Mary & Mary on stage, on tour

Here's a new play entitled Mary Shelley, with - it would appear - an emphasis on that young woman's ghostly relationship with her dead parent:

Having lost her mother, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, at an early age, young Mary finds comfort in reading the family memoir written by her father, the radical philosopher William Godwin. However, his free-thinking account of her mother’s suicide attempt, extra-marital affair and birth of her illegitimate elder daughter are regarded by society as shocking....Delving into Mary Shelley’s turbulent personal history this striking production sheds light on the life of a bold young woman....

(From The Morley Observer.)  However, the West Yorkshire Playhouse,  where Mary Shelley launches its "world premiere tour", doesn't mention Our Lady:

This powerful new play explores Shelley's remarkable life: her controversial philosopher father, her scandalous elopement aged 16 and how she wrote a novel, so radical in its ideology, that in 1817 she changed the literary landscape forever.

We shall see. The company is Shared Experience, the playwright Helen Edmundson, the director Polly Teale. Mary Shelley is a co-production between the company and the Nottingham and West Yorkshire Playhouses, in association with the Oxford one. It launches in Leeds from 16 March to 7 April, tours half a dozen cities, landing finally at the Tricycle in London 12 June to 7 July.

[Addendum: some thoughtful comments in an interview between Catherine Noonan and Polly Teale on "Female-led theatre in an imperfect world".] [And a review from la petite feministe anglaise, Sarah Graham.]

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Kristen Atherton as Mary Shelley.

Mary reaches the NYPL

Opening today is another opportunity to see the very notes Mary Wollstonecraft penned to William Godwin, while labouring to deliver the future Mary Shelley. Readers will remember the excursion with Japanese historian Chihiro Umegaki to the final days of the exhibition entitled "Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the legacy of a literary family". Here's my review of the enduring aspects of the exhibition (website, book, etc.)  It was put on at the Bodleian in collaboration with the New York Public Library, home of the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, and now has reached that institution, under the title "Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet".

Those interested in Mary Wollstonecraft should note the change of focus: the official website says "The exhibition, curated by Stephen Hebron, was shown in a slightly different form at The Bodleian from December 2010 to March 2011."  I called the English version Our Lady, Her Husband, Their Daughter, and the Tousle-hair'd Poet. It seems that in Manhattan, the parents are downplayed, and the young 'uns bigged up.

There is another confirmation that most people who have heard of Mary Wollstonecraft have done so only because they think she wrote Frankenstein:

"It's very exciting for people who don't know Shelley so well, people who are getting a first introduction to his poetry and Mary and his parents," curator Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger said in an interview about the exhibit, which delves into the radical politics that both Shelley and his wife identified with.

I very much doubt that Delinger said "his parents", but that is what the reporter heard, or what her editor "corrected" her copy to. That quote is from Frankenstein's Monster Alive at NYPL Shelley Exhibit. 

It's at the NYPL till Jean Baptiste Day, in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Love those American philanthropists!

Vindication: 220 years on

On 23 February 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published. What does the work of Mary Wollstonecraft mean to you? What is her legacy in our time?

(Reminder: A recap of resources.)

Presidents' Day, Family Day

In the United States it is Presidents' Day*. In parts of Canada, it is Family Day**. What would Mary think? She preferred presidents to monarchs, and family to both. She made her own family in Newington Green, with gentle Frances and rescued sister.

Does anyone want to start a campaign for a Mary Wollstonecraft Day? It doesn't have to start off as a worldwide paid day off. It could be like Apple Day, which is not sponsored by the Apple Marketing Board, or Apple Corp. (Aside: I saw a "Sent from my iPhone" at the end of a message, except it was space-curtailed. The truncated version said "Sent from my iPho". For a second my brain misfired. "What? Steve Jobs's ghost is serving Vietnamese soup? Someone has to tell them when to stop!")

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*Wikipedia has two whole paragraphs about the apostrophe issue. 

I decree a LOVE YOUR PEDANTS DAY.

**Same day, different name in Manitoba: Louis Riel Day. 

Best Tshirt spotted in Toronto: portrait of the rabble-rouser, captioned Keepin' it Riel. 

Photo of Riel is in the public domain, see here.

Heroines in DC

In this month's focus on the United States, and continuing our series on statues (to inspire the one of Mary Wollstonecraft that is in the works), we have an excellent opportunity to look at American statues of women. To what extent they explicitly or implicitly acknowledged their debt to the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (which turns 220 years old this week), I do not know.

