The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 8, Number 4, 2000, pp. 433±455
`Not Empire, but Equality': Mary Wollstonecraft, the
Marriage State and the Sexual Contract*
LAURA BRACE
Politics, University of Leicester
M
ARY WOLLSTONECRAFT's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ®rst
published in 1792, has proved a problematic `classic text' for feminism.1
This paper focuses on the liberal concept of self-ownership to show how the
Vindication both confronts and perpetuates the dilemmas of `liberal feminism'.
Self-ownership is not a term used by Wollstonecraft herself, but I make use of it
in this paper because I believe it captures what she means by `independence',
arrived at by a combination of re¯ection, self-government and labour. It implies a
natural right to resist oppression and arbitrary government and so reaches the
heart of Wollstonecraft's argument against patriarchy as a particular form of
arbitrary power. As Alan Ryan argues, `each of us is obliged to obey the
government so long as it upholds our natural rights, but if it violates them, we are
not obliged to obey'.2 As a liberal concept, self-ownership is fraught with
ambiguity for feminism. Donna Dickenson argues that it can be interpreted both
as `masculinist through and through' and as `the essence of feminism'.3 Its very
ambiguity makes it an appropriate conceptual lens through which to view
Wollstonecraft's own contradictory arguments.
I argue that Wollstonecraft offers a critique of a particular, patriarchal and
narrow view of self-ownership and a plea for its replacement by a more relational
view of power and self-sovereignty. This argument has several strands, some of
which connect Wollstonecraft with Rousseau. I want to suggest that where
Rousseau describes a fraudulent social contract based on force and slavery and its
replacement by a positive social contract based on consent and designed to
* I am grateful to Robert Goodin and to two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an
earlier draft of this paper, and to Julia O'Connell Davidson, John Hoffman, Nirmal Puwar and
Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor. This project was supported by study leave and a research grant from the
Social Sciences Faculty of the University of Leicester.
1
M. Wollstonecraft, `A Vindication of the Rights of Woman', Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication
of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. S. Tomaselli (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995). Parenthetical page references in the text refer to this work.
2
A. Ryan, Property (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), p. 62. For the connections
between self-ownership and `invasion', see also L. Brace, The Idea of Property in Seventeenth-Century
England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 150±1.
3
D. Dickenson, Property, Women and Politics (Oxford: Polity, 1997), p. 77.
# Blackwell Publishers, 2000, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.
434
LAURA BRACE
protect liberty, Wollstonecraft describes a very similar negative sexual contract
and its replacement by a more positive one based on reciprocal duties.
In doing so, she encounters and articulates some of the tensions that have
haunted and shaped `liberal feminism' ever since. By analysing Wollstonecraft,
we can see how dif®cult it is to extend male-centred notions of individuality
structured around self-ownership and independence to `actually existing' women,
living lives informed by patriarchal conditions, by their embodiment and by their
capacity to bear and raise children. At the same time, a critical reading of
Wollstonecraft makes it clear that a retreat into `difference' and duties tied to
nature risks an essentialism which ignores the social relations of power between
women and imposes a `compulsory' femininity which damages autonomy and
individuality. In reassessing Wollstonecraft and by focusing on self-ownership,
we can see the traps set for women within liberalism; the drawbacks of her
attempts to spring them, but also the beginnings of a way out.
I. THE SOCIAL AND SEXUAL CONTRACTS
Rousseau's account of the fraudulent social contract is based on the rich man's
plan `to employ in his favour the forces of those who attacked him'4 by drawing
them into his design. It is represented as a contract which offers protection in
return for obedience. As such, it forms the basis of the liberal social contract
understood as a promise to obey and undertaken by the weak in the face of the
greater power of the strong: `All ran headlong to their chains, in hopes of
securing their liberty'.5 I want to argue that this negative contract, ultimately
based on force, is very similar to Wollstonecraft's analysis of `the marriage state'
(p. 248). In Rousseau's positive social contract the logic of the participatory
process has an educative effect. Possessive individualism is transformed into civic
virtue. Citizens make judgements on the basis of the general will rather than selfinterest, as part of the political association as a whole and so `they become
conscious of themselves, and act politically, as citizens, not only as private
individuals'.6 Something very similar happens in Wollstonecraft's version when,
after a revolution in female manners, women become active citizens and rational
mothers, ful®lling their natural duties on the basis of virtue and reason.
While I draw heavily on Pateman's account of political obligation and, of
course, of the sexual contract, I diverge from her emphasis on the participatory
process to argue that the shift from the negative to the positive social contract
cannot do away with the problem of force, and in particular the problem of being
`forced to be free' when we are compelled to obey the general will.7 This is made
4
J.-J. Rousseau, `A discourse on the origin of inequality', The Social Contract and Discourses
(London: Dent, 1973), p. 98.
5
Ibid., p. 99.
6
C. Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation (Oxford: Polity, 1985), p. 156.
7
J.-J. Rousseau, `The social contract', The Social Contract and Discourses, p. 195.
`NOT EMPIRE, BUT EQUALITY'
435
explicit in Rousseau, but I would like to suggest that it is implicit in
Wollstonecraft's insistence on the centrality of duties, the essential nature of
sexual difference and on the absolute power of reason to confer liberty: `For it is
the right use of reason alone which makes us independent of every thingÐ
excepting the unclouded ReasonÐ``Whose service is perfect freedom'' ' (p. 206).8
Rather as Rousseau argues that we can be forced to be free, Wollstonecraft sees
our `natural' duties as socially enforceable:
I mean therefore to infer that the society is not properly organized which does not
compel men and women to discharge their respective duties, by making it the only
way to acquire that countenance from their fellow-creatures, which every human
being wishes some way to attain (p. 231, emphasis added).
Men and women's `respective duties' are based on the sexual division of labour
as dictated by nature.9 This means that women have different, speci®cally
feminine and maternal duties to ful®l. As rational creatures they should be ready
to render themselves useful to others and to be content with their own station by
discharging `the indispensable duty of a mother' (p. 231). Once they have been
compelled to ful®l their natural duties, women as free citizens will become good
wives and mothers. Like Rousseau's `positive' social contract, this is a `solution'
which is fraught with dif®culties and one which may not always represent an
advantageous exchange. As Gatens points out, Wollstonecraft risks con®ning
women to the private sphere of the `natural' family.10 She also fails to recognise
that the tensions between motherhood and citizenship affect middle-class and
working-class women in different ways. Her arguments for the importance of
maternal practice can be read as part of the eighteenth century's `ideological
appropriation of women as unpaid mothers for the nation',11 but they also
highlight the tensions between citizenship and care that underpin current debates
about nannying and domestic work and about the status of motherhood.12
II. TYRANTS, SLAVES AND SPANIELS
The idea of self-ownership developed out of the wider struggle against absolutism
and arbitrary power. Liberals, from the Levellers onwards, argued that force was
8
Reason requires submission. Wollstonecraft asserts that she fears God: `It is not his power that I
fearÐit is not to an arbitrary will, but to unerring reason I submit' (p. 34).
9
`[F]rom the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be designed by Providence to attain a greater
degree of virtue' (p. 95).
10
M. Gatens, ` ``The Oppressed State of My Sex'': Wollstonecraft on reason, feeling and equality',
Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, ed. M. L. Shanley and C. Pateman (Oxford: Polity,
1991), p. 122. But see the sharp warnings against ascribing `separate spheres' arguments to
Wollstonecraft in V. Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary
Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 161, 176.
