Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Or, Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft Compared

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Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Or, Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft Compared REGINA JANES To speak of eighteenth-century feminism is to commit a vile anachronism, for there was no movement, no concerted demand for change in the political or economic sphere. What there was instead, was a widespread dissatisfaction with the condition of women that found various expression in satire and in sober coun­ sel, in theoretical arguments, practical proposals, and practical action. Most writings on women are by men and fall into one of two large categories: the traditional satires with their familiar Juvenalian topics—feminine infidelity, luxury, vanity, pedantry, promiscuity, masculinity, and shrewishness; and the serious writ­ ings on education and marriage meant to fit women to be better companions to their husbands and mothers to their children.1 Much of the serious advice is a simple obverse to the satire and reduces to avoiding the characteristics satirized in an expansion on Juvenal’s opposition of the old-fashioned hard-working wife to the modern woman. The principal advance on Juvenal’s analysis is the attribution of feminine deficiencies to education. The dissatisfac­ 121 122 / REGINA JANES tion with what women are like implicit in both the satire and the advice, is directed at women of the middle classes and above, and is a dissatisfaction with women’s performance of their duties towards men. If we leave the vapors aside, there seem to be three possible channels for the expression by women of discontent with their sex or their situation: (1) an explicit demand for feminine activity outside of or beyond the conventional roles; (2) the insistence that the conventional roles be better fulfilled; (3) the simple expedient of activity without theory: if the role pinches, make a larger one by performing beyond its bounds. These alternatives are not mutually exclusive; all three appear in Wollstonecraft, the first and third in Astell, and the second and third are a very frequent combination. The first is of course the rarest. Women active as the managers of households, of schools, of affairs of gallantry, minding their pens, their pies, their admirers, are not necessarily prey to discon­ tent. Activity is an antidote to spleen; putting the Yahoo to work stops his wailing and his melancholy. But discontent does surface, although the discontent felt by women with the limitations of their situation is expressed infrequently and is usually confined to the subdued murmurings of momentary irritation in the privacy of correspondence. To demand that women perform beyond the conventional sphere requires that some ideal higher than the domestic ideal be available to provide a focus and give a shape to the felt dissatisfaction. Both Astell and Wollstonecraft possessed such an ideal, and the difference between those ideals marks in one more form the profound changes in thinking about society that occurred in the eighteenth century. In spite of actual changes in the status of women,2 it was possible to perceive the condition of women in much the same terms in 1790 as in 1690. What alters is the theoretical framework by means of which discontent is articu­ lated. Separated by almost a hundred years, Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft give us a common portrait of the position of Astell and Wollstonecraft I 123 women in the world and a common sense of the limitations imposed upon the women of the relevant classes (middling and quality). No sketch could be more familiar than that they provide. By custom, women are not public, but private, characters, removed from the active world and suited for a retired, contemplative, and essentially domestic life, in part because of their exclusion from the public sphere, in part because of their maternal function. By habit, dressing is the “grand devourer” of their time and money; their conversation is froth, impertinence, censure, spiced by envy; and “like Machines [they] are condemned every day to repeat the impertinencies of the day before,”3 if they do not descend from impertinence to vice. Prepared for marriage from the cradle, they neglect the friendship so superior to love and often find in marriage the only useful school they are ever put to, that of adversity: wakened by the neglect of their...