Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman can sometimes strike us as standing apart from the writing of her contemporaries – in its boldness, its lasting impact on Feminist thought, and the extraordinary life of its author. But while Wollstonecraft is unique, she’s not alone. Her ideas resonated with many other women writers, and particularly with female playwrights of her time. Here are a few instances where lines from play texts parallel or reflect her thoughts on morality, freedom, and independence.
Hannah Cowley, A School for Greybeards (1786)
School for Greybeards is loosely based on Aphra Behn’s The Lucky Chance (1686), but Cowley makes a crucial change to Behn’s plot: instead of a rape by deception, she substitutes a staged elopement scene entirely orchestrated by the witty and cynical Seraphina. Having explained her plot, Seraphina also explains why she had no reason to be worried for her safety: ‘A woman, who respects herself Octavio, is safe in every situation; – she ne’er incurs risk, who has sense of Duty for her Guard!’ (V, 5)
This might read as a bit slutshamey to a modern reader; but I don’t believe it’s entirely intended that way. Seraphina is consistently sceptical of male characters’ intentions, and her own experience confirms for her that a woman cannot rely on male protection to safeguard her. Her use of ‘respect’ here appears not to refer to sexual immorality, but more to a sense of inner strength and values which women should try to achieve, because it will be more useful to them than trying to rely on the protection of others. Wollstonecraft uses the term in the same sense when she observes that her society thinks women ‘were made to be loved, and must not aim at respect, lest they should be hunted out of society as masculine.’[1] Cowley and Wollstonecraft both observe that ‘love’ doesn’t always come with ‘respect’ – but that women ought to be able to aim for both.
Elizabeth Inchbald, The Mogul Tale (1784)
Inchbald’s The Mogul Tale is set in an Indian harem, and right at the beginning one of the harem’s inhabitants observes, ‘our sex are seldom kind tо the woman that is so prosperous; their pity is confined to those that are forsaken — to be forsaken and ugly, are the greatest distresses a woman can have’ (I, 1). You can always rely on Inchbald for some pointed satire, and here she points out the two things women were (and are) often considered to be competitive about: popularity and beauty. Because women in the harem are literally cut off from any other means of achieving influence, they very much rely on their physical appearance to gain them some form of power.
Inchbald is exploring a dynamic that Wollstonecraft later analyses further in her Vindication, one that reduces women’s influence to their appearance at the expense of their intellectual and moral character. Wollstonecraft also has a tendency to make references to Eastern cultural practices when writing about this dynamic: she writes of women ‘cunningly obtaining power by playing on the weakness of men; and they may well glory in their illicit sway, for, like Turkish bashaws, they have more real power than their masters’; laments that, ‘[t]o preserve personal beauty, woman’s glory! the limbs and faculties are cramped with worse than Chinese bands’; and argues that in conduct books written by men, women, ‘in the true style of Mahometanism, […] are treated as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species’.[2] There’s certainly some amount of stereotyping involved in Wollstonecraft and Inchbald’s easy association of ‘Eastern’ with ‘tyranny’; but they’re also pointing to the hypocrisy of their own culture, which liked to consider itself in some way superior, but didn’t actually treat women any better.
Sophia Lee, The Chapter of Accidents (1780)
The main point of The Chapter of Accidents is that a woman’s public reputation does not define her value. The heroine Cecilia is a virtuous woman, but her friend Sophia Mortimer knows that her status as a mistress will define her to most people as damaged goods: ‘Supposing her all you say, the world judges by actions, not thoughts, and will bury her merit in her situation’ (V, 2). Sophia Lee herself – notice how she and her fictional character share a first name! – wrote how her status as a woman (and a single, working one) overshadowed her literary talents when she sent this play to manager Thomas Harris: ‘I learnt that merit merely is a very insufficient recommendation’ (Preface, ii).
Wollstonecraft is similarly unimpressed with the world’s tendency to consider women’s moral fitness rather than their skills: ‘with respect to reputation, the attention is confined to a single virtue – chastity. If the honour of a woman, as it is absurdly called, be safe, she may neglect every social duty’.[3] Making a good reputation the main aim of a woman’s life is not only unhealthy, but it prevents her from doing more useful things – in The Chapter of Accidents, Cecilia has to hide for most of the play until her reputation is restored. Wollstonecraft also points out how being concerned about your public image above all else results in superficial behavior not actually based on real character traits (I wonder what she would have said about Instagram?): ‘I doubt whether chastity will produce modesty, though it may propriety of conduct, when it is merely a respect for the opinion of the world’.[4] In the Chapter of Accidents, Cecilia is ‘a truly noble-minded girl, and far above her present situation’ (V, 2), because she decides to have respect for herself, rather than the ‘opinion of the world’.
The world’s opinion on Wollstonecraft herself has certainly varied a lot – Walpole called her a ‘hyena in petticoats’, while Woolf ascribed her a ‘form of immortality […] she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.’ In the works of female playwrights, the ideas made famous by Wollstonecraft achieve another sort of immortality.
[1] Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 100.
[2] Vindication, pp. 107, 109, 71.
[3] Vindication, p. 216.
[4] Vindication, p. 202.
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