An admirer returns from Norway

One of the highlights of the week was meeting Bee Rowlatt, who recently journeyed to Norway on a Mary Wollstonecraft pilgrimage. She is the one who I said had a baby under one arm and a book proposal under the other. Bee found Mary first through the Romantic letters rather than the rational essays, which is fitting, since her first book, Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad, was about an epistolary friendship with an Iraqi academic. (More here.)

Bee got to experience Scandinavia at Solstice, or near enough, and met a Cockney ship's captain, and stayed in the garden of a Communist mayor, and had a fortnight alone with her almost year-old son William (a good name!), who proved to be a great ice-breaker.

Bee has an article coming up for the travel section of the Telegraph [edit: here], and then, more ambitiously, a book! I referred before to Melissa Benn and her Madonna and Child: towards a new politics of motherhood. Another book that came up in discussion was the recent How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran: something zeitgeist-y. Bee uses the phrase "super lightweight" for what she has in mind, some sort of a meditation on Mary Wollstonecraft then and now, and being a woman and a mother, combined with a travel narrative. No book contract yet -- all offers considered.

Bee is a woman of many talents. For one thing, she had the determination necessary to get her new friend out of Iraq and to safety in England, and I know enough about the refugee process to know it is a long and spirit-sapping bureaucratic paper-chase. Bee works at the World Service, and rides a bicycle like many sensible Londoners, and is beautiful, in a healthy scrubbed effortless way, and can pronounce Tønsberg quite convincingly. Her children are charming -- at least, the 75% of them that I got to meet when she brought them to Mary's St Pancras graveside, where the kids ran around and she told me about her trip. What an adventure!

By Hesse1309 (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) 

or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

An American novelist and poet muses

Nancy Means Wright

This guest post is from an American novelist and poet. Nancy Means Wright has been supporting this blog ever since September, when I discovered her cycle of poems about Mary, called Vita.  She has also published one novel with Mary at its centre, and has another nearing completion. Nancy has her own website and is also active on Facebook as Becoming Mary Wollstonecraft.

This is the fourth in a series of "Mary and me" posts, which give guests an opportunity to tell us how Mary Wollstonecraft came into, and fits into, their personal and professional lives. Previously we have heard from a French philosopher and a Japanese historian, and last week, belatedly, from me, because I thought you might like to know who is behind this blog. Here is what Nancy has to say:

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Back in the days when women were starting to gather together in small angry groups and refuse to simply stay home and nurse babies, I went with my husband to teach in a New England boys’ boarding school. I had already taught English for two years, but the headmaster declared that English was a man’s subject. I was dispirited—until I joined a  Unitarian women’s discussion group and read Wollstonecraft’s groundbreaking A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. I felt an immediate kinship. We were both raised in impecunious, unstable homes, with no room of our own to write in. We escaped (so we thought) at an early age—Mary at nineteen to caretake a cranky old lady, and I at twelve when my father died, catapulting me into a girl’s boarding school for five years. I loved my studies, and loved sports, something Mary advised. A female should cultivate mind and body, she insisted in a day when women might spend up to five hours just getting dressed and coiffed. Yet mine was a single sex world, whereas Mary had envisioned boys and girls together.

So you can imagine my excitement, in that sexist boys' school, to discover Mary’s revolutionary work. Inspired by her passion and extraordinary resilience, I earned a masters degree in French and said, “here. Now hire me.” I eventually became the language department head with three men under me—and that was gratifying. But beyond my ivory tower, women were dying from abortions or producing multiple children (I already had four!). Many were afraid to risk a husband’s disapproval and join the struggle for power. Though “I do not wish (women) to have power over men,” Mary declared, “but over themselves.” 

I taped her words in large black letters above my desk. I published a first novel about a rebellious faculty wife in the sixties—autobiographical, yes!—not unlike Mary, a Fiction (1788). I put on protest plays and wrote stories for The Second Wave, a Boston literary journal. I rode an all night schoolbus to march in Washington DC for the Equal Rights Amendment. We lost, but I imagined Mary beside me, waving her arms: “Keep up the fight,” I heard her whisper in my ear.   

Yes, there was criticism. I wasn’t called a “hyena in petticoats” as Mary was, but if  people weren’t laughing at us, they called us Bra Burners and Man Haters. But I liked men—the brainy, seemingly androgynous ones. And so did Mary—this was part of her dilemma, her fatal flaw one might call it: wanting independence but longing for the grand passion. And later betrayed and shunned by society when she thought she’d found it.

In 1990 I walked out of a bad marriage with empty pockets and went to teach in a  liberal arts college in Poughkeespie, New York. Even then, with divorce possible as it wasn’t in Mary’s time, I felt like a pariah. Of course I wouldn’t have had the courage to escape without Mary as my guide! She was a quester by nature, with a brilliant, inquiring mind that railed against any injustice, sham, and the small closed minds one meets every day. Wanting more and more of her words and her colourful life, I read five biographies and all her collected letters (that heart-searching voice!). l wrote her into a chapbook of poems, and then into Midnight Fires, the first in a series of novels in her persona.

