Laura, thank you for getting us started. I'll chime in by way of offering a few passages that inspired me to wonder about this question in the first place.
Based on class discussion today, I think we see Wollstonecraft's principal claim as the following: women's education heightens moral agency (257). Equalizing rank and educating male and female students together will provide fewer opportunities for "rancorous striving" and lead to a culture of modesty rather than of sexual distinction (238).
How can we have one without the other (cultural modesty without sexual distinction)? Here is how she seems to argue for this:
--she appeals principally for the education of middle-class women (as opposed to gentleladies) (xxxiii)
--women need this right so as to help lift themselves and each other out of poverty, which is the real source of societal degradation (207)
--without coercion, sexes will naturally fall into their places (xxix)
--"the sympathies of our nature are strengthened by pondering cogitations, and deadened by thoughtless use" (248)
--private virtue can work towards a common center of public happiness (204)
--reason helps us to avoid tyranny, which undermines civility and morality (xxviii)
--who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him of the gift of reason? (xxviii)
--excluding one-half of the human race from all governmental participation is perplexing and illogical (xxvii)
--elegance is inferior to virtue (xxxiv)
--we say masculine women are unnatural, but where are we to actually find a woman who is too masculine? (xxxiii)
(Jon, does any of this line up with Wollstonecraft's appropriation of Blair's "masculine style" in Allen's article?)
Could we say that for Wollstonecraft, reason is meant to accommodate nature? What could be her noetic field?
-Tarez
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
With the way you have posed the question, cultural modesty is almost a form of establishing "sexual distinction" in a different way for Wollstonecraft, one which makes a more just and civil society because all of its members are educated equally, but one wherein women and men "fall into their places" by their own reasoning, rather than by external pressure.
ReplyDelete"True taste is ever the work of the understanding employed in observing natural effects; and till women have more understanding, it is vain to epect them to possess domestic taste" (243)
For Wollstonecraft, knowledge is all dependent upon relationships, and arises from the discourse which these relationships shape in society. She believes that through reason these relationships will not be deconstructed, but rather will find more meaning and resonance in those who enact them.
"Contending for the rights of woman, my main argument is ...that if she not be prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue. For truth must be common to all" (xxvi)
These are mostly errant thoughts, but I think what I'm trying to say is that she seems to believe that reason will not subvert nature, but rather make it more beautiful to those who come to exercise it (reason). In this sense, she may believe more along the lines of Common Sense Realists who believed nature was something to be "accessed" through reason
Looking at your last quote, Jerrell, and at your statement that "Knowledge is all dependent upon relationships, and arises from the discourse which these relationships shape in society," wouldn't this place Wollstonecraft more in line with the Romantic style of rhetoric, in which "Reality is located not in the external world, . . . but in the interaction of observer and observed" (Berlin 10)? I am thinking also of the passage in Chapter 12, in which Wollstonecraft complains that some women are too ill-educated to appreciate an "admirable poem" or "some terrific feature in nature [which] has spread a sublime stillness through my soul"--this sounds to me similar to the "knowledge-through-interaction process that Berlin describes. I think that Wollstonecraft draws from both traditions where appropriate.
ReplyDeleteI think what Jerrell has said makes a lot of sense. Wollstonecraft argues that "the little attention paid to the cultivation of modesty, amongst men, produces great depravity in all relationships of society" (237). And it is from this argument that she goes on to suggest that "virtue will never prevail in society till the virtues of both sex are founded on reason" (238). In some ways, it seems that cultural modesty is resultant of equality among the sexes.
ReplyDeleteWollstonecraft seems to argue that distinctions of the masculine and feminine are, as far as learning is concerned, arbitrary. She insists that "it is not... a bold attempt to emulate masculine virtues; it is not the enchantment of literary pursuits, or the steady investigation of scientific subjects, that leads women astray from duty. No, it is in indolence and vanity" (244). Wollstonecraft is arguing that there is nothing inherently masculine about the desire to learn. What is a virtue for men is similarly a virtue for women. But by setting up feminine virtues, in a sense, in opposition to male virtues women fail in their "duty" to society. While the roles men and women occupy may be different, the virtues should be the same.
I also see what Mary is saying about Wollstonecraft as a Romantic rhetor. Berlin posits that "romantic rhetoric places the composing process, the act of writing and speaking, at the center of knowing" (10). For Wollstonecraft, it is discourse that is ultimately productive of knowledge.