11
R. Perry, `Colonizing the breast: sexuality and maternity in eighteenth-century England',
Eighteenth-century Life, 16 (1992), p. 187.
12
See in particular N. Gregson and M. Lowe, Servicing the Middle Classes: Class, Gender and
Waged Domestic Labour in Contemporary Britain (London: Routledge, 1994).
436
LAURA BRACE
incompatible with the reasonable and moral exercise of power. Wollstonecraft
extended this analysis. When men attempt to exclude women by force from the
civil and political world, they act like `tyrants of every denomination, from the
weak king to the weak father of a family' in their attempts to crush reason and
rule by force. Tyranny `in whatever part of society it rears its brazen front, will
ever undermine morality' (p. 69). While, like Locke, Wollstonecraft grants men a
`natural pre-eminence' in physical strength, she is clear that men should not use
their physical power to dominate women, `to sink us still lower' or `merely to
render us alluring objects for a moment' (p. 75). Her words recall Rousseau's
insistence that force and right must be incompatible.13 Men who rely on
patriarchal power are tyrants who `force all women, by denying them civil and
political rights, to remain immured in their families groping in the dark' (p. 69).
Rousseau describes the false social contract based on force and the renunciation
of liberty: `If an individual, says Grotius, can alienate his liberty and make himself
the slave of a master, why could not a whole people do the same and make itself
subject to a king?'14 Rousseau argues that the alienation of liberty can never be
legitimate, indeed it must be an act of madness because such a renunciation is
incompatible with man's nature and `to remove all liberty from his will is to
remove all morality from his acts'.15 The Vindication offers us a parallel critique
of the sexual contract. Wollstonecraft's analysis of patriarchal power seeks to
describe how women as a whole sex have alienated their liberty and in so doing
have removed all morality from their acts. Patriarchy has forced women `to
surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties'.16 Wollstonecraft's response
is two-pronged and double-edged: women must be granted the rights of humanity
and at the same time ful®l their speci®cally female duties as mothers. This is the
basis of what Pateman has termed `Wollstonecraft's dilemma' which she sees as
underpinning the division between equality and difference that has resonated
throughout feminism ever since and structured many of its debates.17
The ®rst part of the response, the impulse towards equality, is to aim to enable
women to become the fellow creatures of men and `to obtain a character as a
human being, regardless of the distinction of sex' (p. 77). This transformation
required a revolution in female manners which would restore their lost dignity
and provide a solid foundation for morality. Rather than glorying in their
subjection, women should seek to become fully human characters with their
morality rooted not in their relationship to their bodies, but in their connection to
the character of the Supreme Being, the Deity and to reason. As rational beings,
13
`[T]he strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength
into right, and obedience into duty'; Rousseau `The social contract', p. 184.
14
Ibid., p. 185.
15
Ibid., p. 186.
16
Ibid.
17
C. Pateman, `Equality, difference, subordination: the politics of motherhood and women's
citizenship', Beyond Equality and Difference, ed. G. Bock and S. James (London: Routledge, 1995),
p. 20.
`NOT EMPIRE, BUT EQUALITY'
437
women would become `more masculine and respectable' (p. 78).18 A duty cannot
be binding or virtuous unless it is founded on the universal standard of reason,
the foundation of all human activity. Rationality allows individuals to make
reliable judgements, independently of authority or opinion and such judgements
can form the basis of a reliable morality based on voluntary acts of will.19 The
paradox, and the heart of the dilemma, is that women can only become human,
rational and `masculine' by becoming mothers. Their speci®cally female,
maternal and `natural' duties form the basis of their humanity and give them
the potential to become moral characters acting out of virtue and their voluntary
will in carrying out their duties. They can overcome the lack of political or civil
reason ascribed to them by Kant on the basis that women know `nothing of
ought, nothing of must, nothing of due'.20
Patriarchal power is a form of arbitrary rule that sets up absolute authority on
one side and unlimited obedience on the other.21 Women's enforced obedience to
authority blots out their potential for meaningful self-ownership, based on
`re¯ection and self-government' and their capacity to `obtain a character as a
human being' (p. 144). Through the marriage contract, they ®nd themselves
subject to a convention within which they can have no rights and be owed no
obligations. The exchange of protection for `slavish obedience' is a form of
tyranny of men over women (p. 240).22 The man as a tyrant can `exist only by
virtue of his excluded others'23 and those excluded others can exist only by virtue
of their exclusion. Women are left with no space for self-sovereignty because they
cannot command respect.24 The notion that women are created `to be the toy of
man, his rattle', to serve his purposes, `to jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing
reason, he chooses to be amused' means that women can live only for the present
(p. 104). Where force and reason cannot coexist, women are subjected to force
and denied access to reason. Without their own ends and purposes, their human
character, they can have no hope for the future, no plan of their own life. Instead,
`women appear to be suspended by destiny' (p. 104).25
18
On Wollstonecraft's use of gender-bound language see Sapiro, A Vindication, ch. 6, and F.
Ferguson, `Wollstonecraft our contemporary', Gender and Theory, ed. L. Kauffman (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1989).
19
For a fuller discussion of Wollstonecraft and reason, see M. Gatens, `Rousseau and
Wollstonecraft: nature vs. reason', Women and Philosophy, ed. J. L. Thompson; supplement to
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 64 (June 1986), 1±16.
20
Quoted in C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Oxford: Polity, 1988), p. 169.
21
Rousseau, `The social contract', p. 186.
22
`I exclaim against the laws which . . . force women, when they claim protectorship as mothers, to
sign a contract, which renders them dependent on the caprice of the tyrant'; Wollstonecraft, `The
Wrongs of Woman, or Maria' (1798), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. J. Todd and M. Butler
(New York: New York University Press, 1989), vol. 1, p. 179.
23
M. Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics (London:
Routledge, 1997), p. 152.
24
`Weakness may excite tenderness, and gratify the arrogant pride of man; but the lordly caresses
of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for, and deserves to be respected' (p. 98).
25
They are unable to `break loose from the reign of the present to look toward the future'; Sapiro,
A Vindication, p. 143.
438
LAURA BRACE
This sense of being suspended echoes Rousseau's description of individuals as
`(s)wept along in contrary routes by nature and by men', forced to divide
ourselves between different impulses. We are `in con¯ict and ¯oating during the
whole course of our life'.26 For Wollstonecraft, this fractured sense of self applies
in particular to women, who, whilst being `by their very constitution, slaves', can
deck themselves out in arti®cial graces, and so exercise a short-lived tyranny over
men (p. 107). Women have been taught to be cunning, soft, outwardly obedient
and to pay attention to propriety in order to ensure that they are protected by
men. This is the classic sexual contract, trading obedience in return for
protection, but she complicates the power relationships involved by arguing that
women develop a winning softness `that governs by obeying'.27
The possibility that women could `govern by obeying' or dominate men
from a position of powerlessness was central to eighteenth-century conceptions
of femininity which held that men were given the greater share of reason and
physical strength, making them the lawgivers. Women were designed for
compliance, gentleness and virtue and these qualities were constructed as
giving them the power to subdue their masters: `our Looks have more
Strength than their Laws; there is more power in our Tears than in their
Arguments'.28 Rousseau argued that man's merit was in his power. His
strength was part of the law of nature, existing prior to love itself. As for
woman, `(h)er own violence is in her charms'. Her modesty and shame were
the weapons `with which nature armed the weak in order to enslave the
strong'.29 Wollstonecraft makes clear that this power that comes from
powerlessness, governing by obeying, can only be an inauthentic and
corrupting form of power designed to keep women in a state of perpetual
childhood. Where women did obtain such power it proved to be of a
`lawless', unreasonable kind, gained by debasing means and turning them into
the fawning favourites of absolute monarchs. The master is eager to pro®t
from enforcing arbitrary privilege and wishes to have `a meretricious slave' to
fondle who is dependent on his reason and his bounty (p. 186). Women `may
be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the
master and the abject dependent' (p. 69).30
The slavery and dependence which women have endured has sapped their
capacity for self-ownership: `Considering the length of time that women have
been dependent, is it surprising that some of them hug their chains, and fawn like
the spaniel?' (pp. 161±2). A woman's reason can never be reliable or moral. It is
26
J.-J. Rousseau, Emile (Harmondsworth, Mddx.: Penguin, 1979), p. 41.
