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.

----------------------

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.

----------------------------------

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.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*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....

---------------------

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".