In the Capitol, the symbolic centre of American democracy, is The Woman Movement, also known as the Portrait or the Suffrage Monument, a curious white block from which rise three marmoreal figures. A good first stop for information is, as ever,Wikipedia (and have I mentioned that Mary Wollstonecraft is at the centre of a splendid series of Featured Articles? Oh yes, I have). So, who are these White Ladies?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the principal author of the Declaration of Sentiments, a document signed in 1848 by 68 women and 32 men who attended the first women's rights assembly, now known as the Seneca Falls Convention. Lucretia Mott was a Quaker social reformer; she attended the World Anti-slavery Convention in London in 1840 during her honeymoon trip, where the two women met. 

Susan B. Anthony came slightly later to the cause of women's rights, having previously been active in temperance and anti-slavery. The house she lived in for most of her life is now a museum, and in the little park it faces is a rather wonderful statue of her with former slave Frederick Douglass, enjoying cups and conversation. It is called Let's Take Tea, and is worth a separate post.

The sculptor of the marble block was Adelaide Johnson (1859-1955):

In 1896 she married Frederick Jenkins, a British businessman and fellow vegetarian who was eleven years younger than she. He took her name as "the tribute love pays to genius". They were wed by a woman minister, and her bridesmaids were the busts she did of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. However, the marriage ended after twelve years. She exhibited at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, showing busts of prominent suffragists Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The high point of her career was to complete a monument in Washington D.C. in honor of the women's suffrage movement. Alva Belmont helped to secure funding for the piece, which was unveiled in 1921. [...In later life, as she was faced] with eviction for failure to pay taxes, in 1939 she invited the press to witness her mutilating her own sculptures as a protest against her circumstances, and against the failure to realize her dream of a studio-museum commemorating suffragists and other women's campaigners. 

It seems that much of this comes from a two-page biography by two men, Frank Faragasso and Doug Stover, associated with the Sewall-Belmont National Landmark, the headquarters, museum and archives of the National Woman's Party. It's a classic case of donor beware: look what happens when you give an expensive present to someone who doesn't really want it:

The National Woman's Party presented the 13-ton statue to Congress in 1921, less than a year after the passage of the 19th Amendment. Congress grudgingly accepted it, with its gilded inscription praising the women ""whose spiritual import and historical significance transcends that of all others of any country or any age." Twenty-four hours later, the gilding had been whitewashed and the statue moved from the Rotunda to a storage area beneath, where it remains.

( From "Girl seeks to move statue to Rotunda" in the Houston Chronicle. See also "A rock and a hard place Statue: The stormy debate over placing a Capitol sculpture honoring three feminists may finally be approaching a compromise" in the Baltimore Sun.)  Faragasso and Stover's piece seems to have been written in the mid-1990s, when the statue's place in the Capitol was once more under discussion. Eventually it got moved (back) to the Rotunda. The two men argue in "A Marriage of Art and Politics":

One of the peculiarities of our culture is that artists seldom take an interest in politics, and politicians do not come from the ranks of the artistic community. Occasionally, art and politics blend in one public person. Adelaide Johnson (1859-1955) was an artist who devoted her life’s work to the advancement of equality for women and, in doing so, merged her artistic life with amajor political concern. The women’s movement served as an inspiration for her most monumental works. Her life-size sculptures of prominent suffragists were intended to immortalize the early movement leaders and to convey the sense that what these suffragists did for women was courageous as the actions of the men who founded the Republic.

They conclude:

The symbolism made manifest in this ponderous piece of marble kept the [women's] movement alive. It would become the only monument in Washington honoring the women's suffrage movement. The original inscription placed on the base of the statue by Johnson engendered such a strong negative reaction that members of Congress had it covered with whitewash. Every step of the way the statue has evoked a strong response from one group or another. Its acceptance, the inscription, and now its move to a new location have all been resisted. Still, the support for the monument has prevailed.

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The newer, better photo is from Wikimedia here, published under the GNU Free Documentation License. The older one,presumably a newspaper grab-and-grin, ishere on Wikimedia, sourced from the National Parks Service biography. Johnson is on the left; it is not stated who the other two women are. 

American conference program

The University of Florida has released the programme (or, I should say, program), for Mary Wollstonecraft: Legacies, to be held next week, at Ustler Hall, Gainesville (pictured).

The Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research will host a conference on February 23-24, 2012 to commemorate the 220th anniversary of the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a text that has had profound influence on political modernity and on continuing discussions about feminist thought. This conference follows our inaugural conference on Simone de Beauvoir (February 10-11, 2011), and is the second in a series that will commemorate the re-reading of key feminist texts and the legacies of major feminist thinkers.

Thursday 23 February
4:30-6:00: Panel Discussion on Wollstonecraft’s Legacies
Anita Anatharam, Rachel Rebouché, Stephanie Smith, Louise Newman, and Judith Page, moderator (all University of Florida)

Friday 24 February
10:30-Noon
Sheryl Kroen, Associate Professor of History, UF, “Writing Women's Lives: the Case of Mary Wollstonecraft”
Kari Lokke, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC-Davis, “Grasping at Immortality:
Forms of Freedom in Mary Wollstonecraft's Scandinavian Letters.”
Anne K. Mellor, Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies, UCLA,
“Wollstonecraft, Austen and the Problems at Mansfield Park”
Moderator: Pamela Gilbert (University of Florida)

2:00-3:30
Wendy Gunther-Canada, Professor and Chair of Political Science, UA-Birmingham,
“Disinherited Daughters: Wollstonecraft and the Politics of Female Birthright”.
Daniel O’Neill, Associate Professor of Political Science, UF, “Mary Wollstonecraft and Democracy”
Danaya Wright, Professor of Law, UF, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Unintended Legacy: The Normative Contours of the Parens Patriae Jurisdiction and the Changing Face of Legal Interference in the Family”
Moderator: Ed White (University of Florida)

4:30-6:00
A talk by Anne Mellor, Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies, UCLA, “Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Problems of Liberal Feminism,” followed by discussion

More details here and the full program(me) here (pdf). The long breaks between the sessions, when lots of interesting conversations are bound to happen, are well judged. When I first wrote of this conference, Janet Todd was giving the keynote talk; now, apparently not, alas.

Perhaps you'd prefer the philosophers' day-long symposium in Sweden. Bear in mind that Lund is just up the road (in the European sense) from Malmo. Malmo, across the bridge from Copenhagen, has a programme to experience Swedish hospitality -- supper (and maybe party games) with the locals.  No promises that the mayor will invite you to camp in his garden shed; details here, or maybe not....


Addendum: I had forgotten, or not known, that Janet Todd gained her PhD at the University of Florida. The Guardian's Higher Education profile (by John Sutherland, with whom I have a question outstanding) says:

She wanted to do Mary Wollstonecraft "but nobody had heard of her". So she did her doctoral work on the rustic poet John Clare. They hadn't heard of him, either, but the name was reassuringly masculine. Todd's supervisor died mid-thesis, so her research was uninterfered with - something she has always preferred.

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Photo: Ustler Hall is, according to Wikipedia , "the only freestanding campus building in the United States devoted solely to Women’s Studies [...and...] the first building on the UF campus renamed to honor a woman." (First, or only, I wonder?) 

I do appreciate the coincidence linking it to the German Gymnasium near MW's first grave: 
"I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body".  
The image was taken by Douglas Whittaker and is used under a GNU Free Documentation License.

Vindication, from Philosophy Bro

Philosophy is hard - I read and summarize, so you don't have to, man.

So this month we are looking at Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and how that dense eighteenth century prose - polemic and philosophical - has been adapted to the needs of the readers of today. We looked at resources old and new and squashed. The most irreverent version I've come across is the Philosophy Bro, snugly anonymous (yes, I do mean snugly, as in sitting snugly by the fire)  - "just a bro who likes philosophy" - and takes requests: "Maybe you've got a big paper coming up, and you haven't done the reading. Maybe there's this guy you've heard about, but you don't have the time to wade through the text yourself. Whatever, bro, I don't judge." He also has a clear copying policy, less generous than the Squashed Philosopher, but completely fair, allowing anyone to "excerpt your favorite paragraph or two and link to the rest of it". So that's what I'll do here.

His take on A Vindication starts  

Do you want to know why women fit your stereotypes of stupid, silly creatures? Because they're taught that it's the only way to be. That's what happens when all the bros running education just want pretty idiots to take as mistresses instead of smart ladies to take as wives. Every girl is being taught by these assholes, so if you're frustrated that your wife is like a mistress who spends her time shopping instead of putting out, stop pointing fingers, bro. No wonder she wants nothing more than to shop and drink tea - I don't care how resilient you are, twenty years of being told pretty is the highest value and eventually anyone would start to believe it.