Wollstonecraft, `A Vindication', p. 87.
28
The Whole Duty of a Woman (London, 1701), p. 69.
29
Rousseau, Emile, p. 358.
30
The analogy of woman to slave was central to Wollstonecraft's discourse and it resonates
throughout nineteenth-century feminism. See especially J. S. Mill, `The Subjection of Women', On
Liberty with The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism, ed. S. Collini (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997) and C. Midgley, Women Against Slavery: the British Campaigns,
1780±1870 (London: Routledge, 1992).
27
`NOT EMPIRE, BUT EQUALITY'
439
degraded when it is `employed rather to burnish than to snap her chains'
(p. 184.)31 Wollstonecraft's example of the spaniel makes it clear that women
have been crushed by custom and by their own dependence. Originally, spaniels
kept their ears erect `but custom superseded nature, and a token of fear is become
a beauty' (p. 162). In a similar way, women are valued for their weakness and
their slavery is rendered invisible by their complicity: `Force made the ®rst slaves,
and their cowardice perpetuated the condition'.32 Such `cowardice' means that
women fail to exert themselves or to exercise self-denial, raising the possibility
that some women pro®t from perpetuating their condition (and the false social
contract) and gain a degree of powerÐover men and over other womenÐfrom
`hugging their chains' close to them.
Eighteenth-century moralists worked hard to obscure the sexual contract's
basis in force by arguing that men, although powerful, were not tyrants. They
de®ned middle-class English men in contrast to their counterparts in other
countries. Men in the `Eastern regions' were `a set of wretches as arbitrary as they
are sensual' and treated their wives as `poor imprisoned females . . . merely
subservient to their passions'. In France, on the other hand, women reigned
supreme `from the court down to the cottage' and infected all the men with
vanity, giddiness and effeminacy.33 English gentlemen were understood to be
moderate, reasonable, not arbitrary tyrants, but in control both of themselves
and of their wives. Wollstonecraft insists on uncovering the relations of force and
domination behind the marriage contract itself. Without liberty, middle-class
English women were left on the margins of society, at the edges of humanity:
`they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful ¯aws in nature'
(p. 107). Having recognised that some women `burnish their chains' and exercise
tyranny over men, Wollstonecraft goes on to insist that all women are slaves,
using the rhetoric of slavery to present `women' as an undifferentiated category
who all experience their powerlessness in the same way.34 The power differentials
which are implicit in the notion that some women might `govern by obeying' are
collapsed into gender as an overarching oppression. I want to argue that it is this
collapse which undermines the basis of Wollstonecraft's version of the positive
(social) contract by `forcing' women into a single category.35
31
As Rousseau points out: `Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from
them'; `The social contract', p. 183.
32
Rousseau, `The Social Contract', p. 183.
33
J. Fordyce, The Character and Conduct of the Female Sex (London: 1776), p. 27.
34
In the `Vindication of the Rights of Men', Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Tomaselli, p. 46,
Wollstonecraft discusses the aristocratic `fair ladies' whom `the captive negroes curse in all the agony
of bodily pain, for the unheard of tortures they invent' as part of her argument that dignity, respect
and virtue are activities and processes and not `givens' ®xed by nature or by class. Since at least some
of the `captive negroes' could have been women, it is also an argument for the signi®cance of power
differentials between women based on class and race.
35
Instead, as Prokhovnik argues, we need to `recognize the diversity of what is captured only
inadequately under the term ``gender'' '; R. Prokhovnik, Rational Woman: A Feminist Critique of
Dichotomy (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 146.
440
LAURA BRACE
III. SELF-OWNERSHIP: GILDED CAGES AND ROUGH TOILS
This retreat into gender affects how self-ownership is understood and constructed
not only by Wollstonecraft, I would argue, but also by some subsequent feminist
traditions. It allows the self to become something which is `owned' by men and is
not `owned' by women. In the process, a dichotomy is constructed and a sense of
the `dynamics of inequality' is lost.36 To understand how different women are
trapped by liberal concepts in different ways we need a more sophisticated
critique of self-ownership which is sensitive to diversity and to power
differentials.
The conditions of the negative sexual contract made it almost impossible to
extend self-ownership to women. They were `always taught to look up to man for
maintenance and to consider their persons as the proper return for his exertions
to support them' (p. 149). This is a stark description of the sexual contract where
`one party to the contract, who provides protection, has the right to determine
how the other party will act to ful®l their side of the exchange'.37 In other words,
instead of being an exchange between equals, the contract entrenches `social
relationships constituted by subordination'.38 Again, the focus is on the social
relationship between men and women: the idea that some women might bene®t
from the sexual contract in their relationships with other women from different
classes or races is missing.
Once the focus is on gender alone, separate from other power relationships, it
becomes clear that the sexual contract is about the domination of men over
women, and the rhetoric of slavery takes on its full force. Women in the
eighteenth century could not be free and equal partners to an exchange because:
`the honour of a woman is not made even to depend on her will' (p. 149). She was
dishonoured and deprived of her property in her person by living in a world
where she was educated only to inspire love in others. Self-ownership is
incompatible with this kind of dependence on the protection of others which
allows `the property in the person of the subordinate [to be] used by the
superior'39: `For, miserable beyond all names of misery is the condition of a
being, who could be degraded without its own consent' (p. 150).
The possibility of being degraded without your own consent can be
understood as the basis of slavery. Cohen argues that the `most abject
proletarian' still has self-ownership because `while [he] can do nothing without
another's agreement, it is also true that there is nothing which [he] need do
without his own agreement'.40 Only the slave owner has rights of sheer
36
Sapiro, A Vindication, p. 126. For a useful discussion of dichotomy, see Prokhovnik, Rational
Woman. On the problem of self-ownership, see Pateman, Sexual Contract and Dickenson, Property,
Women and Politics.
37
Pateman, Sexual Contract, p. 59.
38
Ibid., p. 58.
39
Ibid., p. 59.
40
G. A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), p. 100.
`NOT EMPIRE, BUT EQUALITY'
441
command, licensed by a non-contractual obligation which takes away the rights
of the slave and transfers them to his owner. It is this transfer of powers which
Wollstonecraft sees as underpinning the fraudulent sexual contract, licensing
women's slavery and giving men rights of sheer command over them. This
implicitly non-contractual relationship based on force lurks behind the marriage
contract in the same way as force and slavery underpin the false social contract in
Rousseau's account.
The rhetoric of slavery does not exhaust the nature of self-ownership within
the liberal tradition. We need a more nuanced understanding of how the idea is
constructed to exclude women. Dickenson explores the distinction between a
property in the body and a property in the person created by labour. She insists
that this is a crucial distinction which needs to be maintained: `What is right with
contractarian theory is that insists on women's property in the person, thereby
enhancing their moral and political agency'. By property in the person Dickenson
means `property in the moral person, in one's self, one's power of agency.'41 This
needs to be carefully distinguished from having property rights in our bodies
which, in Locke's system, are God's workmanship and so can only belong to him.
