The First Vindication

The standard case against educating women in 1792 was not that they should be kept ignorant out of malice. It was that they were observably frivolous, preoccupied with appearance, skilled at managing men by charm rather than by reason, and that this reflected what they were. The evidence was in plain sight. Any drawing room would supply it.

Mary Wollstonecraft's move is to accept every word of the observation and destroy the inference. Yes, she says, the women of my class are often exactly as you describe. That is what an education designed to produce ornaments reliably produces. Deny a creature the conditions under which reason develops, and then cite its unreason as proof that it possesses none, and you have built a machine that confirms whatever you put into it. Naming that machine is her real contribution, and it has outlasted every particular she was arguing about.

Her principal opponent is Rousseau, and the choice is what makes the attack so sharp. She admired him. Emile is a scheme of natural education devoted entirely to developing independent judgement in a boy, protecting him from flattery, letting him meet consequences, refusing to teach him to please. And then, for Sophie, Rousseau prescribes an education in charm, modesty and adaptation to another person's wants. Wollstonecraft simply holds the two halves of his own book next to each other, and a good deal of her case is made by the juxtaposition before she has argued anything.

The positive argument runs through virtue. Virtue cannot be produced by obedience, because obedience is somebody else's judgement borrowed; it requires the capacity to see for yourself why an act is right. That capacity is reason, and reason is developed by education. So a system that withholds education from half the species and then demands virtue of them is incoherent on its own terms; it is asking for the fruit while forbidding the root. This is an argument addressed to people who believed in virtue, using their own commitments, which is why it could not simply be waved away.

Her most quoted sentence is also her most misquoted: she does not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves. The distinction is not modesty, tactical or otherwise. Power over yourself is self-command, the capacity to act on your own judgement rather than by managing somebody else's, and it follows directly from her account of virtue. It is also, as it happens, much harder to caricature, though she was under no illusion that the caricature was coming anyway, and it came.

The account of marriage follows from the same premise. A wife kept charming rather than rational cannot be a moral equal, and a household run on flattery corrupts the flatterer and the flattered alike. It also collapses when beauty does, leaving two people who have never learned to talk to each other. What she wants instead is friendship: a partnership between two people who can each be held to account, which requires that both have been educated to reason. That was a radical proposal about marriage and a conservative one about everything else, which is characteristic.

Later readers find the book limited, and they are right. Its remedies are thoroughly middle-class (better schooling, companionate marriage, useful work) and the working women of the period are barely present. Its disdain for ornamental femininity is real, and sits awkwardly beside the claim that the ornament was manufactured. Both criticisms are fair. Both are inseparable from what it achieved: it was written for the people who would have to be persuaded, in terms they had already accepted, and that is why it could not be ignored.

The structure of the argument long outlived its occasion. Whenever a disparity produced under particular conditions is offered as evidence about capacity or inclination, the Wollstonecraft reply is available and has to be answered rather than repeated past. The point is not that such inferences are always wrong. It is that they are never free (the conditions have to be examined first) and two centuries of practice at making them cheaply is precisely what she was writing against.