And ends with:

Look, if you want women to stop being weak, stupid complainers who waste money, start educating them. Even I think women are dumb as shit, and I am one. They read bullshit romances and believe in horoscopes and thinks with their hearts instead of their brains. And for thousands of years you've been like, "What's up with dumb bitches?" all while you crank them the fuck out like it's your job. It's time to try something new: teach them reason, and see if they aren't more reasonable. Let them think, and see if they don't. Encourage them to raise their kids and be kind to their servants, and see if they aren't so moody all the time.

In conclusion, it's no fucking wonder bros are awesome; women could be great too, if you would just let them. 

The comments are interesting. "An Art Professor" writes:

I just checked out your tshirts. What is up with the bitches ones? That's never going to be ok. It perpetuates "with humor" the lasting, brutally damaging stereotypes that we still suffer from. Humor about "hoes" and bitches" is one of the most insidious and fucked up things that still lingers.

One response, half a year later:

Dear "Art Professor", it's okay, calm down. You're just "of a different generation", so to speak.
- an anti-kyriarchal (post?)feminist

Another, perhaps the most heartening:

As a bro - and one who read Wollstonecraft - I would like to thank you so much for this piece. I've always believed that real men are Feminists, because strong bro's have nothing to fear from equality, and smart women, confident women are hot!

Mary and Valentine's Day

As they say in exam booklets, 

or on the pdf scans of documents:

This page is intentionally left blank.

Vindication, squashed

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which turns 220 years old this month, can be tough going if you are not used to eighteenth century prose. Fortunately, it has been interpreted and condensed (and not just my paragraph-long attempt). Last week we looked at a recap of resources and some new ones too. Today, we offer you a version which "reduces the original 85,000 words by nearly 90%, but, as Wollstonecraft is an unusually repetitive writer, no great amount of her sense has been lost." It promises to deliver in 50 minutes.

It's the most radical shrinking I've yet presented (though stay tuned for next time). Squashed Philosophers exists to condense " ...the big books, the ones which defined the way The West thinks now, in their original words, neatly abridged down into little afternoons reads." It is all the work of one man, on such a shoestring he doesn't even have a domain name. Three cheers for Glyn Hughes of Lancashire, and here's to the power of the amateur! I love his generous and clear copyright waiver, "so that anyone anywhere (who hasn't been told not to) may reproduce these pages for any non-commercial purpose". I like the way he invites readers to get in touch: "Complaints are especially welcome." Worryingly, weirdly, he claims his website "has repeatedly been subject to serious, targeted, cyber attack. Are mad fundamentalists or wicked States attempting to destroy this grand disseminator of truth and enquiry? Or just geeks with too much spare time?"

So here is the task he has set himself:

For more than a decade Squashed Philosophers has been here to provide a way of making some sort of sense of the writings of The Western Philosophers. It lets you get to grips with a great idea in an hour or so, whether that's to prepare yourself for something bigger, or just for the joy of discovery. These versions are not complete and they're not perfect, but they do let you do something the originals can't - get for yourself a sort of grand overview of the whole universe of ideas, without having to just take other people's word for it. You'll love them.

He starts with a biography, to put her magnum opus in context:

At the heart of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, are the twin virtues of freedom of thought and devotion to family. Few people have so well combined the two as Mary herself, the presiding matriarch of one of the most remarkable families of free-thinkers the West has ever seen. A self-taught London teacher, Mary and her sister Eliza became convinced that the girls they attempted to enlighten were already enslaved by a social training that subordinated them to men....  Mary Wollstonecraft may be the "mother of feminism", yet, for all that she was called a "hyena in petticoats", by today's standards she seems somewhat prudish and more than modest in her aims. She does not lay any claim to equal opportunity for women, but rather allows for the sort of variation in the roles of the sexes which her sucessors might now call 'difference feminism'.

It promises to deliver in 50 minutes. "This condensed edition reduces the original 85,000 words by nearly 90%, but, as Wollstonecraft is an unusually repetitive writer, no great amount of her sense has been lost." However, if you don't have time for almost 10, 000 words, try this distillation:

No Time? Read THE VERY, VERY SQUASHED VERSION...

Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
"I do not wish them to have power over men;
but over themselves."

I have a profound conviction that women are rendered weak and wretched, especially by a false system of education, gathered from books written by men who have been more anxious to make of women alluring mistresses than rational wives. The DIVINE RIGHT of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger. Men, in their youth, are prepared for professions, but women can only look to marriage to sharpen their faculties. Yet, novels, music, poetry and gallantry all tend to make women creatures of sensation. 

"Educate women like men," says Rousseau, "and the less power will they have over us." This is my point. I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves. Rousseau holds that women ought to be weak and passive. Dr. Fordyce and Dr. Gregory's advice to women are full of old prejudices. Modesty is a great virtue, O my sisters, but modesty is incompatible with ignorance and vanity! 

Though I consider that women in the common walks of life are called to be wives and mothers, I lament that women of a superior cast have no way to pursue usefulness and independence. I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any share in the deliberations of government. Taxes on the very necessaries of life support an endless tribe of idle princes. Women might study medicine, politics and business. Women would not then marry for a support. 

Parental affection is often but a pretext to tyrannize. Children cannot be taught too early to submit to reason; but it is unreasoned parental authority that first injures the mind. I think that schools are now hot-beds of vice and folly. Day schools should be established by government, in which boys and girls might be educated together. Humanity to animals should be particularly inculcated. 

Belief in horoscopes is one of the worst affectations of women. Stupid, sentimental novels are another, as is an immoderate savage-like fondness for dress, for pleasure and sway. The majority of mothers leave their children entirely to the care of servants: or treat them as if they were demi-gods, yet such women seldom show common humanity to servants. Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man.

Mastermind answers

Mary Wollstonecraft was on the BBC quizshow Mastermind - lots of excitement on Twitter during the Friday broadcast. Yesterday we looked at the questions faced by the teacher named Godwin (or Goodwin, but I can dream). Episode 14 is available on iPlayer, in theory. Today, the answers.

1. Who famously described her as a "hyena in petticoats", following the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792?  -- Horace Walpole
2. To which friend in Beverley, the daughter of a philosopher and a lecturer, did the 14 year old Wollstonecraft write her earliest surviving letter? -- Jane Arden
3. In which London church did she marry the anarchist and novelist William Godwin on 29 March 1797? -- (Old) St Pancras
4. In  A Vindication of the Rights of Men, whose definition of English liberty did she attack as "security of property"? -- Edmund Burke
5. Which young woman, slender and elegant of form, whom Wollstonecraft met in 1775, is thought to be the principal model for Anne in the novel Mary? -- Frances (Fanny) Blood
6. In the conclusion of Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, Maria says the conflict is over, and then says that she will live for whom?  -- "My child"
7. Which writer and artist provided illustrations for the second edition of  Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life? -- William Blake
   
8. In the 15th of her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft says her thoughts darted from earth to heaven when she saw what sublime waterfall? -- Fredericstradt
9. With which political group, sometimes known as Brissotins, was she closely involved during the French Revolution? -- Girondins
10. Which institution is described in Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, as "the most insufferable bondage for minds governed by superior principles"?  -- Matrimony (marriage)
11. In her early Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, which animal story by Dorothy Kilner does Wollstonecraft recommend to amuse and instruct? -- The Life and Perambulation of a Mouse
12. Which other celebrated writer was present at the dinner party of Joseph Johnson where Wollstonecraft first met her future husband William Godwin?  -- She said Holcroft, but the presenter over-ruled her with Thomas Paine.
13. To which politician and former churchman was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman dedicated? -- Talleyrand
14. According to the Letters, the design of the deity throughout the whole of nature appears to be the preservation of what? -- The species
15. Who registered Wollstonecraft as his wife at the American Embassy in Paris to give her protection when war broke out between Britain and revolutionary France? -- Gilbert Imlay
16. Wollstonecraft jumped off which bridge over the Thames in an attempt to commit suicide in 1795, following the breakdown of her relationship with Gilbert Imlay? -- Putney Bridge

Back to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman tomorrow, working towards its 220th anniversary.

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The black chair, from the BBC Mastermind page. It is famous, apparently.

More on Mastermind

So Mary was on Mastermind yesterday. I have been sent a .wma file of the sound. I played it with VLC, but can't see how to embed it here. Hmm.  Episode 14 is available on iPlayer for a month, if your computer is deemed to live in the correct jurisdiction.

