Mary Wollstonecraft: Life Work and Legacy
Conference
and
The Annual Mary Wollstonecraft Public Lecture
‘Mary in the Twenty-first Century’
by Professor Michèle Le Doeuff
March 8 2017
Conference: 9.00am – 5.00pm
Lecture: 6.00pm – 7.00pm
The Guildhall, Lowgate, Hull HU1 2AA
As part of the celebrations for Hull as UK City of Culture 2017 the University of Hull is hosting
an interdisciplinary celebration of the life, work and legacy of the political theorist and activist
Mary Wollstonecraft. (1759-1797). Wollstonecraft is most famous for her 1792 A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman, the first feminist political text. She also wrote novels, travel writing
and other works of political philosophy. Her life, Virginia Woolf suggested was ‘an
experiment’. She mixed with fellow radicals and was in Paris to witness key events of the
French revolution. In the words of the new edition of the Vindication, in the Penguin books
Great Ideas series, she is one of ‘the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose
ideas shook civilisation and helped make us who we are’.
Mary Wollstonecraft spent her formative years in East Yorkshire (from the ages of nine to
fifteen), longer than anywhere else in her life. It is said to be the only place she remembered
with any affection. Initially the family farmed at Walkington, outside Beverley, but three years
later took a house in the town centre.
Wollstonecraft has been honoured by the University since 2008 by an annual lecture named
after her.
SPONSORS
Hull University City of Culture
Annette Fitzsimons Memorial Fund
Centre for Gender Studies University of Hull
Journal of Gender Studies
School of Histories, Languages and Cultures, University of Hull
Royal Institute of Philosophy
Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies, University of Hull
Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP UK)
The Roberts Fund
Waterstone’s bookshop University of Hull
ORGANISING COMMITTEE:
Dr. Rachel Alsop
Dr. Suzanne Clisby
Dr. Anna Fitzer
Barbara Grabher
Professor Kathleen Lennon
Dr. Dawn Wilson
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SCHEDULE
9.00
REGISTRATION
9.30 -9.45
WELCOME
Ground Floor Room C1
Dr. Rachel Alsop
Centre for Gender Studies, University of Hull
Professor Chris Harris
Head of School of Histories, Languages and Cultures, University of Hull
9.45 – 10.30
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Ground Floor Room C1
Professor Janet Todd OBE
The First Life of Mary Wollstonecraft: Godwin’s perplexing
Memoirs
Chair: Dr. Anna Fitzer
10.30 – 10.45
REFRESHMENTS
10.45 – 12.15
Panel 1
PANEL SESSIONS
Rights, Autonomy and Revolution
Ground Floor Room C1
Carlotta Cossutta
«To have power over themselves» Mary Wollstonecraft and the self-government
of women
Dr. Ros Hague
Autonomy and Citizenship in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft
JI Hee Kim
‘When will thy government become the most perfect’: History, Violence, and
Revolution in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French
Revolution
Panel 2
Wollstonecraft the Writer:
Letters, Travel Writing, and Rhetoric
First Floor Reception
Valentina Pramaggiore
Deconstructing the Boundaries: Genre and Gender in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters
written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
Kerri-Leanne Taylor
A Mother’s Legacy: Finding Mary Wollstonecraft in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda
Olivia Laws,
How Does Wollstonecraft’s Rhetoric Take Account of a Male-Dominated
Public Sphere?
Chair: Dr. Anna Fitzer
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Panel 3
Reception and Legacy
First Floor Room 77
Angela Maione
Rights of Woman over the Centuries: Between Radical Politics and
Domestication
Alice Elizabeth Whiteoak
Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘Uncovering the Legacy of Feminism’
Anousch Khorikian
Breathless: Sylvia Plath and Mary Wollstonecraft’s posthumous lives
Chair: Dr. Suzanne Clisby
12.15 – 1.15
LUNCH
First Floor Reception
1.15 – 2.30
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Ground Floor Room C1
Memorialization of Mary Wollstonecraft
Caroline Criado Perez OBE
Roberta Wedge
Chair: Dr. Rachel Alsop
2.30 – 4.00
Panel 4
PANEL SESSIONS
Influence and Contemporary Importance
First Floor Room 77
Corinne Painter
Philosophy and Feminism in Germany: The League of Jewish Women
Katarzyna Ciarcińska, and Katarzyna Zawadzka
The Actual character of Mary Wollstonecraft's work. A vindication of the rights
of Polish women
Professor Anna Birch
The Wollstonecraft Live Experience
Chair: Barbara Grabher
Panel 5
Philosophical Reflection
Ground Floor Room C1
Dr. Victoria Browne
Feminist historiography and Wollstonecraft’s religiosity:
historical time, the secular and the divine
Professor Nóra Séllei
The Female Body and Feminine Embodiment in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Dr. Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir
Why Wollstonecraft is not a Misogynist
Chair: Dr. Steve Burwood
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4.00 – 4.15
REFRESHMENTS
4.15 – 5.00
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Ground Floor Room C1
Dr. Sandrine Bergès
Revolution, Feminism and Religion
Chair: Professor Kathleen Lennon
5.00 – 5.45
DRINKS RECEPTION
5.45 – 6.00
WELCOME
First Floor Reception
Professor Michael Gratzke
Research Dean, Faculty of Arts Cultures and Education
University of Hull
6.00 -7.00
THE ANNUAL MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT PUBLIC LECTURE
First Floor Reception
Professor Michèle Le Doeuff
Mary in the XXIst Century
Chair Dr. Dawn Wilson
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INTRODUCING KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Professor Janet Todd OBE
A distinguished biographer of Wollstonecraft and President of Lucy Cavendish College,
Cambridge until she became a full-time writer and researcher in 2015, Professor Janet Todd
OBE is an internationally acclaimed expert on Wollstonecraft’s life, work and legacy.
