As delicious as I found it to preempt the critics’ lashing by striking first, I came to the determination that fiction alone did not offer a broad enough canvas. It no longer satisfied what I saw as my duty: to carry on where dear Miss Wollstonecraft had left off.
But the year 1799 had brought with it a backlash against those of us who had dared to speak out on the inequalities to which our sex had been permanently subjected. We were equated with Jacobins and other rebels who threatened to destroy the comfortable status quo, upsetting the apple cart of humanity as we knew it. The previous November, under the pen name of Anne Francis Randall, I had published A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, the treatise that took up Wollstonecraft’s philosophical banner.
I had assumed the pseudonym because I did not desire that the pamphlet be connected to the scandalous image of the Perdita, but rather to be judged on its own merit. It was the same reason I had once written poetry under so many pen names. And the Letter’s composition became a lesson in itself.
For several weeks in 1798, I dictated the tract to Maria, as much to remind her of our second-class state and show her how we might claim strength rather than weakness for ourselves, as I had need of her healthy fingers. I opened the Letter with a provocative question:
“Supposing that destiny, or interest, or chance, or what you will, has united a man, confessedly of a weak understanding and corporeal debility, to a woman strong in all the powers of intellect, and capable of bearing the fatigues of busy life: is it not degrading to humanity that such a woman should be the passive, the obedient slave, of such a husband? Is it not repugnant to all the laws of nature, that her feelings, actions, and opinions, should be controlled, perverted, and debased by such a help-mate?”
“Not a help-mate at all, in my opinion,” muttered Maria, as her quill scratched away, committing my words to perpetuity.
“Precisely, my darling. But we are both aware that English common law as we know it condemns every woman living under its jurisdiction to this purgatory.”
“Because the laws are made by men!” exclaimed Maria, angrily averring the obvious.
I winced in pain. “And in my lifetime, particularly as there is not much left of it, I fear, we shall never witness a change in that regard. Rather impossible, when a woman cannot even vote, even if she owns property in her own name! I see this Letter to the Women of England as more of a call to thought than a call to arms; and when enough of our sex have been armed with knowledge, even if it is merely the acknowledgment that we are not treated like rational creatures, then—oh, then—we shall begin to see some changes in the world.”
“If enough people believe themselves oppressed, they will rise up against the tyrants and revolt in mass, ’tis true. But what if there is a women’s revolution? And it turns bloody and violent?” Maria asked, momentarily advocating for the Devil. “Will you not then arrive at the same conclusions you did of the revolution in France?”
As my daughter spoke, I began to ruminate on the concept of women taking up arms in some just cause. An idea was forming, and I had to give it voice. “Write this, Maria: ‘The barbarity of custom’s law in this enlightened country has long been exercised to the prejudice of women; and even the laws of honor have been perverted to oppress her. If a man receive an insult he is justified in seeking retribution. He may chastise, challenge, and even destroy his adversary. Such a proceeding in man is termed honorable; his character is exonerated from the stigma which calumny attached to it…but were a woman to attempt such an expedient, however strong her sense of injury, however important the preservation of character, she would be deemed a murderess. Thus custom says—to a woman—you must be free from error; you must possess an unsullied fame; yet, if a slanderer, or a libertine, even by the most unpardonable falsehoods, deprive you of either reputation or repose, you have no remedy. He is received in the most fastidious societies, while you sink beneath the uniting efforts of calumny, ridicule, and malevolence. Indeed, we have scarcely seen a single instance where a professed libertine has been either shunned by women, or reprobated by men, for having acted unfeelingly or dishonorably toward what is denominated the defenseless sex. If woman be the weaker creature, her frailty should be the more readily forgiven.’”
I was suddenly flooded with a wave of recognition that the French call déjà vu. The sentiments I had just dictated tasted familiar on my tongue; and through the hazy scrim of memories long buried, I recollected that in nearly the same words, they are also those expressed by none other than Nicholas Rowe’s Jane Shore in a speech I first performed when I was but a green girl with dreams of Drury Lane. The same sense of outrage at our inferior state that was so close to my heart at age fifteen had traveled in my bosom across the decades, and now was as much my own credo at the age of forty.
I watched Maria write; her tongue peeked out from between her lips when she was deep in concentration. Suddenly I saw the little girl whose lot it had been to be the child of a woman like the one I was writing of—condemned to suffer the slings