First in the spotlight is Catherine Goodwin [Godwin?], a teacher from Newcastle. Her subject is one of the first feminist campaigners and writers, Mary Wollstonecraft....

She did well in the face of those quick-fired questions from John Humphrys, but alas not well enough.

The questions were:

1. Who famously described her as a "hyena in petticoats", following the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792?
2. To which friend in Beverley, daughter of a philosopher and a lecturer, did the 14 year old Wollstonecraft write her earliest surviving letter?
3. In which London church did she marry the anarchist and novelist William Godwin on 29 March 1797?
4. In  A Vindication of the Rights of Men, whose definition of English liberty did she attack as "security of property"?
5. Which young woman, slender and elegant of form, whom Wollstonecraft met in 1775, is thought to be the principal model for Anne in the novel Mary?
6. In the conclusion of Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, Maria says the conflict is over, and then says she will live for whom?
7. Which writer and artist provided illustrations for the second edition of  Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life?
8. In the 15th of her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft says her thoughts darted from earth to heaven when she saw what sublime waterfall?
9. With which political group, sometimes known as Brissotins, was she closely involved during the French Revolution?
10. Which institution is described in Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, as "the most insufferable bondage for minds governed by superior principles"?
11. In her early Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, which animal story by Dorothy Kilner did she recommend to amuse and instruct?
12. Which other celebrated writer was present at the dinner party of Joseph Johnson where Wollstonecraft met her future husband William Godwin?
13. To which politician and former churchman was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman dedicated?
14. According to the Letters, the design of the deity throughout the whole of nature appears to be the preservation of what?
15. Who registered Wollstonecraft as his wife at the American Embassy in Paris to give her protection when war broke out between Britain and revolutionary France?
16. Wollstonecraft jumped off which bridge over the Thames in an attempt to commit suicide in 1795, following the breakdown of her relationship with Gilbert Imlay?

Answers tomorrow.

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The black chair, from the BBC Mastermind page. It is famous, apparently.

Mary on Mastermind

For those of you with access to UK television, take advantage of a quiz show featuring Mary Wollstonecraft.She is listed as a specialist subject on episode 14 of Mastermind, which is screening in a couple of hours (20:30 GMT) in England and Scotland (tomorrow in Wales, Thursday in Northern Ireland). You might be able to catch it on iPlayer, if your computer is deemed to be living in the right jurisdiction.

What a weird competition combination:

John Humphrys puts the questions to four more contenders. Subjects are the seven wonders of the ancient world, Enoch Powell, the TV comedy Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, and the life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Shouldn't "Ancient World" have capital letters? At least they spelled her name correctly. It is a tough one.

Tomorrow: the questions.

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Thanks are due to Alexis Wolf, literary pilgrim, for timely help, and, before that, to an alert ship's captain.

Vindication: new resources

If I estimate that perhaps one in a hundred Britons could tell you who Mary Wollstonecraft is, not one in a hundred of those cognoscenti would know that the Vindication that she is remembered for was her second. Fourteen months before, she had published A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a response to Edmund Burke's essay attacking her mentor Richard Price, the minister to the Dissenters of Newington Green. It was that book that made her an intellectual celebrity, placing her name firmly on the map of lettered London, and hence A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published exactly 220 years ago, was received with interest and widely read; even if many disagreed with its conclusions, they paid the book and its author the respect of engaging with the arguments.

Now for some resources not covered in our recent recap: Taking Liberties, "the 900-year struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights in key documents", was the winter 2008/09 temporary exhibition at the British Library. It situates the Vindication in what it calls the human rights group, stretching back to 1690 Locke's Treatises, via the Minutes of the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of Slavery (1787),  and forward to the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights (an obvious choice) and, its last entry, the 1957 Wolfenden Report (a braver choice). The exhibition website (as good in its way as the one of Shelley's Ghost) describes the Vindication thus: "The firmly-argued book, written in the tumultuous period following the French Revolution, was one of the first great works of female emancipation - but the goals she advocated took many decades to attain."