Professor Todd’s many books include: Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life; Death
and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle; The Complete Works of
Mary Wollstonecraft; and The Complete Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Caroline Criado Perez OBE
A prominent campaigner for the memorialization of women, Caroline Criado Perez is a
feminist author and freelance journalist, writing for a range of media including, The
Guardian, The Times and the Independent. She is the founder of The Women’s Room
(http://www.thewomensroom.org.uk/). Her first book, Do It Like a Woman, was published
by Portobello Books in in 2015.
Roberta Wedge
As spokesperson for the high-profile Mary on the Green campaign for the
memorialization of Mary Wollstonecraft, Roberta Wedge has been an important voice in
raising the profile of Wollstonecraft’s continued legacy for women, rights and feminism.
Dr. Sandrine Bergès
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bilkent University, Turkey, Dr Sandrine Bergès is a
prominent Wollstonecraft scholar whose books include: Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of
the Rights of Women (Routledge), A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics (Palgrave
Macmillan), Plato on Virtue and the Laws (Continuum) and the co-edited volume The Social
and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (Oxford University Press).
Professor Michèle Le Doeuff
is one of the most important contemporary feminist Philosophers whose works include: The
Philosophical Imaginary; Hipparchia’s Choice and The Sex of Knowing. Her work provides
powerful critical analysis of the ways in which images and ideas can become unquestioned
orthodoxies that permeate our epistemic imaginary. For the University of Hull’s Annual
Mary Wollstonecraft Lecture 2017, she speaks about the continued legacy and importance
of Wollstonecraft’s life and work.
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PANEL ONE
10.45 -12.15
Rights, Autonomy and Revolution
Ground Floor Room C1
Carlotta Cossutta
“To have power over themselves» Mary Wollstonecraft and the self-government of women
Dr. Ros Hague
Autonomy and Citizenship in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft
JI Hee Kim,
‘When will thy government become the most perfect’: History, Violence, and Revolution in
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution
«To have power over themselves»
Mary Wollstonecraft and the self-government of women
Carlotta Cossutta,
Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale, unipmn.academia.edu/carlotta cossutta
Mary Wollstonecraft was often considered the mother of feminism and at the same time been
included by many thinkers - Pettit and Skinner all - within the republican tradition, but these
two lines of interpretation have rarely intertwined. In this paper, I will start from this account
to try, however, to combine these two perspectives, inspired by reflections of Virginia Sapiro
and Lena Halldenius. Observe the reflections of Wollstonecraft through the lens of
republicanism, in fact, allows me to bring out how to claim women's rights is intimately
connected to a rethinking of the boundaries of the public sphere.
I will discuss both the political and philosophical texts and the novels to show how Mary
Wollstonecraft proposes to extend citizenship to women not through a pure process of
inclusion, but as a process which modifies the characteristics of the citizenship itself, always
on the edge of the paradox of claiming equality preserving differences. In particular, I will
highlight the concept of virtue and freedom that emerge in the reflections of Wollstonecraft to
propose a reading of his thought as a Republican feminism, in which the two terms are not only
juxtaposed but deeply interconnected.
In this frame, I want to focus on the insistence of Wollstonecraft on the independence of women
– both economic and intellectual independence that allows women to be truly free. Thanks to
the unitary reading of philosophical writings, educational ones, and the novels I would like to
propose the idea that Wollstonecraft reveals an ideal of self-government in small groups: the
protagonists of the novels in fact choose to live, to be fulfilled, in small communities selfsufficient, autonomous and equals. A political proposal which appears in backlight in
Wollstonecraft thought that may be useful not only to deepen her theories, but also to dialogue
with contemporary feminisms.
