Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World

10. “I sympathize in their pains and pleasures”: Women and Animals in Mary Wollstonecraft

In the Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, William Godwin describes his wife’s childhood in a violent home: The conduct…[her father] held toward the members of his family, was of the same kind as that he observed towards animals. He was for the most part extravagantly fond of them; but, when he was displeased, and this frequently happened, and for very trivial reasons, his anger was alarming .… In some instance of passion exercised by her father to one of his dogs, she was accustomed to speak of her emotions of abhorrence, as having risen to agony.1 Sympathy for the suffering of animals and its connection to domestic tyranny is a recurrent pattern in Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings and appears to be grounded in the author’s lived experience. While critics have characterized her attitudes towards animals as conventional, I re-examine Wollstonecraft ’s view of animals, and argue for her place in the history of ecofeminism. As defined by Karen Warren, ecofeminism investigates “the connections—historical, empirical, conceptual, theoretical, symbolic, and experiential—between the domination of women and the domination of nature.”2 Throughout her work, Wollstonecraft is concerned with the ethical treatment of animals, and develops a political critique that is rooted in the perceived interconnectedness of structures of domination. This essay reads her texts in the context of eighteenth-century discourses of animal welfare and rights, and demonstrates that she puts sentience at the centre of ethics. Secondly, Wollstonecraft explores the intersections between 223 10 “I sympathize in their pains and pleasures Women and Animals in Mary Wollstonecraft barbara k. seeber ” gender, class and species in all of her fiction and educational writings, and in her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark , she develops an ecological vision that transforms the human/animal divide. In a 1990 article entitled “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,” Josephine Donovan cited Wollstonecraft as one in “a long list of first-wave feminists who advocated vegetarian or animal welfare reform,” and listed Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Original Stories from Real Life in the attendant footnote. Donovan’s suggestion has not been developed by other critics. Mary Mellor, for example, argues that “in common with Enlightenment thinking of the time,… [she] framed her claim for a common humanity in terms of the distinctiveness of human beings from ‘brute nature.’”3 “Despite her insistence of the kindness to animals, the gulf she describes between humans and animals is far greater than any we find expressed by the Romantic poets,” states Rod Preece, as does Christine Kenyon-Jones: “human beings’ place in the chain of being” as superior “is stressed time and time again”; hence Wollstonecraft’s attitudes to animals are akin to those of “political conservatives.” Similarly, David Perkins, while acknowledging that Wollstonecraft is “strongly in favor of kindness to animals,” sees her ultimately as “quite traditional” since she “maintained ” that animal “behaviour is merely instinctive.”4 Wollstonecraft’s reputation as politically conservative in terms of animals seems to be based more on the Vindication of the Rights of Woman than her other texts. Certainly, Wollstonecraft’s argument for the education of women takes as its starting point the human/animal divide: “In what does man’s pre-eminence over the brute creation consist? The answer is as clear as that a half is less than the whole; in Reason.”5 Women, like men, are rational beings, not animals, even though they are treated as such. Yet, this categorical division becomes problematized by the fact that often Wollstonecraft compares women’s social condition to that of caged and domesticated birds and dogs. For instance: “Confined then in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch.”6 Or, “Considering the length of time that women have been dependent, is it surprising that some of them hug their chains, and fawn like the spaniel? ‘These dogs,’ observes a naturalist, ‘at first kept their ears erect; but custom has superseded nature, and a token of fear is become a beauty.’”7 These examples reveal the domination of both women and animals, in fact drawing a structural parallel between the two forms of domination. The animals in the Vindication tend 224 Barbara K. Seeber to be pets, not animals in their habitat, which suggests...