Wollstonecraft’s relationship to Christian faith defies partisan classification
Wollstonecraft and Religion by Brenda Ayres. Anthem Press, 2024. 380 pp., $110.00
Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent by Emily Dumler-Winckler. Oxford University Press, 2022. 392 pp., $80.00
William Godwin published a posthumous biography of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1798, just a year after her death. Laying bare his wife’s struggles—including her depression after being abandoned by the father of her first child, and her suicide attempts—Godwin’s memoirs set the tone for the reception of Wollstonecraft’s life and work.
For decades, liberal feminist commentators embraced Wollstonecraft as one of their own, assuming that her premarital relationships must signal a complete acceptance of free love, on the one hand, and a dismissal of traditional Christian morality on the other. In her recently published book The End of Woman (which I reviewed for Current), Carrie Gress also adopts this view, albeit from the opposite end of the political spectrum. She launches an ad hominem attack on Mary Wollstonecraft, concluding that a wholesale rejection of her ideas must follow from the knowledge of her failures of virtue.
For the past two centuries, Wollstonecraft has stayed in our collective imagination as a woman who left God behind in favor of a new, progressive ethical system. Fortunately, the tide is changing. Scholars are beginning to rediscover the deep theological undercurrents in Wollstonecraft’s thought and the significant role faith played in her life. Published in the last two years, Brenda Ayres’ Wollstonecraft and Religion (2024) and Emily Dumler-Winckler’s Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent (2022) serve as encouraging testaments to this change. Ayres and Dumler-Winckler remind us that Wollstonecraft’s works remain relevant to contemporary discussions of virtue, sex, and education; just not in the way we’ve been made to think.
The first chapter of Ayres’ book consists of a copy of the first edition of Rights of Woman, annotated with scriptural references. In their 1989 edition of Wollstonecraft’s seminal text, Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler cite forty-two references to the Bible; Ayres identifies over 1100, which constitute the text’s “biblical scaffolding.” Although Ayres’ book is more a collection of essays than a sustained thesis, there is one central underlying claim: that A Vindication of the Right of Woman “reflects a vision for freedom that Wollstonecraft based upon her understanding of the King James Bible.”
The subsequent chapters in Wollstonecraft and Religion approach Wollstonecraft’s work from different angles and through different disciplines, from history to biblical exegesis to biographical analysis and more.
Not all chapters are equally successful. Chapter three left me puzzled. It is partly Ayres’ own exegesis of some of the Pauline epistles and gospel narratives, partly a description of Wollstonecraft’s own biblical argument for the equality of women, partly a digression into Wollstonecraft’s thoughts on Islam. Ayres paints too broad a stroke as she generalizes, somewhat irresponsibly, two thousand years of biblical scholarship, claiming that “Historically, Christianity has often been the greatest enemy of the woman.” Louise Perry would beg to disagree.
Chapter four, on the other hand, is easily the most insightful. It identifies how the memoirs of Wollstonecraft’s husband, radical political philosopher William Godwin, have warped our perception of her life and works.
It is important to keep in mind that Godwin and Wollstonecraft had only known each other for less than two years before her death. Indeed, Ayres goes so far as to agree with Mitzi Myers that Godwin’s biography of Wollstonecraft “is primarily an autobiography about Godwin.” Ayres focuses especially on Godwin’s claim that Wollstonecraft’s religion, insofar as she subscribed to one, was “little allied to any system of forms” and “almost entirely of her own creation.” On the contrary, Ayres argues, while Wollstonecraft seems to have somewhat abandoned Anglicanism by the end of her life in favou of non-sectarianism, she did not become the kind of pantheist that Godwin considered her to be. She maintained, to the end of her life, a respect for ritual and prayer.
Like Ayres, Dumler-Winckler takes on at times the role of the literary critic, the historian, and the theologian in Modern Virtue. She remains, however, first and foremost a philosopher. Modern Virtue teases out the claim that is only implicit in Ayres’ Wollstonecraft and Religion—that if Wollstonecraft was deeply concerned about the formation of moral character through the practice of the virtues, and with the Christian faith as the virtues’ foundation, then we need to re-evaluate the ways in which her work is relevant today. As Dumler-Winckler states in her introduction, “When we think of religion and virtue as revisable garb in the wardrobe of the moral imagination, we can—indeed should—take responsibility for the ongoing work of tailoring its garments. This book is devoted to that task.”
Although Dumler-Winckler is indebted to virtue ethicist Alasdair Macintyre’s work, she is less pessimistic than Macintyre in his seminal 1981 book After Virtue about the state of what she terms “modern virtue.”