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Autonomy and Citizenship in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Dr. Ros Hague,
Lecturer, Division of Politics and International Relations, School of Social Sciences,
Nottingham Trent University
This paper argues that republicanism would benefit from the inclusion of the work of Mary
Wollstonecraft who offers a strong notion of citizenship connected to her understanding of
autonomy, and her understanding of both autonomy and citizenship requires us to adopt a
disposition of non-domination. The development of republican values found across
Wollstonecraft’s work and her emphasis on education to achieve this can provide an important
addition to the contemporary literature on republicanism and this paper presents a reading of
republican autonomy from these values in Wollstonecraft’s work.
Wollstonecraft’s feminism was directed not only against patriarchy but also against the
aristocracy, two dangerous and corrupting forms of power. The strong civic community she
envisioned depended on these two forms of power being subverted by the development of a
body politic which thrived through active citizenship and an end to the moral corruption
wrought by the domination of the poor by the rich and of women by men. Wollstonecraft’s
writing provides a nuanced understanding of the problem of domination and she develops a
number of interlocking arguments in order to combat this in the form of self-government, active
citizenship and the potential of education. Wollstonecraft wanted citizens to participate actively
in political and civic life but also to retain the self-direction necessary to know their own minds.
In this paper, I read Wollstonecraft’s work as presenting a binding notion of citizenship
(traversing public/private) which allows for a basic level of autonomy. Wollstonecraft brings
citizenship and autonomy together – citizenship takes place in the public and the private,
autonomy can be limited in the public as well as the private sphere. The responsibilities of
citizenship are demanding because the ‘good’ citizen is always a citizen (at home or in public),
similarly, autonomy needs to flourish in all areas of life for it to have significance.
Wollstonecraft’s notion of citizenship requires the citizen to have a disposition towards nondomination, in turn that disposition enhances individual autonomy. The concept of autonomy
which this paper extrapolates from Wollstonecraft’s work is a rational and reflective autonomy
founded on the idea of non-domination.
‘When will thy government become the most perfect’: History, Violence, and
Revolution in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French
Revolution
JI Hee Kim,
University of York.
In April 1795, the Monthly Review praised Mary Wollstonecraft for ‘the attempt to investigate
[the French Revolution’s] origin, to estimate its political and moral value, and to predict its
probable consequence.’ In 1790, Wollstonecraft had put herself in the spotlight as the first
respondent to Edmund Burke’s anti-revolutionary text, Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790) and in 1794 published An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, which
8
she had written in France. While she stayed in Paris, this stage of the Revolution did not meet
the sanguine expectations the British people had held in 1790.
The View of the French Revolution shows how Wollstonecraft navigates the changing situation
in France and modifies her response to Burke’s Reflections. She wrote on the early stages of
the Revolution in her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and then returned to the same
subject in her View of the French Revolution. As Jane Rendall has argued, it is important to
consider Wollstonecraft’s View of the French Revolution as shaped by her perspective on the
later stages of the Revolution. Comparing these two texts therefore helps us to understand her
changing ideas about the Revolution.
In this paper, I argue that the violence had significant effects on Wollstonecraft’s understanding
of the Revolution. I look at why she changed the genre of her description of the Revolution
from the epistolary form to history. I also trace how her reflections on the Revolution changed,
comparing her earlier works and examining her wavering preferences for gradual improvement
and radical change.
PANEL TWO
10.45 -12.15
Wollstonecraft the Writer: letters, travel writing, and rhetoric
First Floor Reception
Valentina Pramaggiore
Deconstructing the Boundaries: Genre and Gender in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters written
during a short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
Kerri-Leanne Taylor
A Mother’s Legacy: Finding Mary Wollstonecraft in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda
Olivia Laws
How Does Wollstonecraft’s Rhetoric Take Account of a Male-Dominated Public Sphere?
Chair: Dr. Anna Fitzer
Deconstructing the Boundaries: Genre and Gender in Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
Valentina Pramaggiore
PhD candidate in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Bologna
The Letters written and published in 1796 by Mary Wollstonecraft represent a very
unconventional as well as an interesting example of XVIII century travelogue: the traveler
being a woman and one of the most important proto-feminists of all time. The sex and the
feminist views of the author engender the great unconventionality of the text that cannot be
labelled or restraint in one single category but has to be appreciated in its different tones and
drives.Wollstonecraft combines together the main elements of many different genres: travel
narrative,autobiography, feminist vindication and aesthetic theorization. In this epistolary
9
collection, the physical-geographical account of the countries she was visiting is blended with
the depiction of the people she meets, their habits, customs, food and laws. She perceives while
she is perceived: a single woman travelling alone with a child. The description of the nature
surrounding her is intertwined with her own feelings, producing a Romantic conception of the
human being overwhelmed by and subsumed into the natural elements. The journey through
the Scandinavian countries turns out to be more than a business travel, it takes the shape of an
inner route, a rediscovery of herself and of her experiences, including motherhood. The ability
to dismantle the boundaries the author evidences by dealing in such an innovative way with a
genre that was so popular at the time, is the same she shows by subverting the literary gender
stereotypes that saw women marginalised inside the domestic sphere. From Letters written
during a short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark emerges a woman capable of the
greatest sentimentality and, at the same time, of the smartest rationality, an active woman who
does not deny her femininity but who strongly refuses the passivity society has always
attributed to the female. Being a young middle class woman alone on a business trip,
Wollstonecraft embodies both the masculine and the feminine, proving that such a gendered
distinction is biased and stereotypical. Wollstonecraft’s fight for women’s freedom — in life
as well as in writing — was not only ground-breaking for her time, but is still inspiring. That
is the reason why a feminist critical analysis of how genre and gender are constructed and
related to each other in this hybrid work would further demonstrate what an exploratrice Mary
Wollstonecraft has been and what extraordinary contribution she made not only to the feminist
movement but also to literary history in general. In the Letters, she was able to “gender” the
travelogue not merely substituting a woman to a man as viewer and traveler, but modifying the
canons of the genre itself, making its borders permeable and changeable adapting to
circumstances. In the end, Wollstonecraft strongly affirms a female subjectivity who could and
wanted to inhabit every realm of sociability, while nourishing her true self and her inner world.