A Vindication draws on the parallels between women's position and that of slaves. It is worth mentioning the environment in which the author developed these ideas. The 1787 committee had a dozen members, all men: nine Quakers and three Anglicans, including William Wilberforce. A non-denominational (or multi-denominational) pressure group was thought to be more effective than one composed exclusively of those outside the establishment: Quakers could not stand for Parliament, and suffered other civil disabilities. It is only fair to remember, however, that abolitionism began with the Society of Friends - a lesser known committee, entirely of Quakers, preceded this famous one by three years. Not surprisingly, some of its members, such as Joseph Woods senior and Samuel Hoare junior, lived at Stoke Newington, a village popular with that sect and due north of the City of London, an easy journey for merchants who wanted the benefit of fresh country air for their growing families. It also happens to be the neighbouring village to Newington Green. This was the environment in which Mary was radicalised; from her childhood she knew that the world could be a harsh and unjust place, but there she learned to see its injustices through political eyes.

One final resource: the avid readers at A Year of Feminist Classics devoted January 2011 to reading A Vindication, and their comments are preserved. Their year proved so productive that they are continuing into 2013, according to the reading list.

Coming up are some interpretations -- or, you could say, translations -- of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

International Women's Day, New York

Whether it is consciously for International Women's Day, I don't know, but on 9 March, the New York Public Library is hosting a lecture by Kathleen Lubey: Late Eighteenth-Century Feminisms: Mary Wollstonecraft and her Contemporaries. Need I remind you that the NYPL, and specifically the Pforzheimer Collection, provided much of the content for the exhibition at the Bodleian, Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family.

Kathleen Lubey, a researcher at the Library’s Wertheim Study and Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University, will contextualize Mary Wollstonecraft’s radical calls for gender equality within the intellectual traditions of English women writers in the decades preceding her feminist treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791).[sic]

Wollstonecraft’s most visible legacies—her daughter Mary Shelley, and modern feminism itself—make her recognizable in our time as a harbinger of democratic and egalitarian ideals.  But in her own time, Wollstonecraft’s calls for total equality for women, as well as her sympathies with French republicanism, alienated her from her female contemporaries and immediate predecessors, who envisioned more subdued programs for women’s improvement and social action.  Frances Burney, Hester Chapone, Anna Barbauld, and the women intellectuals known as the Bluestockings, while recognized as part of a proto-feminist lineage, recoil from the polemical tactics undertaken by Wollstonecraft, offering instead a varied spectrum of strategies for women’s social advancement, such as marriage, publication, private learning, and self-improvement.

Professor Lubey is author of articles on sexuality, pornography, and eighteenth-century culture in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and differences. Her book Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760 is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press.  “Late Eighteenth-Century Feminisms” is part of a new book project she is writing in the Wertheim Study, examining the relationship between private manuscript and published writing in eighteenth-century literary culture.

 Tomorrow: a second look at the second Vindication. 

Vindication: a recap of resources

We are approaching the 220th anniversary of the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, generally agreed to mark the start of the struggle for women's rights, at least in the English-speaking world. It seems a good moment to recap the resources around this land-mark book.

Some modern readers still praise the vigour and directness of her writing, but it is fair to say that many others, unused to eighteenth century literary conventions, find it convoluted. One readability calculator estimated that you'd need 32 years of formal education before you could understand her 1792 magnum opus on first reading. High school and undergraduate students are understandably put off by this, as I can attest after a few years on Twitter, running a permanent search for her name. A typical tweet is along the lines of: "Essay due tomorrow. I hate Wollstonecraft." I reach out, as @1759MaryWol1797, linking to this blog: "Madam, you called my name. Are you more interested in my life (link) or my book (link) ?" Which often provokes responses rich in initialisms: "OMG Mary Wollstonecraft is on Twitter LOL!!!"

Fortunately, alternative versions of  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman are available. I tried to "translate" an excerpt, and one of my readers kindly pointed out in the comments that the exercise has been done before, and more thoroughly. Thus did I discover the delights of the erudite and benevolent Jonathan Bennett, who is donating his retirement to the world by translating Early Modern philosophy, including the Vindication. He doesn't simplify or shorten the classics, though; he limits his blue pencil to modernising the written style. Throughout February, I will be bringing you other versions, some of them quite ... drastic.

If you prefer your Vindication on video, we've looked at an amateur version of the Three-Minute Philosophy series, and the professional 30-minute Dutch Humanist "Dare to Think" episode. For those who haven't read the text itself, or who perhaps would like a refresher, I recommend Ian Johnston's 1998 lecture, kindly released to the public domain*. He is very strong on context, and on the intellectual relationship with Rousseau. He lays out the case for her as a liberal feminist -- and as a radical socialist: " I would not put it beyond the realm of possibility that Wollstonecraft is a radical wolf in the guise of a liberal sheep." He devotes the final long section to her attitudes towards sexuality.