Property in the person underpins a right to life and liberty and to our own
designs, projects and plans in life. It is this which grounds an entitlement to
material property: `If there is anything special about my work, it is not that it is
the labour of my body, but that it represents my agency, a part of myself, my
person'.42 Such labour is intimately linked to personhood, freedom and
responsibility for our own actions.
For Wollstonecraft, women are unable to make such a distinction between their
bodies and their persons. First, as we have seen, they do not own their property in
their person and second, without a revolution in female manners, they cannot `as
part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world' (p.
117). Women's minds are weakened by depending on authority and never
exerting their own powers. They have been damaged by the emphasis on the
frippery of dress and the skills of needlework which prevail in their world, so that
`(t)he thoughts of women ever hover round their persons'Ðmeaning their bodies
in this case (p. 154). Men's and women's relationships to their bodies and to their
persons are quite different. Most men are only occasionally made aware of their
bodies at times of illness, injury or physical discomfort. Genteel women, on the
other hand, are `literally speaking, slaves to their bodies, and glory in their
subjection' (p. 115). A woman's self is inevitably fractured and ¯oating once men
take her body and her mind is `left to rust' (p. 155). Her rusty mind shapes itself to
her stolen body, roaming around its gilt cage, seeking to adorn its prison.
Unable to labour virtuously, or to disentangle themselves from their
embodiment, women are left to strive for a version of subjectivity through
41
42
Dickenson, Property, p. 77.
Ibid., p. 79.
442
LAURA BRACE
their bodies. By doing so, they are hugging their chains and glorying in their
subjection, emphasising their weakness until `false notions of female excellence
make them proud of this delicacy, though it be another fetter, that by calling
attention continually to the body, cramps the activity of the mind' (p. 154). This
is a struggle which is bound to be lost: women cannot gain self-ownership until
they ful®l their human duties and own their actionsÐin other words until the
fraudulent sexual contract is replaced.
Self-ownership and the terms of a more equal sexual and social contract
depend on women's access to reason and through reason to a disembodied
individuality and eventually to God. Every individual is a world in itself and the
nature of reason is the same in all because it is an emanation of divinity, the tie
that connects a creature with the creator. The individual soul is stamped with the
heavenly image and perfected by the exercise of its own reason. Wollstonecraft
builds on a synthesis of reason, virtue and knowledge. Reason gives humanity
pre-eminence over the rest of creation; virtue distinguishes individuals from one
another, and knowledge enables us to struggle with our passions. The triumvirate
of reason, virtue and knowledge at once binds people together by distinguishing
their humanity from the rest of the animal world, and holds them apart from
each other in their individual virtue. Their struggles with their passions are part
of their individual life stories, but also draw them into a shared narrative of what
it means to be human. Their shared exercise of reason is the ground for
independence and for virtue. A woman's soul is not perfected in this way; she is
excluded from the shared narrative of humanity and so she cannot become
virtuous, independent or an authentic self: `man, ever placed between her and
reason, she is always represented as only created to see through a gross medium,
and to take things on trust' (p. 127).
Traditional notions of self-ownership rely on not having to take things on trust
from others, on being able to exercise your own reason and direct your own body.
Proprietorship of the person was not about passive enjoyment, but about active
improvement: `Men were created to improve, and enjoy by improving their
capacities'.43 Freedom consisted in this active proprietorship of one's person and
capacities. Individuality is created through activity. It is de®ned in opposition to
being sedentary, delicate and soft, insulated from the world. Worthy individuals
should exert themselves and engage directly in `all the rough toils that dignify the
mind' (p. 240). These `rough toils' require a speci®c and active form of embodiment
that allows individuals to `claim' their bodies through a developmental process
`involving training my body and mind in dexterity and control'.44
43
C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1962), p. 142.
44
Dickenson, Property, p. 100. Wollstonecraft describes a similar process which produces a
woman `whose constitution, strengthened by exercise, has allowed her body to acquire its full vigour'
(p. 123).
`NOT EMPIRE, BUT EQUALITY'
443
IV. WOMEN OF SUBSTANCE
Recent feminist theory has turned its attention to `the body' as a category for
analysis and argued that the body as well as the mind is `something we live in and
through' as embodied and embedded subjects.45 Young argues that instead of
claiming her body by taking control of it, a woman often `lives her body as a
burden' which needs to be dragged, prodded along and protected.46 Her body is
both subject to and the object of the gaze of others. The possibility of being gazed
upon is ever present while a woman's body is regarded `as shape and ¯esh that
presents itself as the potential object of another subject's intentions and
manipulations'.47 While men can be sovereign individuals of reason who
answer for their conduct only to God, for women `it is the eye of man that they
have been taught to dread' (p. 219). This is bound to affect how a woman sees
herself as part of the world and her relation to the shared narrative of reason and
human character. Young sees feminine bodily existence as constantly selfreferred, preoccupied with itself as well as with the world. Rather than being a
developmental process, `(f)eminine existence lives space as enclosed or
con®ning'.48 A woman experiences herself as rooted and enclosed, unable to
move out into the world with a sense of intention, co-ordination and direction.
In the eighteenth century context, the concern for reputation created by being
subject to the dreaded male gaze was equally damaging and con®ning.
Constantly under scrutiny, women's `outward carriage must be . . . honest and
inoffensive, void of Suspicion as well as Blame.'49 The careful maintenance of a
good name required that: `Your looks, your Speech, and the course of your whole
Behaviour, should own an humble distrust of your selves.'50 Wollstonecraft
insists that women must be able to trust themselves, to make reliable moral
judgements on the basis of reason. It is not suf®cient for women to view
themselves as they suppose others view them. To be able to act as moral agents
they should endeavour to view themselves as they suppose the supreme Being
views them: `morality is very insidiously undermined, in the female world, by the
attention being turned to the shew instead of the substance' (p. 223).
This dual structure of being both enclosed and open to the gaze and
manipulation of others applies not only to women's bodies, but also to their
reason and character, their persons. Women are born `with certain sexual
privileges' ( p. 132), but with no opportunity of exerting themselves with dignity
45
Prokhovnik, Rational Woman, p. 145. On feminism and the body, see in particular M. Gatens,
Imaginary Bodies. Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996) and E. A. Grosz,
Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
46
I. M. Young, `Throwing like a girl: a phenomenology of feminine body comportment, motility
and spatiality', Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 148.
47
Ibid., p. 155.
48
Ibid., p. 151.
49
W. Fleetwood, The Relative Duties of Parents and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and
Servants (London: 1705), pp. 180±1.
50
Whole Duty, p. 9.
444
LAURA BRACE
or of claiming respect on account of their abilities and virtues. They are ®xed and
made immobile by the male gaze which grants them unearned privileges.51 These
privileges are grounded in their bodies, enclosing and con®ning them, without
giving them the means to own themselves in a way which forges an effective
connection with the world, `of rising by the exertions which really improve a
rational creature' (p. 132). Women's morality is weakened by false re®nement
and fraudulent privilege.52 This echoes Young's point about the way the feminine
body is conditioned. Feminine motion is constructed and impaired in ways which
sever the connection between intention and action and instil hesitancy.
