Mary Wollstonecraft, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The question assumes a contradiction, and I do not grant it. A contradiction would require that I had taught women to feel nothing, or that I had claimed to be exempt from the system I described. I did neither. What I attacked was a marriage in which a woman sells her person for maintenance, and an education that trains her to nothing but pleasing.
What I set against it was friendship between equals, a bond that rests on esteem and not on appetite alone. Look at what I did with Imlay. When he would have married me, I refused to bind him, because I would not make him answerable for the father, sisters and brothers I was supporting.1 That was the act of a woman keeping her independence, not a woman seeking maintenance; I took no bargain of the kind I had denounced.
I held the engagement sacred without the ceremony, and we planned to go to America, where it might be accomplished.2 The error was not in the principle that love should be too honest to need the bondage of authority. It was in the man. I leaned upon a reed, and found it out slowly, in letters from Sweden and Norway that grew cold.3 When I wrote that love, dear delusion, was something rigorous reason had forced me to resign, and that my rational prospects were blasted just as I had learned to be contented with rational enjoyments, I was not recanting the Vindication.4
I was reporting what it describes. A woman is taught from infancy to feel, to attach, to live in another's regard, and her understanding is awakened late and at her own cost. When passion arrived, it found a heart trained to feel and a reason that had never been taught to govern it. The two attempts on my life, the Thames and the rain-soaked walk on Putney Bridge, are not refutations of reason.5
They are the account of what the false system leaves in a woman, written in my own body. A physician who falls ill of the disease she has described has not disproved her diagnosis. So I will not call it a life that contradicts a thought. Call it a life that paid for it. I had argued that the heart, ungoverned by judgment, makes women the victims of whoever is willing to use them.
I then lived that argument at its bitterest, and I did not hide it. That I afterwards recovered, so far that I could meet Imlay in private without pain, is the other half of the proof: reason, though it came late, did not abandon me.6 What I demand still is what I demanded then, that girls be educated so that they meet love as rational creatures, and not as I met it.
Marriage as the laws and manners make it is a bargain in which a woman sells her person for maintenance, and the law that gives the husband her property, her children and her body makes it legal prostitution; the true bond is friendship between equals, and love that is not grounded in esteem is a passion that burns out and leaves contempt.7
She loved a man who was not her equal, bore his child without the law, wrote him letters that beg and reproach, and twice tried to die; she then married Godwin and kept separate rooms.8 The letters are hers and she does not disown them: they show what the heart does when the understanding has been trained to nothing else, and they are the case the Vindication describes.910
When Gilbert Imlay would have married Mary Wollstonecraft, she herself refused to bind him; she would keep him legally exempt from her responsibilities towards the father, sisters, brothers, whom she was supporting.Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
The engagement was however considered by her of the most sacred nature, and they formed the plan of emigrating to America, where they should be enabled to accomplish it.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
But the letters she had from him in Sweden and Norway were cold, and she came back to find that she was wholly forsaken for an actress from a strolling company of players.Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
Love, dear delusion! Rigorous reason has forced me to resign; and now my rational prospects are blasted, just as I have learned to be contented with rational enjoyments.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
She paced the road at Putney on an October night, in 1795, in heavy rain, until her clothes were drenched, that she might sink more surely, and then threw herself from the top of Putney Bridge.Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
she afterwards had a private interview with him, which did not produce any painful emotions.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
The woman who is faithful to the father of her children demands respect, and should not be treated like a prostitute; though I readily grant, that if it be necessary for a man and woman to live together in order to bring up their offspring, nature never intended that a man should have more than one wife.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
S---- to wait a moment, and instantly going into the counting-house, desired Mr. Venables to return with me to the dining-parlour. "He laid down his pen, and entered with me, without observing any change in my countenance. I shut the door, and, giving him the letter, simply asked, 'whether he wrote it, or was it a forgery?' "Nothing could equal his confusion.Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 4 vols
She only felt in earnest to insist on the privilege of her nature. The sarcasms of society, and the condemnation of a mistaken world, were nothing to her, compared with acting contrary to those feelings which were the foundation of her principles.Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 4 vols
She therefore pays her tythe of mint and cummin, and thanks her God that she is not as other women are. These are the blessed effects of a good education! these the virtues of man's helpmate. I must relieve myself by drawing a different picture.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
The question the Memoirs made inescapable and that every biography since has asked; the texts, read together, make the life an argument rather than a refutation.