

Wollstonecraftâs 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 wifeâs strugglesâincluding her depression after being abandoned by the father of her first child, and her suicide attemptsâGodwinâs memoirs set the tone for the reception of Wollstonecraftâs 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 Wollstonecraftâs thought and the significant role faith played in her life. Published in the last two years, Brenda Ayresâ Wollstonecraft and Religion (2024) and Emily Dumler-Wincklerâs Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent (2022) serve as encouraging testaments to this change. Ayres and Dumler-Winckler remind us that Wollstonecraftâs works remain relevant to contemporary discussions of virtue, sex, and education; just not in the way weâve been made to think.
The first chapter of Ayresâ book consists of a copy of the first edition of Rights of Woman, annotated with scriptural references. In their 1989 edition of Wollstonecraftâs seminal text, Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler cite forty-two references to the Bible; Ayres identifies over 1100, which constitute the textâs âbiblical scaffolding.â Although Ayresâ 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 âreflects a vision for freedom that Wollstonecraft based upon her understanding of the King James Bible.â
The subsequent chapters in Wollstonecraft and Religion approach Wollstonecraftâs 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 Ayresâ own exegesis of some of the Pauline epistles and gospel narratives, partly a description of Wollstonecraftâs own biblical argument for the equality of women, partly a digression into Wollstonecraftâs thoughts on Islam. Ayres paints too broad a stroke as she generalizes, somewhat irresponsibly, two thousand years of biblical scholarship, claiming that âHistorically, Christianity has often been the greatest enemy of the woman.â Louise Perry would beg to disagree.
Chapter four, on the other hand, is easily the most insightful. It identifies how the memoirs of Wollstonecraftâs 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 Godwinâs biography of Wollstonecraft âis primarily an autobiography about Godwin.â Ayres focuses especially on Godwinâs claim that Wollstonecraftâs religion, insofar as she subscribed to one, was âlittle allied to any system of formsâ and âalmost entirely of her own creation.â 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 Ayresâ Wollstonecraft and Religionâthat if Wollstonecraft was deeply concerned about the formation of moral character through the practice of the virtues, and with the Christian faith as the virtuesâ foundation, then we need to re-evaluate the ways in which her work is relevant today. As Dumler-Winckler states in her introduction, âWhen we think of religion and virtue as revisable garb in the wardrobe of the moral imagination, we canâindeed shouldâtake responsibility for the ongoing work of tailoring its garments. This book is devoted to that task.â
Although Dumler-Winckler is indebted to virtue ethicist Alasdair Macintyreâs work, she is less pessimistic than Macintyre in his seminal 1981 book After Virtue about the state of what she terms âmodern virtue.â
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 virtueâalong with its Christianised, Thomistic medieval renditionâand modernity. She terms Macintyre, along with the likes of Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank, âvirtuesâ defenders.â On the other hand, âmany feminist, womanist, postcolonial and decolonial philosophers, theologians, and ethicistsâ are âvirtuesâ despisers.â The former tell a narrative of moral decline and believe that âvirtuesâ revival depends on a return to premodern traditionsâ; 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 âhelped brand Wollstonecraft as a canonically secular liberal thinkerâ and placing her instead in what she calls a âtradition of dissent.â For Dumler-Winckler, rather than breaking with traditional Christian morality and its account of the virtues, Wollstonecraft works towards an account of âmodern virtuesâ which is to be understood as âthose garments of the moral imagination that, like a tradition of dissent, is inherited and tailored by each new generation in every time and place.â 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 Rousseauâs âgendered pedagogy.â
The book stands out for its close textual analysis, covering not only Wollstonecraftâs (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 Godwinâs claims about his wifeâs religious convictions in a more fruitful way than Ayres. Finally, she provides a masterful account of Wollstonecraftâs âdenial of sexual virtues,â which is necessary for the ârevolution in female mannersâ Wollstonecraft deems necessary in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. While for her contemporary Rousseau, âwomen and men have distinct ends, which require distinct formation, virtues, and exemplars,â 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, âWollstonecraft would obviously deny any secular feminist views that religion and virtue are inherently patriarchal and oppressive.â
Both Ayres and Dumler-Winckler, then, call for a vindication of Mary Wollstonecraftâs thought; but where do they point us next? Ayres thinks it essential to recover the religious and specifically biblical scaffolding of Wollstonecraftâs 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-Wincklerâs virtuoso effort in Modern Virtue leaves some threads unresolved. Throughout the book, she appeals to philosopher Judith Butlerâs work as proof that debates and negotiations about gender and virtue continue to our day: âWollstonecraftâs account of the virtues can be seen, I argue, as a precursor for what Judith Butler calls âperformativity,â albeit absent Butlerâs anxieties about virtue, normativity, and subjectivity.â
What Dumler-Winckler reduces to an âalbeit,â 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 âmodestyâ 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 Wollstonecraftâs 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 womenâs 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 Wollstonecraftâs 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; itâs also possible to be a Christian without idealizing the past or calling for the demise of feminism.
To vindicate Wollstonecraft as a thinkerâwhether we agree with her or notâis to take seriously what Dumler-Winckler terms Wollstonecraftâs âtriune callâ: âto imitate God, deny sexed virtues, and effect a revolution in female manners.âÂ
Beatrice Scudeler holds an M.A. in English from Oxford University. She is a freelance writer on literature, religion, the arts, and family life.Â
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I learned a lot from this judicious review and the material from the books it is reviewing. It is a fine example of the kind of contribution that _Current_ makes which is hard to find elsewhere.