Sinister for the greater good

First, I have to give a shout-out to Wallstonecraft’s rhetoric: It seems that Jane Austen took her snark from Mary Wallstonecraft – education of women is a “barren blooming” engineered by men, “who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives.” Great stuff.

I’m sure the perennial commentary on this piece is how it remains completely relevant for contemporary times. Even if the specific characteristics around the image of female modesty have changed (many of which have not), the structural logic of dominance and subordination remains in place. Perhaps more importantly, we can see Wallstonecraft’s call for the meaningful education of women applicably relevant for any subjugated group. I read this and thought of my days teaching low-income Black and Latino students in the Bronx –children who deserve to be educated in a manner that develops their humanity, in a manner that does not simply lead them to a re-inscription of stereotypes of “all they’ll ever amount to.” Then when they meet those expectations, they blame them for failure. Wallstonecraft asks, “Why do men halt between two opinions, and expect impossibilities? Why do they expect virtue from a slave, or from a being whom the constitution of civil society has rendered weak, if not vicious?”

One interesting paradox in this piece is the way in which Wallstonecraft uses the very constructions of masculinity and femininity as a rhetorical tool in her argument against those constructions. At one point she zings, “I presume that RATIONAL men will excuse me for endeavouring to persuade them to become
 more masculine and respectable.” It is interesting that she uses the constructions of masculinity and femininity to insult men, but at the same time, demonstrates how pervading is the normalcy around those constructions.

Wallstonecraft demonstrates how the most sinister subjugation is the one that purports to be for the benefit of all mankind, blanketed in universalism. In one example of her argument around this point, she writes: “The sensualist, indeed, has been the most dangerous of tyrants, and women have been duped by their lovers, as princes by their ministers, whilst dreaming that they reigned over them.” There’s also evidence of this kind of subjugation done in the name of greater good of constructing a power dynamic in the orientalist attitudes Wallstonecraft displays, reminding us again of how deeply pervading these kinds of narratives can be even for someone railing against them.