Young argues that a woman's experience of her body is inhibited; she underuses her real capability and withholds `full bodily commitment' from her
actions.53 Wollstonecraft is saying something similar about women's inhibited
capacity for, and commitment to, reason. Living under the terms of the
fraudulent sexual contract and ®nding themselves able to govern by obeying has
corrupted women's capacity for reason, and so for self-ownership. Their
thoughts turn on things calculated to excite emotion, emphasising feeling and
sentiment at the expense of the steady exercise of reason. This leads to unstable
conduct and wavering opinions. Suspended by destiny and without a clear vision
of a future, women become nothing more than `creatures of sensation':
This overstretched sensibility naturally relaxes the other powers of the mind, and
prevents intellect from attaining that sovereignty which it ought to attain to render a
rational creature useful to others, and content with its own station (p. 137).
Without the sovereignty of reason, women are unable to pursue virtue.54
However, women's capacity for reason has the potential to re-forge the
connection between the self and the world, overcoming the hesitancy, enabling a
full commitment to the self and to others. In the process, women would gain selfrespect and a place for themselves in the world. Self-ownership and a new sexual
contract become a possibility once women can exercise their reason in
discharging their duties. Rather than being created and educated for men and
gaining negative power over them by `governing through obeying', women could
become fully human characters, exerting themselves with dignity and improving
themselves as rational creatures. Women are being asked to give up the unearned
privileges that come from their `frivolous accomplishments' and instead
undertake to improve themselves in the same way as middle-class men (p. 135).
51
Luce Irigaray makes a similar point about the `specular economy' of the male gaze: `Truth is
necessary for those who are so distanced from their body that they have forgotten it. But their truth
immobilizes us, turns us into statues . . .' quoted in D. Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature
and Difference (New York and London, Routledge, 1990), p. 59±60.
52
Their moral condition `is much below what it would be were they left in a state nearer to nature'.
Wollstonecraft `A Vindication', p. 136. For a fuller discussion of privilege and `unnatural distinctions'
in Wollstonecraft see Sapiro, A Vindication.
53
Young, `Throwing like a girl', p. 148.
54
Sapiro, A Vindication, p. 52.
`NOT EMPIRE, BUT EQUALITY'
445
Rousseau argued against educating men and women together on the grounds
that this would make women resemble men and so lessen the power women
could yield through their sexual difference. Wollstonecraft concurs, but twists his
meaning: `This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over
men; but over themselves' (p. 138). Instead of striving to be ladies with nothing to
do except `loiter with easy grace', women with such power over themselves could
study the arts of healing, politics and business, becoming physicians as well as
nurses. They would not then need to marry for protection because they could
earn their own subsistence and support themselves (p. 238). Women can `become
free by being enabled to earn their own subsistence, independent of men . . . as
one man is independent of another' (p. 260). This independence disrupts the
fraudulent sexual contract by allowing for the possibility that men and women
could contract with each other to use each other's property to mutual advantage.
We ®nd ourselves at the heart of what has come to be termed liberal feminism,
where women strive to be `independent' of men and of each other. Wollstonecraft
shares the `implicitly masculinist values of the bourgeois public sphere'.55
Digni®ed, rational individuals have the potential to labour to reform
themselves and the world, to make themselves useful to others and to be
content with their own station. Women have to stop glorying in their subjection
and give up the unearned privileges of sexual difference, the vulgar respect paid
to wealth and beauty, and the power they gain from their sensibility.56
Independent, reasonable and educated women would be able to transform
their relationships to themselves and to the world by acquiring strong, vigorous
constitutions, labouring to reform themselves and the world and engaging in the
`rough toils' of the mind until they are able `to comprehend the moral duties of
life, and in what human virtue and dignity exist' (p. 123). Claiming selfownership requires more than not being a slave. Rousseau's social contract and
Wollstonecraft's positive sexual contract both require more than resistance to
tyranny: they are about individual moral transformation. Women had to stop
being aristocrats and make themselves middle-class. Their potential for
transformation and the possibility of rewriting the sexual contract were
expressed through their maternal duties.
V. VIRTUE, SUCKLING AND SYMPATHY
In this section I want to explore the tensions within Wollstonecraft's `positive'
sexual contract based on maternal duties. It is here that we reach the limits of her
attempt to extend a fully realised self-ownership and independence to women. As
55
J. B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 134. Wollstonecraft writes, `Abilities and virtues are absolutely
necessary to raise men from the middle rank of life into notice; and the natural consequence is
notorious, the middle rank contains most virtue and abilities' (p. 132).
56
`[W]oman's narcissistic display [was] both symptom and cause of aristocratic corruption';
Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, p. 36.
446
LAURA BRACE
Sapiro warns, we need to make sure that we do not treat Wollstonecraft's writing
as a `clear expression of stereotypical liberal individualism' and instead recognise
her scepticism and the implicit challenge she offers to liberalism.57 At the same
time, I would argue that we also need to pay attention to the ways in which she,
and later feminists, remain trapped by liberal assumptions and traditions. From
Wollstonecraft onwards, feminists have struggled to integrate self-ownership and
motherhood.
Motherhood created the possibility of self-ownership as long as a woman
negotiated her nature as a duty and did not struggle to transcend it. This meant
that she was still trapped. Her work was, and had to be, the `labour of [her]
body' and the object of her labour represented the agency and personhood of her
husband, not of herself.58 The maternal solicitude of a reasonable, affectionate
woman was expressed in the `chastened dignity with which a mother returns the
caresses that she and her child receive from a father who has been ful®lling the
serious duties of his station' (p. 232). The terms of Wollstonecraft's new sexual
contract which call for men and women to ful®l their respective duties rely on
®xed and static notions of what those duties are, attaching them ®rmly to
biological difference. The emphasis on motherhood and `natural' duties colonises
women as effectively as the original sexual contract by entrenching the notion
that `maternal practice was at the heart of real femininity'.59 The notion of a
®xed, essential nature takes over from explicit force as the basis of the sexual
contract.
In the eighteenth century, to become a `whole and entire Mother'60 required a
degree of self-ownership missing in women who saw themselves as created to be
the playthings of men. Wollstonecraft argued that part of the damage patriarchy
did to women was to make them weaker in mind and body than they ought to be
`were one of their grand ends of their being taken into account, that of bearing
and nursing children'. Instead they strove to `either destroy the embryo in the
womb, or cast it off when born'. The weak, enervated women who caught the
attention of libertines were un®t mothers (p. 228). The full status of motherhood,
and so the unity of the family, depended on a mother nursing her own children:
`For how can she be call'd a Mother that will not nurse her young ones? The
Earth is call'd the Mother of all things, not because she produces, but because she
maintains and nurses what she produces'. Children fed by their own mothers
would `be like Giants, whereas otherwise they are but living Shadows and like
unripe Fruit'.61 This is the closest a woman came to being an active proprietor
and improver.
57
58
59
60
61
Sapiro, A Vindication, p. 167.
Dickenson, Property, p. 79.
Perry, `Colonizing the breast', pp. 207±8.
J. Maubray, The Female Physician (London: 1724), p. 331.
Whole Duty, p. 457.
`NOT EMPIRE, BUT EQUALITY'
447
The terms of the fraudulent sexual contract, as we have seen, alienate women
from their own natures and corrupt the pursuit of virtue. Many women lack
natural affection for their own children because they are diverted from their duty
by the admiration of men and the ignorance of other women. They are induced to
refuse to suckle their own children by `a social system that puts it in their shortterm self-interest to do so' even as it endangers the lives of their infants.62 Men
collude in the abuse by restricting women's access to reason and education. The
national education of women is the only way to ensure that `the present race of
weak mothers' could take reasonable care of a child's bodily needs (p. 274). At
present, their subjection to their own bodies corrupts their capacity for
motherhood. When women are taught only to please men `(t)he mother will be
lost in the coquette' (p. 122). Their natural duties are displaced by arti®cial
competition with their daughters.63 This is an inadequate and corrupting, nonrelational view of power based on rivalry and domination.
