I did wonder what Mary Wollstonecraft would have made of Raymond Blanc's Twitter comment about the 'female tears' that were ruining his enjoyment of the Great British Bake Off. As Ruby Tandoh so eloquently put it:
What are "female tears", anyway? Are they more fragile and delicate than male tears? Do they wear pink?
More than two hundred years ago, Wollstonecraft similarly asked why particular virtues should be regarded as specifically 'manly' and not — 'more properly speaking' — virtues that ennoble all humans. It's clear that debates concerning which characteristics are masculine and feminine rumble on even today and continue to chip away at the idea of equality.
One of Wollstonecraft's main objectives in publishing her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 was that women should be viewed as human first and foremost rather than as a separate and irreconcilably different species to men. She boldly declared:
I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties', and she railed against those male conduct book writers who instead considered 'females rather as women than human creatures
Way ahead of her time, Wollstonecraft was convinced that gendered behaviour was learned through education and experience, rather than being something with which one was born. This perhaps partly explains why her work, after initially being well received, was neglected until the feminist movement of the 1970s found in it a very modern sense of gender identity.
Women and natural history
In my new book, Creating Romanticism, I argue that Wollstonecraft had been led to this new understanding of woman's capacities in part by her reading and reviewing of works of natural history for a politically radical journal called the Analytic Review. During the time that she was thinking about and writing her Vindication, she reviewed a significant number of natural history books and in her reviews of them she considers issues that come up again in Vindication. For example, she was fascinated by the fact that species of animals and plants were capable, through domestication or cultivation, of degeneration, becoming physically weaker and prone to disease.
When Wollstonecraft looked around at the women of her society, she saw them as childish, weak in body and mind, concerned only with their dress and other frivolous pastimes. Drawing comparison with the plants and animals described in natural history books, she could argue that women only behaved this way because of their education. Like domestic animals, their true natures had been perverted but this also meant —crucially — that through being differently educated there is the possibility that they might regain what she called woman's 'natural state'.
Strong female characters
In what seems to me to be another peculiarly modern understanding, Wollstonecraft became aware of the political uses to which scientific knowledge was being put. Writers such as Jean-Jacque Rousseau and John Gregory used their scientific and medical knowledge to argue that women's 'love of dress' is 'natural' to them, and, much more sinisterly, that the study of the natural world confirmed that women were 'made to please and be subjugated to man'. The physical inferiority of women to men Wollstonecraft was prepared to admit, but she argued that even this was exacerbated by the fashion and custom of the day. In his A Father's Legacy to his Daughters, published in 1774, Gregory urges woman not to indulge in 'luxury of eating' and not to boast of her 'great strength, her extraordinary appetite, her ability to bear excessive fatigue'.
In Vindication, Wollstonecraft angrily asks why women should be embarrassed to admit physical strength:
In the name of truth and common sense, why should not one woman acknowledge that she can take more exercise than another? Or, in other words, that she has a sound constitution.
She argues that practices such as the wearing of corsets, not allowing girls the same opportunities for exercise as boys, encouraging them to sew for hours in hot, stuffy rooms, and advising them to think that being thin and physically delicate will be attractive to a male suitor, has actually changed the body shape of women. Women have become 'enervated by confinement and false notions of modesty' and this has affected their mental capacities too:
Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison
Strength of body and mind
Wollstonecraft is certain that mind and body are linked and that women need to acquire strength in both in order to break the bonds that hold them. She lays down a gauntlet to her contemporaries:
Let us then, by being allowed to take the same exercise as boys, not only during infancy, but youth, arrive at perfection of body, that we may know how far the natural superiority extends
If she would have despaired at the reactions to the Great British Bake Off, she would I think have been cheered by the physical and mental strength we have seen in Nicola Adams, Jessica Ennis, Victoria Pendleton, Ellie Symonds, and Sarah Storey last year, all of whom showed just what women were capable of when they were given the chance.
Sharon Ruston is Professor of Romanticism at Lancaster University. She tweets at @sharonruston