A Mother’s Legacy: Finding Mary Wollstonecraft in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda
Kerri-Leanne Taylor,
English Literature PhD Student, University of Miami, FL
This paper explores how Mary Shelley’s 1819 novella, Mathilda, challenges the strict
philosophies her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, offers in The Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792). Recent scholarship interprets Mathilda through a Freudian lens, which ignores
the novella’s feminist undertones. Furthermore, scholars have traditionally overlooked
Wollstonecraft’s influence upon her daughter, thus critics have not yet explored how Mathilda
extends and complicates Wollstonecraft’s feminist legacy. Whereas Vindication promotes
female advancement by working within the established gender hierarchy of the Georgian
period, Shelley directly confronts the era’s rigid gender roles in Mathilda. The novella’s
protagonist, Mathilda, is a progressive woman who defies patriarchal power structures. Shelley
was also influenced by the account of Wollstonecraft her father, and Wollstonecraft’s husband,
William Godwin provides in his expository biography, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication
of The Rights of Woman (1798). Memoirs reveals the inconsistencies between Wollstonecraft’s
private and public personas, rendering her as a much more complex individual than the
idealized woman Vindication portrays. Shelley read widely from both her mother’s and father’s
10
works, thus she creates Mathilda as a dynamic character who rejects Vindication’s rigid
standards, in favor of emulating aspects of Wollstonecraft’s tumultuous personal life and
unconventional behavior. Mathilda struggles, makes mistakes, and acts authentically; Shelley
therefore represents her protagonist as an attainable, multifaceted female model. Through
Mathilda, Shelley simultaneously builds upon and challenges her mother’s feminist legacy,
championing a radical, yet realistic version of nineteenth century womanhood.
How does Wollstonecraft’s rhetoric take account of the male dominated public
sphere?
Olivia Laws
associate member of Keble College at the University of Oxford currently studying
Philosophy, Politics and Economics
Mary Wollstonecraft authored A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) because she was
outraged at the unequal treatment of women in English society. During the eighteenth century,
there was very little constructive commentary on women’s political status. Her text is one of
the first political treatises to acknowledge the issue of gender inequality and advocate for
women’s rights. However, Wollstonecraft struggled to convince a male-dominated public
sphere that women deserved equal civil, political, and educational rights. In this essay, I argue
that Wollstonecraft’s rhetoric had to be carefully woven to persuade her male audience of her
central beliefs, or more precisely that men and women are equal human beings created by God
and endowed with reason. Wollstonecraft believed that women were unfairly taught to become
domesticated slaves, and as human beings gifted with rational thought, women ought to be
educated to achieve gender equality in society. If women remain ignorant and excluded from
the public sphere, then one half of the human species is enslaved by male dominance.
Wollstonecraft subtly addresses inequality between the sexes within a male-dominated print
culture using several rhetorical strategies: by making direct appeals to men, challenging them
to prove themselves reasonable and rational, by arguing that women’s current oppression was
incompatible with Christian morality, and by drawing on the example of Rousseau. However,
in employing these methods, Wollstonecraft opens herself up to criticism that she undermines
the position of the women she intends to defend. Susan Gubar has argued that because
Wollstonecraft concurs with male satirists, A Vindication has misogynistic undertones.
Through close reading of A Vindication and examining its contexts, I argue instead that
Wollstonecraft was not a misogynist. Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication to liberate women
from the patriarchy. The questions of this investigation are therefore, who were
Wollstonecraft’s readers? Why did she take extensive steps to accommodate her readers? What
does she achieve by doing this?