For Macintyre, the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics ceased with the Enlightenment, hastening the triumph of moral relativism. Dumler-Winckler makes the case that Wollstonecraft continues such a tradition and provides the missing link between ancient virtue—along with its Christianised, Thomistic medieval rendition—and modernity. She terms Macintyre, along with the likes of Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank, “virtues’ defenders.” On the other hand, “many feminist, womanist, postcolonial and decolonial philosophers, theologians, and ethicists” are “virtues’ despisers.” The former tell a narrative of moral decline and believe that “virtues’ revival depends on a return to premodern traditions”; the latter rejoice over the demise of Christendom and claim Mary Wollstonecraft as one of their own.
Rejecting both narratives, Dumler-Winckler disputes the claims of 1970s feminist theorists who “helped brand Wollstonecraft as a canonically secular liberal thinker” and placing her instead in what she calls a “tradition of dissent.” For Dumler-Winckler, rather than breaking with traditional Christian morality and its account of the virtues, Wollstonecraft works towards an account of “modern virtues” which is to be understood as “those garments of the moral imagination that, like a tradition of dissent, is inherited and tailored by each new generation in every time and place.” To be more specific, Wollstonecraft does not reject the premodern accounts of virtue of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, but she does contest the kind of sexual anthropologies that eventually led to sexed accounts of virtue in the Enlightenment, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “gendered pedagogy.”
The book stands out for its close textual analysis, covering not only Wollstonecraft’s (in)famous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman but several of her other works, including her lesser fiction, such as the novels Mary (1788) and Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman (1798). Indeed, the greatest problem in Wollstonecraft criticism is perhaps that, eager to co-opt her as one of their ilk, many feminist literary critics in the last few decades have not actually offered a close reading of her corpus, opting instead to focus on her personal life and disregarding any sign that she may have been a more committed Christian than they would like. Of course, this is the same faux pas committed by Carrie Gress in The End of Woman.
Dumler-Winckler also re-interprets Godwin’s claims about his wife’s religious convictions in a more fruitful way than Ayres. Finally, she provides a masterful account of Wollstonecraft’s “denial of sexual virtues,” which is necessary for the “revolution in female manners” Wollstonecraft deems necessary in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. While for her contemporary Rousseau, “women and men have distinct ends, which require distinct formation, virtues, and exemplars,” Wollstonecraft believed in a shared human nature that demanded shared virtues. And while thinkers on both ends of the political spectrum today tend to see feminist theory and religious conviction as incompatible, “Wollstonecraft would obviously deny any secular feminist views that religion and virtue are inherently patriarchal and oppressive.”
Both Ayres and Dumler-Winckler, then, call for a vindication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s thought; but where do they point us next? Ayres thinks it essential to recover the religious and specifically biblical scaffolding of Wollstonecraft’s work and free it from the shadow cast by Godwin. Dumler-Winckler clarifies that we must do so not merely as an exercise in historical accuracy, but rather to reveal the invisible thread that connects modernity back to antiquity via medieval theology.
And yet, even Dumler-Winckler’s virtuoso effort in Modern Virtue leaves some threads unresolved. Throughout the book, she appeals to philosopher Judith Butler’s work as proof that debates and negotiations about gender and virtue continue to our day: “Wollstonecraft’s account of the virtues can be seen, I argue, as a precursor for what Judith Butler calls ‘performativity,’ albeit absent Butler’s anxieties about virtue, normativity, and subjectivity.”
What Dumler-Winckler reduces to an “albeit,” I see as a chasm. That Wollstonecraft modified previous models of what it means to be virtuous to account for the shared nature of men and women is undeniable. But rejecting the gendering of virtues is not the same as saying that gender is performative. For example, Wollstonecraft severely criticized the eighteenth-century focus on “modesty” as a distinctly female virtue, believing that it should be practiced by men, too. But she also had a strong understanding that women who become mothers are called to virtuously care for their infants in a way that is, by nature, inevitably distinct from fathers.
Rather than seeking to find Wollstonecraft’s inheritors in contemporary gender theorists, then, it would perhaps serve us better to recognize how unusual Wollstonecraft is and was even during her lifetime. She embraced the idea of revolutionizing women’s position in society, granting them equal rights, but with the expectation that women would have equal duties of virtue and responsibility with men. She may seem progressive to some, but she also remained deeply attached to her Christian faith, nonconformist though it may have been, to her death.
We should let the idiosyncratic nature of Wollstonecraft’s thought challenge our own assumptions about gender, virtue, and religion. Today, we constantly discuss whether feminism is reconcilable with Christianity. But to Wollstonecraft, the very logic behind her desire for the improvement of the female condition was inevitably Christian. In our deeply polarized society, this serves as a reminder that it is possible to hold views that go beyond partisan categorization. It is possible to be a feminist without being progressive; it’s also possible to be a Christian without idealizing the past or calling for the demise of feminism.
To vindicate Wollstonecraft as a thinker—whether we agree with her or not—is to take seriously what Dumler-Winckler terms Wollstonecraft’s “triune call”: “to imitate God, deny sexed virtues, and effect a revolution in female manners.”
Beatrice Scudeler holds an M.A. in English from Oxford University. She is a freelance writer on literature, religion, the arts, and family life.
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