Feminists versus Gallants: Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain

Abstract

Mary Wollstonecraft’s status as an Enlightenment philosophe earns her divided notices. For admirers of Enlightenment, Wollstonecraft’s identification with what she described, significantly, as the ‘masculine and improved sentiments of an enlightened philosophy’ wins her kudos.³ By contrast, those who condemn Enlightenment as sectarian — a ‘conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism’, in Eric Hobsbawm’s satiric formulation⁴ — criticise her complicity in it. The judgements, until recently, have been more polemical than substantively historical, with little detailed attention to Wollstonecraft’s place in the constellation of writers, ideas, and intellectual practices retrospectively labelled Enlightenment.⁵ Probably for this reason, both sides in the argument tend to exaggerate her Enlightenment allegiances, and to underestimate the complexities of her intellectual position. Far from an uncritical spokeswoman for a monolithic ‘Enlightenment’, Wollstonecraft elaborated her philosophical stance against the grain of mainstream enlightened opinion. This was particularly evident in her major feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) where, far from echoing Enlightenment perspectives, she mounted a systematic assault on ‘modern’ writings on women which, in her view, portrayed women ‘as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species’.⁶ If the Rights of Woman is a work of Enlightenment philosophy, in other words, it is one that highlights important tensions in Enlightenment thought, particularly in enlightened thinking on gender issues.⁷

‘The male sex among a polite people, discover their authority in more generous, though not a less evident manner; by civility, by respect, and in a word by gallantry.’ (David Hume, Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences, 1742)¹

‘Many of the sentiments [in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman] are undoubtedly of a rather masculine description. The spirited and decisive way in which the author explodes the system of gallantry, and the species of homage with which the sex is usually treated, shocked the majority.’ (William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1798)²