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PANEL THREE
10.45 -12.15
Reception and Legacies
First Floor Room 77
Angela Maione
Rights of Woman over the Centuries: Between Radical Politics and Domestication
Alice Elizabeth Whiteoak
Mary Wollstonecraft: Uncovering the Legacy of Feminism’
Anousch Khorikian
Breathless: Sylvia Plath and Mary Wollstonecraft’s posthumous lives
Chair: Dr. Suzanne Clisby
Rights of Woman over the Centuries: Between Radical Politics and Domestication
Angela Maione,
PhD Harvard University
This paper explores the history of the critical reception of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
from the eighteenth century to its breakthrough into academia in the twentieth century while
also tracing the evolution of the symbolic status of the feminist figure of Wollstonecraft. It
shows that the suppression of Wollstonecraft's political thought in the late-eighteenth century
occluded from view its initial reception and also the historical circumstances around its
suppression. It then shows that Rights of Woman was excavated first for intellectual, political,
and activist use in the nineteenth century (around suffrage and education) and later for
academic use in the twentieth century, at the cost of the continued repression of the radical
republican project into which it had been embedded upon its initial publication. Finally, it
argues that recent scholarship is now recovering Wollstonecraft’s original project.
Mary Wollstonecraft opens her most famous text by declaring that its project necessitates
disputing with "prevailing prejudice every inch of ground." It is well known that while her
radical republican critique of hereditary monarchical and patriarchal rule was initially very
well-received—and even helped to secure her status as a celebrity of her day—shortly after
Wollstonecraft's death, her political thought was suppressed; it then quickly became guarded
by the threat of contamination with the political toxicity that she had come to represent in light
of the dramatic shift in political climate. As anxiety over the Terror took hold, so did a
pervasive fear of the authors of the pamphlet war of the 1790s who lauded the French
Revolution. Buried under the story of her life, which was told and retold in such a way as to
create public scandal, Wollstonecraft's political writings were forced underground while the
aboveground figure of Wollstonecraft, the woman, served as the symbolic locus for attacks on
radical democrats.
Public discussion of Rights of Woman in the nineteenth century contributed to changes in the
status of women which, in some quarters, resulted in women gaining access to electoral systems
12
and to institutions of higher education. It also included, however, a progressive deradicalization
of Wollstonecraft as a figure, which reflected women's continued subjugation. At times, efforts
to rehabilitate Wollstonecraft's character had the same effect as those that sought to defame
her, insofar as both displaced her radical politics with discussion of her personal life. This paper
examines the practices in the critical reception that rendered Rights of Woman safe to interpret
again as long as Wollstonecraft’s own attention to domesticity was properly addressed.
While Wollstonecraft reception finally began to take place within academia in the 1970s,
academic feminists separated the second Vindication both from the first as well as from the
larger revolution controversy of which it was originally part. This paper suggests that these
scholarly practices are changing. Interpreters have begun to recover Wollstonecraft’s radical
politics and her republicanism. New readings, including the one implied in the present paper,
restore Wollstonecraft’s second Vindication to the public debate in which its politics were
manifestly radical.
Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘Uncovering the Legacy of Feminism’
Alice Elizabeth Whiteoak
current PhD in Women’s History at University of Hull
I’m interested in the legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft from a Women’s History perspective, with
my paper focusing on the qualities that have set her apart as the foremother of feminism. Unlike
notable female figures before her, Wollstonecraft’s association with feminist ideas is widely
accepted as historically accurate, rather than an anachronism that historians are so careful to
avoid. This surety provides a solid foundation for the feminist past, but also raises the question
as to why attempts to highlight feminist consciousness pre-18th century are often disregarded
as historically inaccurate and seen as attempts to force modern interpretations onto historical
sources. It is so often stressed that historical women aren’t feminists merely because their ideas
resonate with modern feminist thought: a historian must value voices rather than give meaning
to them.
In order to explore this issue, I will refer to work of Rachel Speght alongside that of
Wollstonecraft. Speght, a 17th century Englishwoman, published works under her own name
and is best known for refuting the work of Joseph Swetnam, noting his sexist attitude towards
women. This comparison of sorts will allow for a brief consideration as to the process of
identifying a feminist legacy, and the reasons as to why Wollstonecraft is so often attributed as
the first real feminist voice.
Through this discussion, I will comment on the qualities of Wollstonecraft’s legacy, as well as
the importance of historical circumstance in regards to ideas that challenge the norms of
society. Furthering my interdisciplinary perspective, I will consider the obstacles faced by
feminist historians and the process of recognising agency and intention in voices, without
decontextualising in favour of a unified feminist history. I note the specific value of
Wollstonecraft’s work, as well as the importance of tracing feminist thought wherever possible,
but stress that her work in particular offers an example of a critically aware female voice, and
one that will remain within feminist discussions for many generations to come.
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Breathless: Sylvia Plath and Mary Wollstonecraft’s posthumous lives
Anousch Khorikian
University of Hull
This paper draws parallels between Plath and Wollstonecraft’s posthumous lives. It builds, first
of all, on the idea that both women utilised Romantic conventions to consciously create
personas of themselves in their writing. Most noticeably, perhaps, both convincingly, artfully
present seemingly raw emotional and melancholy experience.
