Mysogyny and Feminism: The Case of Mary Wollstonecraft

Misogyny and feminism: a provocative pairing. And to attach the misogynist label to Mary Wollstonecraft, heroine of western feminism, seems provocation indeed. In 1994 Susan Gubar published an article on Wollstonecraft offering precisely these provocations. In her “Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradoxes of ‘It Takes One to Know One,’” Gubar took a coolly irreverent look at Wollstonecraft and the western feminist tradition that succeeded her, and concluded that for the last two hundred years “the histories of feminism and misogyny have been (sometimes shockingly) dialogic.” 1 From 1792 on, feminists, fondly believing they were marching to their own political drum, have in fact all too often been engaged in an elaborate pas de deux with women-hating contemporaries, matching idea to idea in an “uncanny mirror dancing that repeatedly link[ed] feminist polemicists to their rivals and antagonists.” 2 Hence the “Takes One to Know One” of her subtitle: the feminist knows at whom to hurl the charge of woman-hater because his features are so shockingly like her own; the adversarial hailing is a repudiated self-recognition. Accuser and accused are one. This article begins from Gubar’s provocations. If Mary Wollstonecraft can be described, as Gubar emphatically does, as a misogynist, how are we ‐ as inheritors of Wollstonecraft’s project ‐ to understand the origins and implications of this anti-womanism for her emancipationist aspirations? What kind of heretical historical writing is capable of addressing such difficult issues? Heroic versions of the feminist past of the sort popular during the heyday of women’s liberation clearly will not do, but integrating a misogynist element into the feminist story will require more than just abandoning these earlier idealizations. If Gubar’s argument is even partly right ‐ as I think it is ‐ a radical revision of approach is needed. The necessary revision I am proposing here is toward a method that combines traditional modes of historical enquiry ‐ the intensive scrutiny of sources and context ‐ with an interpretive theory capable of tackling what I will call the deep agenda of feminism, by which I mean the unconscious fantasies as well as the conscious intentions fuelling feminist ideals. Every political agenda is driven by unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable wishes as well as by more or less realistic ambitions: desire in the social/political sphere is no more reason-governed than desire in any other area of life. This may seem so obvious as to hardly be