Mrs Shelley | Page 4

other pursuits should be open to women.
This wish is now in progress of fulfilment.
That married women should own their own property as in other
European countries. Recent laws have granted this right.
That they should have more facilities for divorce from husbands guilty
of immoral conduct. This has been partially granted, though much still
remains to be effected.
That, in the case of separation, the custody of children should belong
equally to both parents.
That a man should be legally responsible for his illegitimate children.
That he should be bound to maintain the woman he has wronged.
Mary Wollstonecraft also thought that women should have
representatives in Parliament to uphold their interests; but her chief
desires are in the matter of education. Unlike Rousseau, she would have
all children educated together till nine years of age; like Rousseau, she
would have them meet for play in a common play-ground. At nine

years their capacities might be sufficiently developed to judge which
branch of education would be then desirable for each; girls and boys
being still educated together, and capacity being the only line of
demarcation.
Thus it will be seen that Mary's primary wish was to make women
responsible and sensible companions for men; to raise them from the
beings they were made by the frivolous fashionable education of the
time; to make them fit mothers to educate or superintend the education
of their children, for education does not end or begin with what may he
taught in schools. To make a woman a reasoning being, by means of
Euclid if necessary, need not preclude her from being a charming
woman also, as proved by the descriptions we have of Mary
Wollstonecraft herself. Doubtless some of the most crying evils of
civilisation can only be cured by raising the intellectual and moral
status of woman, and thus raising that of man also, so that he, regarding
her as a companion whose mind reflects the beauties of nature, and who
can appreciate the great reflex of nature as transmitted through the
human mind in the glorious art of the world, may really be raised to the
ideal state where the sacrilege of love will be unknown. We know that
this great desire must have passed through Mary Wollstonecraft's mind
and prompted her to her eloquent appeal for the "vindication of the
rights of woman."
With Mary's improved prospects, for she fortunately lived in a time
when the strong emotions and realities of life brought many influential
people admiringly around her, she was able to pay a visit to Paris in
1792. No one can doubt her interest in the terrible drama there being
enacted, and her courage was equal to the occasion; but even this
journey is brought up in disparagement of her, and this partly owing to
Godwin's naïve remark in his diary, that "there is no reason to doubt
that if Fuseli had been disengaged at the period of their acquaintance he
would have been the man of her choice." As the little if is a very
powerful word, of course this amounts to nothing, and it is scarcely the
province of a biographer to say what might have taken place under
other circumstances, and to criticise a character from that standpoint. If
Mary was attracted by Fuseli's genius, and this would not have been
surprising, and if she went to Paris for change of scene and thought, she
certainly only set a sensible example. As it was, she had ample matter

of interest in the stirring scenes around her--she with a heart to feel the
woes of all: the miseries however real and terrible of the prince did not
blind her to those of the peasant; the cold and calculating torture of
centuries was not to be passed over because a maddened people, having
gained for a time the right of power by might, brought to judgment the
representatives, even then vacillating and treacherous, of ages of
oppression. Her heart bled for all, but most for the longest suffering;
and she was struck senseless to the ground by the news of the execution
of the "twenty-one," the brave Girondins. Would that another woman,
even greater than herself, had been untrammelled by her sex, and could
have wielded at first hand the power she had to exercise through others;
and might not France have been thus again saved by a Joan of Arc--not
only France, but the Revolution in all its purity of idea, not in its
horror.
In France, too, the women's question had been mooted; Condorcet
having written that one of the greatest steps of progress of the human
intellect would be the freedom from prejudice that would give equality
of right to both sexes: and the _Requête des Dames à l'Assemblée
Nationale_ 1791, was made simultaneously