Facilitated by this apparently direct access to the personal, many – readers, critics, husbands,
biographers – have appropriated and modified these women’s Romantic self-representations
into their own representations of them: thus, together creating the Wollstonecraft Legend and
the Plath Myth. This paper explores these appropriations, and the tensions inherent in, how,
thus, these have both enabled the created ‘selves’ of Plath and Wollstonecraft to live on after
the writers’ deaths, and contributed to the posthumous silencing of these women.
PANEL FOUR
2.30 – 4.00
Influence and Contemporary Importance
First Floor Room 77
Corinne Painter
Philosophy and Feminism in Germany: The League of Jewish Women
Katarzyna Ciarcińska, and Katarzyna Zawadzka
The Actual character of Mary Wollstonecraft's work. A vindication of the rights of Polish
women.
Professor Anna Birch
The Wollstonecraft Live Experience
Chair: Barbara Grabher
Philosophy and Feminism in Germany: the League of Jewish Women
Corinne Painter
Henry Moore Institute
The League of Jewish Women (Jüdischer Frauenbund or JFB) was founded in 1904 by Bertha
Pappenheim (1859-1936) who had written a translation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Women, which influenced the aims of this movement. The JFB
was a national organisation, which grew rapidly to become the largest Jewish women’s
association in Germany and their membership was broadly middle class. Initially the
organisation focused on social work in the Jewish community but soon expanded beyond this
to campaign for women’s education, the development of employment opportunities, and
women’s suffrage. Like Wollstonecraft the JFB used the interconnection between the public
and private spheres to create a space for women and to campaign for social change.
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By 1904, Bertha Pappenheim had long been involved in the women’s movement. Since a
period of severe mental ill health, which led her to become Freud’s famous case study ‘Anna
O’, Pappenheim had recognised the importance of social work and campaigning as a way to
provide meaningful occupation and support to bourgeois women. In 1899 she published a
German translation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (Mary
Wollstonecraft – Eine Verteidigung der Rechte der Frau) and the influence of Wollstonecraft’s
thinking can be seen throughout the JFB, in both their campaigns and aims. Like
Wollstonecraft, the JFB engaged with and debated the ideas of other Enlightenment thinkers
such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Moses Mendelssohn. The JFB also altered and adapted
these Enlightenment ideals to make sense of their contemporary society and their place within
it. This paper will explore some examples of how the JFB understood their world through the
philosophies they engaged with and developed.
The German Jewish community at the start of the twentieth century was a community facing
specific stresses. Although Jews had been legally emancipated in 1871, discrimination still
affected where many Jewish Germans lived, the types of jobs they had, and their interactions
with wider non-Jewish society. Additionally, pogroms in Eastern Europe had led to an influx
of Jewish migrants, who were mainly Orthodox and poor and formed a highly visible minority
in German cities such as Berlin and Munich. The German Jewish community was divided
between wanting to help these migrants, either on humanitarian grounds or as coreligionists,
and seeking to distance themselves from this group for fear of attracting the attention of antiSemites. Jewish Germans often felt obliged to prove their citizenship as anti-Semites often
publicly denounced them as not German. Through their social work, the JFB hoped to
demonstrate their citizenship (through service to the state) and alleviate the suffering of those
around them. The First World War and the economic uncertainty that followed created a
perilous situation for the JFB which only worsened during the Third Reich. As such, the JFB
consistently reinterpreted thinkers such as Wollstonecraft and Mendelssohn to try and
understand their situation. This paper will examine this heretofore unexplored use of
philosophers by the JFB in order to shed light on how a community under threat used
philosophy to shape their identity and respond to change.
Actual character of Mary Wollstonecraft's work. A vindication of the rights of Polish
women.
Katarzyna Ciarcińska
Katarzyna Zawadzka
University of Szczecin, Poland
Mary Wollstonecraft's philosophical and social treatises take the reader right into the middle
of a revolutionary debate. Wollstonecraft's writings were truly rebellious, since she openly
criticised the patriarchal, oppressive tradition forcibly pushing women to the role of slaves.
Not only Wollstonecraft's writings concerned the difficulties that women experienced when
trying to gain access to work and education. She also tackled the topic of exclusion of women
from the public sphere. She criticised the institution of "holy matrimony" – according to her,
marriage (understood in her times as the only possible success for women) was actually, a
form of legalised prostitution, and a way of pushing women away from the public life.
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Wollstonecraft believed that women were deprived of so many rights and privileges
accessible to men only, that they were actually slaves.