These ideas ®nd their echoes in the strands of feminism which emphasise the
importance of women's capacity to care and the possibility of `maternal
thinking'. Ruddick argues that a mother `acting in the interest of preserving and
maintaining life, is in a peculiar relation to ``nature'' '.64 She engages in
preservation, in conserving the fragile and in fostering growth. Ruddick, too,
warns that a maternal perspective can take degenerative and inauthentic forms
when mothers collude in their own subordination and train their children `for
defensive or arrogant power over others'.65 For a woman to breastfeed her own
child, or in Ruddick's terms, for a mother to create her own values and train her
children for strength and moral sensitivity in the face of patriarchal pressure, she
must exert her judgement to modify the general rules, and so extend her
intellectual empire to claim a kind of individuality.
The traditional liberal notion of self-ownership is about being the proprietor of
one's person and capacities, owing nothing to society for them, but (as we have
seen) it does also impose the duty to be an active proprietor and to improve those
capacities. Such active proprietorship is realised not only through contracts
between equals but also through duties towards others: `for virtue is only a
nominal distinction where the duties of citizens, husbands, wives, fathers,
mothers, and directors of families, become merely the sel®sh ties of convenience'
(p. 229). Duties have to involve more than the `ties of convenience' embedded in
traditional contracts. Hirschmann argues that obligation is a limitation on
behaviour, a requirement for action or non-action that the actor or non-actor has
agreed to or chosen. A duty, on the other hand, is a requirement that exists
`naturally' or `positionally' and is not explicitly chosen. It is central to the liberal
62
Sapiro, A Vindication, p. 124. Wollstonecraft writes that the practice of sending babies to be
wet-nursed `render[s] the infancy of man a much more perilous state than that of brutes' (p. 273).
63
`Duties!Ðin truth she has enough to think of to adorn her body and nurse a weak constitution'
(p. 122).
64
S. Ruddick, `Maternal thinking', Feminist Studies, 6, #2 (Summer 1980), p. 349.
65
Ibid., p. 355.
448
LAURA BRACE
understanding of obligations that they arise from voluntary and free actions: all
obligations must be `explicitly taken on by the individual'.66 This process of
taking on duties parallels the idea of claiming the body. It is an assertion of
owning your actions, of activating your own virtue and reason: `In making a
promise the individual deliberately undertakes ``an act of her own'' that
voluntarily creates a relationship of obligation, and commits her for the future'.67
This constitutes an escape from slavery and into self-ownership: she need do
nothing without her own agreement.
In the eighteenth century, maternal feeding of infants was regarded both as a
duty and an obligation. While it was clearly tied by moralists to nature, it also
needed to be explicitly taken on by the individual mother, as `an act of her own'.
In choosing to suckle her own child, she could ®nd herself in con¯ict with her
husband:
Besides, there are many husbands so devoid of sense and parental affection, that
during the ®rst effervescence of voluptuous fondness they refuse to let their wives
suckle their children. They are only to dress and live to please them: and loveÐeven
innocent love, soon sinks into lasciviousness when the exercise of a duty is sacri®ced
to its indulgence (p. 151).
Maternal feeding was thus constructed both as a natural dutyÐone of the
`grand ends' of being a woman and `the indispensable duty of a mother'
(p. 231)Ðand as a rational choice sometimes made in opposition to others.
Motherhood was not simply a biological fact: women who conceived could be
`un®t' to be mothers. Maternal duties needed to be understood both as natural
and as moral, not to be sacri®ced to convenience. Choosing to `cast off' the child
by sending it to a wet nurse was a dereliction of nature, reason and of duty. This
is an argument that must sound familiar to many working mothers who employ
nannies today, and it is one which functions to `hide' the wet nurses and nannies
themselves behind the `choices' of their employers.68 Sheriff argues that the
practice of wet nursing can be read `as both symptom and cause of that inverted
order ruled by the sex made to obey',69 part of women's attempts to govern by
obeying.
The assumption is that middle-class women who chose to have wet nurses
employed in their service, like middle-class women who employ nannies and
domestic workers, were somehow allowing others to mother on their behalf and
so `losing out' by opting out. They shirked their duties by handing them over to a
66
N. J. Hirschmann, `Rethinking obligation for feminism', Revisioning the political, ed. N. J.
Hirschmann and C. DiStefano (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996), p. 157.
67
Pateman, Political Obligation, p. 13.
68
For a corrective to this silence, see: V. Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the
Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); Gregson and Lowe, Servicing the Middle Classes; and B.
Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (London: Zed Books,
2000).
69
M. Sheriff, `Fragonard's erotic mothers and the politics of reproduction', Eroticism and the Body
Politic, ed. L. Hunt (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 32.
`NOT EMPIRE, BUT EQUALITY'
449
representative and so they were still tainted by aristocratic corruption. In
choosing these ties of convenience, a woman damaged her own self-sovereignty
and her prospects for future happiness: `she sins against herself by neglecting to
cultivate an affection that would equally tend to make her useful and happy'
(p. 231). Women who `cast off' their children (and, more recently, those who
choose not to have them) indulge themselves at the expense of their chance to
reform themselves and so reform the world and the sexual contract. By choosing
arti®cial privilege over `natural' duty, a woman made herself into a `Gaudy Idol ',
`an empty Airy Thing' or a `Gilded Butter¯y', a triumph of show over
substance.70
Mothering under patriarchy has been corrupted by the negative sexual
contract which has damaged relationships between men and women and between
women's bodies and their reason. This `institutionalized motherhood'71 rests on
meek wives who make foolish mothers and hope to gain power by drawing their
children into competition with their fathers. A woman who is dependent on her
husband becomes cunning, mean and sel®sh and ignorant of her duties.72 She is
not a `whole and entire' mother. Wealthy women are doubly damaged by gender
and by property because their wealth renders them weak and luxurious. They are
`debased and cramped' by riches and inherited honours which compound the
unearned privileges conferred on them by their sex (p. 233). They can choose not
to take on the duty of feeding their own infants and opt for the convenience of
employing a wet nurse but `(t)he rank in life which dispenses with their ful®lling
this duty, necessarily degrades them by making them mere dolls' (p. 235). The
possibility of employing others to care for children may look like a route to
independence, but Wollstonecraft makes clear that this is another trap, a false
version of self-ownership and an inauthentic form of power.
Men cause misery by inciting women to render themselves pleasing, to live
outside themselves and for others, subject to the dreaded male gaze. As a result
women's selves become fractured and divided because `natural and arti®cial
duties' clash with each other. A husband is implicated in this process of fracturing
and in perpetuating the negative social contract when he fails to `feel more
delight at seeing his child suckled by its mother, than the most artful wanton
tricks could ever raise' (p. 232). The woman who `neither suckles nor educates
her children' refuses to take on her obligations explicitly and instead becomes
proud of her weakness, expecting to be protected and guarded from care by her
husband. The non-breastfeeding mother risks not acquiring the `countenance
from [her] fellow-creatures' that grounds her domestic and her political status.
She `scarcely deserves the name of a wife, and has no right to that of a citizen'
(p. 236).
70
Whole Duty, pp. 61±2.
