Mary Wollstonecraft revisited

Abstract

In 1976, I began teaching the first women's studies course at The Australian National University. That course had been fought for and won as a result of student agitation, supported by some academic staff, and I was fortunate enough to be appointed as the first lecturer in women's studies. I was then thirty years old and this was my first lecturing position. When I began teaching, I had little idea how to teach such a course, for I had never been a student in women's studies and my doctoral dissertation had been in another area - a study of race relations in nineteenth-century colonial Australia. What I did know, though, was what I had learnt as an activist in the 1970s women's movement, first in its women's liberation phase and then in its more general incarnation as simply the 'women's movement' or contemporary feminism. And that was in fact quite a lot. The early 1970s women's movement - or at least that part of it I was involved in, in Sydney - was the scene of much reading about women, their situation and their history. At the foundation of this frenzy of reading was a desire to understand why it was that women occupied a subordinate position in society. If their secondary status was not ordained by nature - and that was a fundamental position in 1970s feminism - it had to have some other cause. Our reading in search of a cause or causes extended in all directions and we were much less bound by discipline than we have all since become; we read women's history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, literature and literary criticism, and much else. So, when I came to create a women's studies course out of almost nothing in 1976, 1 used the knowledge I had gained as a women's movement activist. When I look over my old course outlines I am struck by how interdisciplinary they were, though I can detect a historian's distinctive interest in chronology and historical context for the discussion of ideas. One of the courses I created was called 'Changing concepts of woman's place in European thought'. This began with a discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft, and in particular her famous book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792, when English society was being shaken by the events of the French Revolution. It continued by looking at John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, the suffrage movement, Friedrich Engels and Simone de Beauvoir. One of the essay questions I set my students was 'How relevant are Mary Wollstonecraft 's arguments today?' and this gives a clue to the feminist interest in Wollstonecraft. We read her as being the first to insist on that fundamental proposition of 1970s feminism: that women's subordination was a social product and, as such, could be ended through social action. We saw her as - like us - interested in women's socialisation and education and as emphasising women's intellectual capacity and rights to freedom. We thought, rather condescendingly, that she did not follow her ideas through sufficiently, since she still thought women's primary responsibility was in the family, but she had made the breakthrough for others to build on. When I left The Australian National University for the University of Technology, Sydney, in 1978, 1 continued to teach courses on women's history for several years, and Mary Wollstonecraft featured prominently in them. Gradually, however, my teaching changed to focus on other things, especially on histories of race relations and colonialism, and I rather forgot my knowledge of Wollstonecraft, Mill and the others. When I was invited in mid 2008 to contribute to the Key Thinkers lecture series, I thought of Mary Wollstonecraft, that key thinker for feminism that had so inspired me and my generation almost 40 years earlier. I wondered how she might look now, in the light of new questions and new intellectual frameworks for reading her. In this rediscovery of Mary Wollstonecraft, I have found that interest in her has continued strongly since the 1970s, spread across a number of scholarly fields. …