Wollstonecraft's works are (unfortunately) still actual. Even now, inequality permeates our
societies: taking multiple forms and performed in various ways – sometimes so transparent,
that it is not recognisable as something wrong. We still need to educate people about equality
of men and women, secure and respect their rights and allow them unbiased access to politics,
business and education. The actual character of Wollstonecraft's writings is especially visible
when we speak about the events currently taking place in Poland (black protest of 2016 –
nationwide women's strike). Right after when women's movements started gaining more
support and strength, they are forced to struggle with the phenomenon of backlash. Polish
women obtained their right to vote in 1918, but now – almost a century later – they seem to be
losing what they gained in their long and fierce struggle, in a country stricken with war,
communist regime and social upheavals. For the last 25 years, Polish women tried their best to
improve their newly-established position, yet today they face the threat of revocation of their
rights and objectification of women by conservative law-makers and politicians. It seems that
the threat of losing women's rights in Poland is real and calls for a new vindication – vindication
of the rights of Polish women.
The Wollstonecraft Live Experience!
Professor Anna Birch FRSA
Language that is compelled to repeat what it seeks to constrain. [It] invariably
reproduces and restages the very speech that it seeks to shut down. In this way,
speech exceeds the censor by which it is constrained.
(Butler,1997, p129)
Drawing on the early work of feminist philosopher Judith Butler I have sought to create a
‘living monument’ to Mary Wollstonecraft using live performance, film and book publishing.
This approach researches through performance the contribution made by Butler to recognize
the repetition and rehearsal that produces gendered identities. In Feminist Perspectives on the
Body (2010, 2014) Lennon argues the importance of embodiment in ‘subjectivity, corporality
and identity’ in ‘making sense of sexed difference’. The possibilities afforded by live
performance, film and place to create the conditions where resignification (Butler, 1993, p55)
might emerge is the practice research methodology discussed in this paper. The aim is to
produce an ongoing and living monument to memorialize Wollstonecraft’s life and legacy.
I live in the same neighborhood as Mary Wollstonecraft lived and worked on Newington Green,
Hackney where she ran a school for girls testing her ideas on education (1784). A critical mass
of eighteenth century radicals were drawn to Newington Green where Wollstonecraft debated
and developed her conviction that woman should have representation in parliament; one
hundred years before the suffragettes.
To connect with her radical voice and calls for ‘women to have power over themselves’ our
site-specific performance and film memorializes the ‘founder of feminism’. The Unitarian
chapel (pew 19) where Mary prayed is the starting point for our ‘living monument’ films and
gallery installations, which travel beyond the ‘Green’ to celebrate Wollstonecraft’s local and
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global legacy. 'Mother of feminism reborn in triplicate. Wollstonecraft makes for a great
multimedia heroine. Long may she live!' (Independent on Sunday, 2005).
An original version of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792 is held in the Hackney
archive. To mark Wollstonecraft’s legacy as the first woman travel writer The Wollstonecraft
Live Experience! (Birch, A and Iohe, T: 2010) limited edition art book is written as a travel log
and deposited next to Wollstonecraft’s book. My productions of the most famous and effective
women’s suffrage play A Pageant of Great Women by Cicely Hamilton, (Pageant and Pioneers
Conference, Hull (2011) http://bit.ly/2iiTH8J and March of Women, Glasgow (2015)
http://bit.ly/2iV0p5z) both celebrated Wollstonecraft in the procession of great women from
history. In these ways, the ‘living monument’ continues to show how Wollstonecraft’s voice
has aroused other women's curiosity and influenced their artistic and political voices over the
years.
This paper seeks to explore how both audience and performer embodiment in site-specific
performance might offer some opportunities for gender resignification through iteration,
repetition and rehearsal. In this way, our living monument engages both with Wollstonecraft’s
writing and her life, work and legacy.
Confined, then, in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to
plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792.
PANEL FIVE
2.30 – 4.00
Philosophical Reflections
Ground Floor Room C1
Dr. Victoria Brown
Feminist historiography and Wollstonecraft’s religiosity: historical time, the secular and the
divine
Professor Nóra Séllei
The Female Body and Feminine Embodiment in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of
the Rights of Woman
Dr. Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir
Why Wollstonecraft is not a Misogynist
Chair: Dr. Stephen Burwood
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Feminist historiography and Wollstonecraft’s religiosity: historical time, the secular
and the divine
Dr. Victoria Browne
Oxford Brookes University
A distinctly religious lexicon and sensibility permeate many of Wollstonecraft’s writings, yet
this rarely receives mention within popular representations of her life, work and legacy today.
My paper will explore this forgetting of Wollstonecraft’s religiosity in relation to the
marginalization of religion, or default secularism, within contemporary western feminism more
generally speaking, and moreover, the teleological model of history and modernity which has
predominated within feminist historiography for the past few decades. The teleological impulse
and structure of mainstream feminist storytelling, I will argue, results in Wollstonecraft’s
thought being treated as anticipatory of contemporary forms of secular feminism, and hence
even when her religious faith is acknowledged, it is rendered incidental rather than essential to
her ideas and worldview. Finally, I will ask how taking Wollstonecraft’s religiosity seriously
might have a transformative impact upon the feminist historiographical imagination, helping
to challenge the self-image of western feminism as inherently secular and the presumption that
feminist time is necessarily secular time.
