Sofia 99 March/April 2011 27th April (birthday): Mary Wollstonecraft As her biographer, Janet Todd, rightly remarks, ‘throughout her life, Mary Wollstonecraft grappled with the complexities of women’s lot.’ Born in Spitalfields, second in a family of seven and the eldest girl, she struggled as a lady’s companion at 19; nursed her mother through fatal illness; set up a school in dissenting Stoke Newington to support her friend, Fanny Blood, and sister, Eliza, whom she had encouraged to quit a miserable marriage; abandoned it to nurse Fanny, then dying of consumption; and spent an unhappy year as a governess in Ireland – prompting Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, her first published work. She died at 38, from complications 10 days after the birth of her second daughter (also called Mary).
The momentous luck of being appointed editorial assistant on the Analytical Review in 1787 spurred her mastering of French and German, publishing translations and reviews, and entering London Radical circles. Not until her early thirties did Wollstonecraft recognise that her underlying problem was the systematic denial of women’s education and autonomy, rather than her father’s fecklessness and her brother’s privilege. It was an understanding which produced the works of her intellectual maturity, the Vindications of the Rights of Men – her vigorous response to Burke’ s critique of the French Revolution (1790) – and of Women (1792).
A period in France, an unhappy love-affair and illegitimate daughter (Fanny) prompted acceptance of her need for sexuality and companionship alongside freedom and autonomy, expressed in a final novel, Maria. The fruit of her brief but contented marriage with William Godwin, father of the daughter (Mary) who was to marry Shelley and write Frankenstein , the candour of this work, and Godwin’s honest biography of his wife, clouded Wollstonecraft’s name among ‘respectable’ feminists for a century after her death.
Her courage, resolve and hope sustain us still: ‘ The beginning is always today.’ Red Letter Days A page which recalls the birthday or death day of people who have made a notable contribution to humanity. Mary Lloyd presents Mary Wollstonecraft and John Ruskin. 20th February: John Ruskin Son of a London wineimporter, Ruskin published prolifically from the age of 15 and won the Newdigate Poetry Prize as an Oxford student. His reputation as a prominent art and architecture critic, author of The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, was well established when, in December 1860, he published Unto This Last.
A radical critique of capitalism, that up-ended Victorian England by rejecting the classical theories of economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, it took the Parable of the Vineyard (Matthew 20) as its inspiration. Denying that human beings are primarily motivated by self-interested economic reasoning, Ruskin contended that people are often driven by emotions and motivations unrelated to the law of supply and demand.
Rejecting the ‘unfettered markets’ that justify and encourage economic inequality, he gave new meanings to many of the terms in the economists’ lexicon, such as utility, wealth, value, exchange, and believed that the theory of supply and demand resulted in misery for workers, because it encouraged them to sell their labour at a discount when jobs were scarce.
Against the claim that hoarding wealth is the path to greater happiness, Ruskin wrote: ‘That man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others. There is no wealth but life.’ The book influenced the development of Christian Socialism and profoundly affected Gandhi, who espoused Ruskin’s values – especially the view that whatever benefits the individual also benefits the group as a whole – in his teachings and writings.
Lancaster economist, Christopher May, comments (2010) that Ruskin believed, ‘We can choose how to treat others, and these choices have consequences.’ Mary Wollstonecraft 27th April 1759 – 10th Sept 1797 John Ruskin 8th Feb 1819 – 20th Feb 1900 Submissions welcome for famous birthdays or death days for the summer quarter June 1st – August 31st.