The phrase is from Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (London: Virago, 1977), p. 42.
72
`Her parental affection, indeed, scarcely deserves the name, when it does not lead her to suckle
her children' (p. 244).
71
450
LAURA BRACE
Citizenship based on reason and the proper organization of duties has the
potential to vanquish tyranny and arbitrary power. Men and women could live
together in `rational fellowship', replacing the fraudulent sexual contract with
reciprocal bonds which should prove stronger because they are rooted in virtue,
reason and the recognition of others (p. 240). Parents should be willing to limit
their power, to connect it to duty and to relationship, rather than expecting to
exercise tyranny and demand unlimited obedience from their children. A mother
who is able to act out of affection rather than rivalry gives `a sacred heroic cast to
her maternal duties'. By taking on `an act of her own' and choosing to feed her
own child, she will ®nd herself `reaping the reward of her care' in the future (p.
123). Her explicit commitment to take on the obligation of caring for her child
overcomes her suspension by destiny. It gives her `a foothold in the future'73 and
commits her to it.
Motherhood based on maternal duty, virtue and reason can help women to
escape from the traps set for them by patriarchy. It releases them from being
caught in the present; it provides them with an active rationality which is neither
`brutish' nor masculine, and it allows them to ®nd a course between slavery and
tyranny. Maternal solicitude can make women whole by uniting reason and
affection, bringing together her person and her body. It also gives women a place
in the world, the potential to be recognised by others as a self-conscious being. A
digni®ed mother is a respectable and beautiful sight: others should view with
pleasure a woman nursing her children, receiving her husband from the outside
world with smiling babes and a clean hearth. The male gaze has been turned on
her with approval; she has carried out her duty and achieved a form of
sovereignty over herself. As a couple they are `equally necessary and independent
of each other, because each ful®lled the respective duties of their station' (p. 232).
The way to ful®lment lies in equality not empire. It is reached through nurturing
and sustaining relationships rather than through attempting to exert power over
others.
Notions of equal necessity and independence form the basis of
Wollstonecraft's alternative to the fraudulent sexual contract under which, to
reiterate, women are `always taught to look up to man for maintenance and to
consider their persons as the proper return for his exertions to support them'
(p. 149). Women can overcome their defeat by ful®lling their duties as mothers.
The care they take of their children can represent their agency and their
personhood. A mother's power over herself is expressed through her virtuous and
dutiful relationships with other people, and in particular through her maternal
duties towards her children. A dutiful mother is also able to form stronger
relationships with her husband and children: `We should then love them with
true affection, because we should learn to respect ourselves' (p. 241). Escaping
73
Rich, Of Woman Born, p. 189. Rich is quoting from a recently divorced mother describing what
a man she was seeing had said to her: `Mothers turn me onÐthey are more real than other women.
They have a foothold in the future. Childless women are already dead.'
`NOT EMPIRE, BUT EQUALITY'
451
from the fraudulent sexual contract into new relationships based on mutual
respect, women could become active citizens and more observant daughters,
affectionate sisters, faithful wives and reasonable mothers. As Ruddick argued
much later, when mothers have the opportunity to create their own values and to
train their children in moral sensitivity, then their `transformed maternal
thought' is ready to move into the public realm.74
The reciprocal bonds of the common relationship as opposed to mere `ties of
convenience' inspire affections `that are the surest preservatives against vice'.
Affections grow out of the habitual exercise of mutual sympathy and it is this
notion of sympathy and fellow feeling that lies at the heart of Wollstonecraft's
conception of the common relationship, of how individuals should relate to one
another. It is re¯ected in a mother's care of her children and strongly contrasted
to the instrumental values of the women who employ wet nurses when she asks:
`what sympathy does a mother exercise who sends her babe to a nurse, and only
takes it from a nurse to send it to a school?' Sympathy requires a direct,
unmediated relationship with others. It allows women to exercise their virtue for
themselves, without a man being placed between her and her reason (p. 244).
For Wollstonecraft, independence involves escaping from the original sexual
contract which promises protection in return for obedience and extinguishes
women's moral agency. The `positive' sexual contract which she suggests as an
alternative replaces the `ties of convenience' with the much stronger and tighter
bonds of duty. These are duties which men and women can be compelled to
discharge and which are imposed on them by nature: the care of children in
infancy is `one of the grand duties annexed to the female character by nature' (p.
243). In much the same way as reluctant citizens must be `forced to be free' in
Rousseau's republic, women can only `acquire countenance from their fellowcreatures' and gain `power over themselves' by becoming virtuous mothers and
ful®lling their natural duties. As mothers, they render themselves rational, useful
to others and content with their own station. Once the slavery of the fraudulent
sexual contract was removed, nature would assert itself to usher in `a world in
which nature's transparence will accord with human virtue.'75
The practice of maternity allows women the possibility of improving and
owning themselves, of being the active proprietors of their own capacities.
Through the `rough toils' of full motherhood, they can activate their morality by
making judgements based on reason, they exert themselves, and above all they
exercise self-control, discipline and restraint. They de®ne themselves in
opposition to the over-re®ned and feminine women who neglect to cultivate
and improve themselves and, by choosing indulgence over duty, violate both
nature and reason. By contrast, the breastfeeding mother strengthened the unity
of the family and offered her husband the possibility of overcoming his own sense
74
75
Ruddick, `Maternal thinking', p. 361.
Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, pp. 130±1.
452
LAURA BRACE
of fragmentation, `when he beholds the object of his soul, cherishing and
supporting in her arms the propitious reward of wedlock, and fondly traces his
own lineaments in the darling boy'.76 By giving her husband the `inestimable
present' of an heir, guaranteeing that he can trace his `own lineaments' in his son
and so in his property, the middle-class breast-feeding mother was able to
improve herself through her `darling boy'. She was held in great esteem and secret
veneration, inspiring `the standing admiration of some great and noble work of
Nature'.77
Landes argues that Wollstonecraft's attempt to provide women with a route
into the public sphere through motherhood was bound to be `undermined by the
claims of nature'.78 Women would still be distrusted in the public realm `in case
they bring their bodies with them'.79 Their moral regeneration required `natural'
virtue which was most clearly expressed in the private, leaving women with a
`mediated existence', represented in the public by men.80 For Hegel, a man could
have an actual substantive life in the state through labour and struggle with the
external world and with himself. His life is characterised by this struggle to
appropriate, change and shape the world. He strives to make the world embody
his own subjectivity, and so `he ®ghts his way to self-subsistent unity with
himself'. Out of the simple union of the family, he can `particularize' himself into
civil society, and eventually sublate himself into the comprehensive universality
of the state. His family gives him `a tranquil intuition of this unity',81 but it is
only as a member of the state that `the individual himself has objectivity, genuine
individuality, and an ethical life'.82
A woman's mind, by contrast, maintains itself in the simple, tranquil
universality of the family. She is passive in relation to her externality, unable
to struggle with the world or to reach self-subsistent unity with herself. Instead, a
woman has her `substantive destiny' in the family.83 She cannot emerge out of the
life of the family and into the world of `history-constituting activity'.84 The
essence of marriage is monogamy, the mutual, wholehearted `free surrender by
both sexes of their personality'.85 Men can gain another, more enlightened
personality in civil society, through their interactions with the external world.
Women can only realise their subjectivities within the domestic world. They do
not have the opportunity of `struggling with the world, by making nature
conform to [their] purpose'.86 She cannot experience herself as an active,
76
H. Smith, Letters to Married Women (London: 1748), p. 83.
Fleetwood, Relative Duties, p. 264.