The Female Body and Feminine Embodiment in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Professor Nóra Séllei
Deputy Director, Department for British Studies, Institute of English and American Studies,
University of Debrecen
The female body and feminine embodiment have always haunted western philosophy as a
problem. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, written in a period when the cult of sensibility
put the notion of the body into a new perspective, engages with the issue of the female body in
multiple, and sometimes contradictory ways. I wish to explore her approach to the female body
and embodiment in her Vindication, and investigate how the female body is compared to the
male body, how the female body is related to feeling and the intellect, how the female body is
seen as the result of education, furthermore, how Wollstonecraft argues for the idea that what
we today call embodiment has an impact upon the mind and the intellect.
To analyse her concept of the female body and feminine embodiment, rather scattered in the
Vindication, while also a central concept that haunts the whole text, I will rely on various
philosophical and theoretical sources. Starting off from how the eighteenth century constructed
the man of feeling, contesting the absolute priority of reason, I will argue that in spite of the
cultural emphasis on sensibility, there is a marked difference once gender is at play in the
construction of a human subject, implied in Wollstonecraft’s famous passages warning women
of complying fully with the standards of feminine sensibility that render them weak creatures.
Whereas the man of feeling apparently seems to gain from his capacity of sensibility, the
woman of feeling can rather be seen in the Vindication as losing out on her humanity if fully
subscribing to contemporary notions of femininity that are deeply related to the body, which,
in turn, is inscribed into the cult of sensibility.
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Apart from the 18th-century philosophical-cultural context, Wollstonecraft’s notion of the
female body and embodiment can also be interpreted using 20th-century theories. Whereas in
respect of her analysis of the female body, Simone de Beauvoir can be seen as Wollstonecraft’s
descendent due to her critique of femininity arising from women’s positioning, I find Iris
Young’s double approach (using both Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the lived
body) to the analysis of the female body and feminine embodiment more in harmony with
Wollstonecraft’s concept because in my reading Wollstonecraft’s notion of the female body
and embodiment can not only be regarded as an impediment in the construction of the feminine
subject, but also as a potential, an empowering element once used to its full capacities as a
result of education, and thus even goes beyond Iris Young’s analysis of the feminine body and
spatiality (1980). In the Vindication, Wollstonecraft’s argument by implication takes issue with
the limitations that Young even at the end of the 20th century describes as “an ambiguous
transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with the surroundings”
(1980:145). This is why I claim that Wollstonecraft’s notion of the female body and feminine
embodiment is ambiguous: both a gendered limitation and a means of empowerment that opens
up the potential for a new feminine motility, embodiment and spatiality.
Why Wollstonecraft is not a Misogynist
Dr. Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir
research specialist, Institute of Philosophy, `University of Iceland
Their senses are inflamed, and their understandings neglected, consequently they
become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about
by every momentary gust of feeling. [...] Ever restless and anxious, their over
exercised sensibility not only renders them uncomfortable themselves, but
troublesome, to use a soft phrase, to others. All their thoughts turn on things
calculated to excite emotion; and feeling, when they should reason, their conduct is
unstable, and their opinions are wavering—not the wavering produced by
deliberation or progressive views, but by contradictory emotions.
In her paper “Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of “It Takes One to
Know One””, Susan Gubar cites the above passage, as well as several others, as examples of
Wollstonecraft‘s misogyny. Gubar claims that there is an element of misogyny widespread in
feminism and calls it ‘feminist misogyny’. Responding to this accusation, Barbara Taylor
claims that the “woman” to which Wollstonecraft attributes all these vices is a construct and
not something essential to all those belonging to the corresponding category. Furthermore,
Taylor points out that Gubar neglects to explain what misogyny is.
In this paper, I take the accusation of Wollstonecraft's misogyny under further scrutiny
alongside my account of misogyny. I argue that misogyny is best described as a dehumanizing
attitude to women. In order to be misogynistic, it is not sufficient to have a negative attitude to
to femininity or some aspects of womanhood. For example, the many feminists who have
negative feelings towards the restrictions associated with socially enforced femininity are not
thereby misogynists. In order for an attitude to be misogynistic, it needs a more sinister element
concerning the humans involved, which I argue is dehumanization.
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While Wollstonecraft certainly has many negative things to say about femininity and even
about women, she does not dehumanize women. On the contrary, her aim is to emphasize the
common humanity of women and men and to find ways to enable all humans to make the most
of their capacities. With her negative and, admittedly, often harsh remarks, Wollstonecraft is
criticizing a dehumanizing social structure that turns people into flawed versions of what they
could become under better circumstances. As her ultimate goal is to empower women and to
find ways to bring out their capacity to be enlightened moral beings, it seems by no means
fitting to consider her a misogynist.
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