 

There are conferences on two continents commemorating the 220nd anniversary of the publication. One, in the United States, looks broadly at Mary Wollstonecraft's legacies. The keynote speaker is was going to be biographer Janet Todd. The other, in Sweden, focuses more specifically on her philosophy, and not just that of women's rights. Sandrine Berges, this blog's resident philosopher and zombie-chaser extraordinaire, will be speaking there. (As she was at last summer's knowingly titled Man and Nature: From Descartes to Wollstonecraft.)

As I've said before,  I am very glad to see Mary Wollstonecraft's work, including books other than the second Vindication, given the light well beyond the field of women's studies. It is good to see modern philosophers engage and a Nobel Prize winner, addressing lawyers on international human rights, call her "the most neglected thinker of the Enlightenment".

Tomorrow: a heads-up for International Women's Day, in New York. And, over the month, several more entries on the Vindication.

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*I admire the breadth of work and the huge generosity behind Ian Johnston's offer:

This section lists the texts of various introductory and public lectures and supplementary notes prepared for college courses, particularly for Liberal Studies at Vancouver Island University (once Malaspina College). These are not scholarly studies of the works listed but rather initial introductions designed for readers who are encountering these texts for the first time. These materials are in the public domain and may be used, in whole or in part, by anyone without permission and without charge, provided the source is acknowledged.

I note that his visible site stats claim over 17 million page views, and am reminded of Cory Doctorow's dicutm that while it may be difficult to monetise fame, it is impossible to monetise obscurity. This university instructor is giving away a large chunk of of the fruits of his labour. An awful lot of people value what he has to offer, and that means a lot of eyeballs on his site. There are a few discreet Google ads, which did not distract from my enjoyment of the content. I hope they generate enough revenue to keep the author in first editions, if not second homes. Win, win, win.

Lots of statue ideas

It is high time we looked at statues. This blog champions existing and nascent projects related to Mary, trying to catalogue the world of Wollstonecraft. In an attempt to be of service to Mary on the Green, the campaign to raise a significant tangible memorial (the first anywhere in the world), A Vindication of the Rights of Mary will highlight sculpture projects to learn from. This series is intended to run weekly.

Last Friday was the tale of Dr Salter, the theft of his Thames-side statue, and the death knell, in my view, for any chance of Mary being cast in bronze. It is just too precious a metal to leave lying around a park. Strangely enough, mere days later, up pops a similar statue, stolen a decade earlier and suddenly rediscovered, not melted down as had been feared. So there is hope.

Here are some ideas for sculpture posts: American statues (this is a good month for that). Statues of inspirational figures, such as revolutionaries and educators. Interactive statues -- not animatronic ones, but those that draw passersby or pilgrims to engage with them. Boring statues on pedestals and bad sculpture everywhere: if you can't be a good example, serve as a terrible warning. Memorials to women, still rare enough to be remarkable. Recent additions to the cityscape. Projects in progress. Non-statue sculptures. 

Suggestions are welcome: names or places or images. Can you tell me about a sculpture that the future Mary Wollstonecraft one should owe something to? The comments are open.

There are also related resources, such as the Interntional Directory of Sculpture Parks. New York's Madison Square Park is noted for its presentation of public art, and the 2011 Echo there, by Jaume Plensa, caught the influential eye of Alex the architect....

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Statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in Victoria Gardens, London.

Fin Fahey [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Pop-up thanks to the eagle-eyed economist, and IDSP via SB, who can have her full name here should she wish it.

Mary and America

Here begins a month with a focus on the United States and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, both separately and together, leading up to the Florida conference, Mary Wollstonecraft: Legacies, which commemorates the 220th anniversary of the publication of her magnum opus

Last July, another auspicious month, I wrote of Mary and the USA, Richard Price and the American Revolution, On the frontier, and Lost daughters in the young United States.

This month, I hope to cover various versions of Vindication, and lots of Americana: statue ideas and exemplars on Fridays, admirers (lost sons as well as daughters, starting with John Adams), special places and people, and events going on right now. In the meantime, if you want more background, I can only recommend Lyndall Gordon's essay, "Mary Wollstonecraft's America".