ABSTRACT
But neither Wollstonecraft’s use of the discourse of natural rights, nor the scandal of her personal career, seem to have dismayed her. In 1798 she reports that Wollstonecraft’s ‘death shocked and concerned me’,3 and, in a letter to Humphry Repton, she writes in praise of Godwin’s Memoirs that:
Seward seems to have found in Wollstonecraft’s work and life principles she could continue to admire even though she recognized the sympathy between Wollstonecraft’s political opinions and the radicalism she hated and feared. She went on to explain, in her discussion of the Vindication of 1792, that:
What’s intriguing about Seward’s comments, I think, is the implication that Wollstonecraft’s arguments about the education of women are somehow separable from the politics of her Vindication of their rights. Seward links her admiration for Wollstonecraft as an educational theorist with her feeling for her as a woman victimized by what she described as her ‘basely betrayed attachment to that villain Imlay,’ rather than with arguments for rights to sexual and political equality.6 Now, I don’t want to suggest that it was commonplace for women who rejected Wollstonecraft’s political views to see her theories on the education of women as a distinct body of beliefs, uncoloured by her radicalism, and capable of being uncoupled from the claim to sexual equality. Writing in July 1792, Sarah Trimmer, for example, remembered the second Vindication exclusively as a claim for ‘a further degree of liberty or consequence for women’ within marriage; a claim which, she felt, threatened her own ‘happiness in having a husband to assist me in forming a proper judgement, and in taking upon him the chief labour of providing for a family’. Trimmer regretted that Wollstonecraft had not employed her ‘extraordinary abilities…to more
advantage to society’.7 In August of the same year, Horace Walpole wrote congratulating Hannah More on not having read the Vindication. Apparently confident of More’s agreement, he observes that:
More herself claimed to find the notion of the rights of woman both absurd, and a regrettable staining of ‘domestic manners…with the prevailing hue of public principles’.9 Whether or not they had actually read the second Vindication, these writers clearly perceived it in the context of a polemical genre associated primarily with the discourse of rights-they perceived it as a political text.