Yet for me, Mary is far more than a character in a book. I want to bring her into the twenty-first century. I want women—and men too—to know what they owe to this brave, freethinking woman who, in a day of female oppression, dared speak out for equality and a liberal education for all. An education that would entail an open mind, social justice, and a woman’s right to create a life of her own.

A lady of leisure muses

After hearing from a French philosopher and a Japanese historian on how their personal and professional lives have been touched by Mary Wollstonecraft, I thought it was only fair, dear reader, that you get to hear a little about the person who set up this blog, namely me.

My name is Roberta Wedge and I was born in London. There the similarities end, thank goodness: I didn't have to sleep across a doorway to prevent my drunken father from beating my doormat mother, pregnant with a litter-full of babies. We did move around a lot, though, economic migrants as most migrants are, reaching for a better life. Eventually we settled in Montreal. Not only were there were shelves of books in the household, but we lived a child-sized walk from one of the best libraries in the country. Looking back, I can see plenty of gently feminist literary role models, of the "girls can do anything" variety. (As opposed to the "girls used to be legally and socially prevented from doing pretty much anything interesting or significant" variety.)  I read voraciously throughout my adolescence: high brow and low brow, Enid Blyton trash and adult encyclopedias. Garage sales yielded an endless supply of 1970s paperbacks for a nickel each, the paper already acidifying: The Female Eunuch, Fear of Flying (aka The Zipless Fuck), Jaws, The Population Bomb, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...

I wish I had come across Mary Wollstonecraft in high school. I attended a single-sex school -- common in the United Kingdom but exceedingly rare in North America. It meant we girls got unimpeded access to the bunsen burners and the teachers' attention, which is great, but as far as I can recall there was no effort whatsoever to bring remarkable women into our studies. We got the Great Men of history and literature, and precious few women at all. I view it as a lost opportunity, if not miseducation. Indeed, after that I took my education even more into my own hands, and spent a couple of years travelling and working and reading. When I started university I was ready for a typically broad liberal arts curriculum, taking courses in not only history and literature, but philosophy and linguistics and social sciences. Eventually this coalesced around women's studies. I didn't restrict my reading to the curriculum.

Certainly I was aware of our heroine by the time I was 21, as my bachelor uncle will attest. I was working my way around England, reconnnecting to my roots, and when I arrived on his doorstep he had the bright idea of taking me to see her grave, the second one. I checked this out with him recently, and he said absolutely I knew back then who she was, and I had the wrong shoes on. Make of that what you will.

Some years later, life and work brought me to London, city of my birth, and I ended up frequently passing by her gravestone (the first one). I read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman all the way through, having previously dabbled in extracts. I looked for her other work. I read a couple of the full-length biographies, instead of satisfying myself with those in the introductions to various editions of her works.

Just over two years ago, on a sort of New Year's self-dare, I walked into a church. I had been telling myself that religion was a socially sanctioned cover for bigotry, but I knew that that was a stereotype I needed to challenge. And here was this place literally on my way to the farmers' market, and with a rainbow flag on its notice board outside...so I went through the doors of New Unity. Imagine my surprise to find, not only a service unlike what I'd expected (no smitings or hellfire or Jesus or Christianity even), but, in the notices afterwards, evidence of Mary-worship. I checked it out later, with Google's help, and it turned out that this was the only group of people in the entire world putting on a programme of events to celebrate Mary Wollstonecraft's 250th anniversary in April 2009. (There were two academic colloquia, one in the West Country and one in Scandinavia, but those are dry and inward-looking affairs, and a couple of groups offering a single activity, such as a psychogeographic walk to her London grave.) New Unity was putting on an art exhibition, a concert, a lecture by biographer Barbara Taylor, a debate between three female MPs and MEPs, services in the church and at her grave, a birthday cake, and (a lovely touch) a man-made lunch for the congregation of all genders, with man-done washing up.

The banner outside the church said "Birthplace of feminism": I was hooked. I started doing publicity on social media for these events, starting with Twitter: I'm @1759MaryWol1797 . I also started educating myself about the Unitarians in general, and Newington Green Unitarian Church in particular. It was that community, in what is now north London, that radicalised her, and now forms half of New Unity. Her pew, by legend number 19, can still be sat in, and often I do!

Through those events, it came to me very clearly that her story needs to be told -- and her insights need to be studied -- by a far wider group than now knows of her or them. I began to concoct ideas, and to read everything I could get my hands on....

Through the church, I was asked to serve on the group campaigning to create a statue to Mary Wollstonecraft on Newington Green. We needed a snappier name: Mary on the Green. I've done a fair amount of work on that project.