78
Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, p. 138.
79
Prokhovnik, Rational Woman, p. 121.
80
Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, p. 148.
81
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (1821), } 166.
82
Ibid., }258.
83
Ibid., }166.
84
S. Benhabib, `On Hegel, women and irony', Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, ed.
Shanley and Pateman, p. 135.
85
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, }168
86
Hegel, quoted in Dickenson, Property, p. 98.
77
`NOT EMPIRE, BUT EQUALITY'
453
respectable, masculine, human character with ennobling talents and durable
virtues that can make a difference to the worldÐeven as a mother. Her `nature'
means that she remains suspended by destiny. Under the terms of a sexual
contract which enshrines difference, rather than being the slave of a tyrant, she
®nds herself in `rational subjection to a Prince' and to nature, which is bound to
be preferred to `the disquiet and uneasiness of Unlimited Liberty'.87
VI. CONCLUSION: EMPIRE OR EQUALITY?
Wollstonecraft argues that the fraudulent sexual contract based on force and
domination rests on women's slavery which denies them access to reason and to
morality. After a revolution in female manners, women become active citizens
and rational improvers as republican mothers and so achieve a degree of selfownership. The false sexual contract corrupts both men and women because the
`recognition that stems from domination is a fraud' for the master as well as the
slave.88 These patriarchal relations are bound to prove debasing and corrupting.
Arbitrary privilege can never form the basis of morality. Women should not be
aiming for negative power over others, a mere inversion of patriarchy, but for
power over themselves: `It is not empire, but equality, that they should contend
for' (p. 186).
The dif®culty is that this power over themselves still rests on notions of
re¯ection, self-government and independence from one another, `features of
male-centered individuality'89 which have proved particularly problematic to
extend to women. The model of men and women who are independent of one
another in the same way as men are independent of one another implies a `selfpossessing individual linked to others only by agreement'. This has failed to do
justice to the complex interdependencies which characterise the lives of many
women.90 It is a model which promotes rather than undoes the `sel®sh ties of
convenience', assuming that individual lives can be governed by contract. Cohen
argues that self-ownership represents `the bare bourgeois freedom which
distinguishes the most abject proletarian from a slave'. It offers no more than
`a very con®ned freedom' which cannot be reconciled with equality.91
The problem with Wollstonecraft and with much of the subsequent liberal and
feminist theorising is that women are often forced to choose between these `ties
of convenience' on the one hand and the `grand duties annexed to them by
nature' on the other. Equality or difference, empire or equality, care or
citizenship are stark choices to make, and also ones which are not as simple as
they look. Wollstonecraft's route to equality, for example, brings us to an empire
87
Lady's New-years Gift (London: 1688), p. 61.
C. Willett, Maternal Ethics and other Slave Moralities (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 116.
89
Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, p. 134.
90
M. Minow and M. L. Shanley, `Revisioning the family: relational rights and responsibilities',
Reconstructing Political Theory, ed. M. L. Shanley and U. Narayan (Oxford: Polity, 1997), p. 90.
91
Cohen, Self-ownership, p. 101±2.
88
454
LAURA BRACE
of difference. She recognises that ending the false sexual contract requires `a
radical change in what it means to be a masculine or a feminine social being', but
not how radical that change needs to be if the new sexual contract is going to
overcome the twin problems of force and `nature'.92 This is in part because she
sees the sexual contract as a universal problem for all women, regardless of race
or class, which means that she imposes a single `solution' on all women.93 Her
recognition that some middle- and upper-class women gain at least a form of
respect and power from `hugging their chains' and endorsing the fraudulent
sexual contract is not balanced by a recognition that they do so by exercising
power over other, poorer and more `exotic' women.94 The new sexual contract is
still based on `force' in the sense that it makes participationÐheterosexuality,
motherhood, domesticityÐcompulsory: under its terms, women are forced into
`rational subjection'.
Like Rousseau, Wollstonecraft sets up a dichotomy between the corruption of
representation based on sel®sh ties of convenience, and republican, moral and
natural duties. We need to ®nd a way between the two, to unmask `the
con®gurations of social power that provide the backdrop to any contracts'.95
Minow and Shanley argue that by taking account of the inequalities and
dependencies behind contracts and paying attention to `relationships of care and
connection' we can construct a theory of relational rights and responsibilities
which does not absolutely reject the model of a self-suf®cient individual.96 Doing
so means replacing self-ownership with a conception of autonomy which offers
`the circumstance of genuine control over one's own life' and opens up the widest
possible range of genuine choices.97 Such autonomy would mean that women
could not be compelled to discharge their `natural' duties and could acquire
countenance from their fellow creatures on the grounds of a shared individuality
rather than their `real femininity'.
Some of Wollstonecraft's own arguments can be put to use in developing such
a notion of autonomy. Her analysis of the negative sexual contract makes it clear
that tyranny, in its many denominations, is damaging both for the subordinate
and for the superior. Its basis in domination and in arbitrary privilege means that
it has to be incompatible with equality and autonomy wherever it raises `its
brazen front'. While I would argue that we need to be critical of her `solution',
the notions of reason, sympathy, a `common relationship' and rational fellowship
all have the potential to move beyond negative and non-relational ideas of power.
Her version of reason emphasises our common humanity, while virtue guarantees
92
Pateman, Sexual Contract, p. 160.
`No one ought to expect the forms of our liberation to be any less various than the forms of our
oppression'; E. V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1988), p. 132.
94
The term is taken from Wollstonecraft, `A vindication', p. 107.
95
Minow and Shanley, `Revisioning the family', p. 89.
96
Ibid., p. 99.
97
Cohen, Self-ownership, pp. 102, 236.
93
`NOT EMPIRE, BUT EQUALITY'
455
individuality and the struggle with our passions keeps our life stories separate but
entwined. The Vindication is an indictment of patriarchal power in its broadest
sense, understood as negative power which relies on force and denies the
possibility of equality. For Wollstonecraft, hereditary power is damaging in all its
forms, an illegitimate power whether it manifests itself in monarchy or in
patriarchal rule. Her attempt to formulate a more relational view of power and
self-sovereignty demonstrates the potential within liberalism to value the
individual self in its experience of relationship and of connection, `de®ned not
by re¯ection but by interaction'.98
Her theory of the reciprocal bonds of duty and of a common humanity united
by reason has the potential to reconstruct the individual self and notions of
autonomy and responsibility, moving `toward a relational individualism'.99
Wollstonecraft recognises that morality, as well as mental wellbeing, requires
`security and certainty that our efforts to externalize our subjectivity will be
respected' and not always refracted through others' perception of our bodies.100
This means recognising the interconnections, but also the differences and the
power differentials between women: equality for some which rests on empire
over others is not the same as power over ourselves. Security and trust are only
possible when both our individuality and our `common relationship' are
recognised and valued, allowing us to become moral and autonomous beings,
striving not for an equality which values only independence, nor for an `empire'
grounded only in ®xed, `natural' difference and compulsory duties.
98
C. Gilligan, `Remapping the moral domain: new images of the self in relationship',
Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought, ed. T. C.
Heller, M. Sosna and D. E. Wellbery (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 241.
99
N. Chodorow, `Toward a relational individualism: the mediation of self through psychoanalysis',
Reconstructing Individualism, ed. Heller et al., p. 207. See also L. Brace, `Imagining the boundaries of
a sovereign self', Reclaiming Sovereignty, ed. L. Brace and J. Hoffman (London: Cassell, 1997).
100
Dickenson, Property, p. 98.