critically important to Wollstonecraft both as a liberal reformer and as a radical theorist and proponent of women’s rights.

An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution

First published in London in 1794, Wollstonecraft’s second most renowned work is An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. In An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft stated that the aristocracy reduces a woman’s value to her childbearing abilities and corrupts them by forcing them to value their outward appearance more than their education, character, or morality.

Wollstonecraft's Legacy and Influence

The publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was met with largely favourable reviews, and it became a bestseller. In later years, however, the work drew condemnation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the radical changes that Wollstonecraft proposed would be a long time coming. However, her work had significant influence on the women’s rights movements in Great Britain and the United States. American women’s rights advocates-notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Fuller-were especially inspired by A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Relevance in Contemporary Education

In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft makes an argument for an equal education of both women and men. Often celebrated as the first feminist, Wollstonecraft defines the link between a woman’s strength and overall maturity to the education they receive. More specifically, Wollstonecraft points out that reason is largely connected to the ability of using knowledge in applicable situations. Her cry out for a “revolution in female manners” was followed by a revolution on education, one that’s impact can be seen today. However, upon examination into the different schools, one finds that inconsistencies still remain prominent in today’s education system.

Wollstonecraft’s legacy in public education seems to be missing the vital component of her strategy. Today’s schools lack a consistently inclusive education that creates success stories. In order to analyze education in public school systems, the standards of success must also be looked at against the ideas of Wollstonecraft. Would her desires for equal education for women be fulfilled by the education in 2019? Maybe. Wollstonecraft did desire to have women and men placed in the same playing field. However, we still find ourselves lost in a public class system that often translates to the quality of education available. When education across the board receives the same standard, the tests reveal disparities that often hide the growth occurring in these schools.

Parallels with Modern Educational Debates

If “uneducated” replaces “women” in her writing, I find an eerily similar idea that our culture often constructs around the working class. In “Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay on Education,” Elizabeth Frazer analyzes the legacy that Wollstonecraft leaves through her analysis of social constructivism and call for equal education. Frazer summarizes that “[g]iven agreement that virtue can be taught, there is the questions whether this involves teaching knowledge of propositions and principles, or whether, rather, ethical education is more like teaching skill,” (Frazer 2011). In order to view how education produces virtue and skills in the students of today, it’s necessary to identify how public schools define success in an academic environment.

George W. Bush introduced the No Child Left Behind Act in 2011. Department of Education and the Public School Review, this act attempted to standardize the United States’ school systems, focusing education on what the tests deemed important. Wollstonecraft might have approved of this attempt at equalizing the availability of education quality by promoting a standard for all teachers to follow.

Contrary to the overall argument, several components of Wollstonecraft’s arguments appear in the logic of standardizing schools through consistent testing. In the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Frazer point. out, “Virtues are potentially realizable characteristics of the human condition in civilization. Virtuous conduct is predictable and stable,” (Frazer 2011). Following Frazer’s line of reasoning, standardizing education across the United States promotes the idea of a predictable and stable behavior. If Wollstonecraft was here today making education policy, she might change her ideas based on affluence and stereotypes. In the time she was writing in, the No Child Left Behind act might have survived the test of standardizing education because there would be nothing to compare it to.

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