I've also been approached from other angles too, and took Mary to an IGNITE event last autumn -- her life in five minutes, in front of a crowd of hipsters with alcohol in their hands (and bloodstreams).

I started this blog to bring Mary enthusiasts, and Wollstonecraft scholars, together. I have so many ideas, and wanted a place to share them.

Tomorrow: Modern philosophers engage
Next in the series of Mary and me: An American novelist and poet muses

A Japanese historian muses

Last week we had the thoughts of a French philosopher in Turkey; this week, those of a Japanese historian on a research visit to London.  Chihiro Umegaki specialises in the history of the English Enlightenment and women writers in the 18th century; no surprise, then, that she has written extensively on Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing her to a Japanese audience. She came across this blog, and I promptly invited her along on my jaunt to Oxford to commune with Shelley's Ghost (which closed yesterday). Chihiro was the ideal companion; our obsessions tally nicely. We got out our maps and plotted where exactly Mary's dwelling places would have been, and how many of them might be visitable in a week in London. Plaques, and places without plaques, and Newington Green for the church as well, and the Museum of London for Hidden, not forgetting the National Portrait Gallery....I'll describe our peregrinations in several future posts. For now, let Chihiro introduce herself, and how she came to work with Mary.

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Mary Wollstonecraft has been my idol for more than 15 years. I came across her Vindication when I was an undergraduate student in Tokyo. Of course there were a lot of phrases and expressions which I could not understand fully, but I found her arguments very authentic, and fancied that she personally supported me, unsure of my own future academic career in the still male-dominant society of Japan.

My first visit to London was in 2000, when I took my MA course in history in York. I remember how disappointed I was to learn that there were no proper memorial spots of Mary Wollstonecraft. I tried to find her plaques on buildings, but in vain. As an overseas student who spent only one year in Britain, I would be happy enough if I could take a picture of me standing side by side with her statue, and imagine that I was connected with her real life in London…

After finishing my MA, I came back home, and published some articles (in Japanese) about Mary Wollstonecraft and contemporary women writers. I have been teaching British history at a women's junior college in Tokyo for 8 years, and now I am writing an introductory book to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman for Japanese readers. We do have a Japanese translation (published in 1980), but I think ordinary readers still need some guidance to understand the full context of her arguments. My book is intended to be such a guide.

I came to London in March this year partly because I needed some fresh inspiration for the final phase of my writing. Unexpectedly, the Mary on the Green project caught my eyes. It was a very happy surprise, and convinced me that Mary Wollstonecraft’s voice is still heard. I will encourage my Japanese readers to support this project, and hope that some day I can take a picture of me holding my book, standing next to Mary's statue in Newington Green.

A (modern, female) philosopher muses

I am absolutely delighted to introduce the first guest post, from Sandrine Berges, an early supporter of this blog. Sandrine teaches philosophy in Turkey, and blogs for fun with her two sisters at http://paris-ankara.blogspot.com. Here she writes about how Mary Wollstonecraft fits into her professional life. 

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Four years ago, I barely knew who she was. Then a (male) colleague suggested we introduce the two Vindications to our survey course in political philosophy. It was love at first read - I found arguments and a style that I liked and that I could relate to. I sometimes wonder whether I saw in her writings what I wanted to see – I seemed to be able to extract from them most of what I wanted to say about most things – still do. Before that, I had spent years reading and writing on Plato. For a feminist, that is not always very satisfying. Also, I had been teaching for five years in a department in which I was the only woman, having graduated in a field in which there are very few of us already.

Wollstonecraft did not quite give me voice - I was already a published philosopher - she did not quite give me confidence - being a woman academic in a male department will do that for you - but she helped anchor me, become at peace with what I was: a woman philosopher, intermittently fighting for the cause of other women through my writings. 

Wollstonecraft also gave me success. The first article I wrote on her was accepted for publication in a very good journal. The second sent me to Tuscany for a conference, and of course, there is the book. The first book I wrote was a monograph: my own reflections on Plato's moral and political philosophy - very worthy, no doubt, but frankly, who reads it? The book I am writing now is an introduction. One of those you see in all university bookshops, that students buy whenever they want to find out something about someone. One of those books that people buy even if they're not philosophers, and even, sometimes, if they're not students! I shall be rich! Well, no, but I will enjoy seeing the number of copies bought when I receive my no-doubt measly royalty check.

But forget these misplaced fantasies of fame and riches. What is making me happy is the feeling that I have a chance of being useful, as Wollstonecraft herself would say. My book, when it is written, may encourage people to read the Vindications, its existence may trick some of them into thinking that Wollstonecraft is part of the canon of philosophers taught at university, and then, who knows? She might become just that.

In the meantime, I am struggling, for the first time in my life really trying to get something just right, and worrying about the consequences if I don't. Wish me luck.