In Newington Green, a park in north London, stands a silver figurine atop a mesh of scrambled metal: a naked woman, with about as much distinctiveness to commend her as a store-window mannequin. The sculpture, intended as an effigy of the eminent 18th-century philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, caused controversy last year when it was unveiled to the British public. The artist responsible, Maggi Hambling, said the Wollstone­craft statue was designed that way in order to represent “every woman.” Which is an odd thing to say, since Wollstonecraft is best remembered for being exceptional.

The controversy over the statue is symbolic of the deeper misunderstandings surrounding the legacy of the “mother of feminism.” Erika Bachiochi aims to redress some of these misunderstandings in her book The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision. Examining Wollstonecraft’s philosophical writings on sex, sexuality, and motherhood — as a lens through which to view the history of feminism in the United States — Bachiochi argues that between the 19th and 21st centuries, too many American women abandoned Wollstonecraftian ideals of virtue and fairness, replacing them with the self-defeating ideology (and various waves) of progressive feminism.

Bachiochi’s thesis is generally persuasive. To the extent that there is a progressive feminist appreciation of Wollstone­craft, it is based on a selective reading of her writings. Bachiochi points out that Wollstonecraft believed in achieving sexual equality not through redistributing power or reordering society but through a recognition of a woman’s God-given dignity. In her seminal work A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft wrote, “Thanks to that Being who impressed [aspirations] on my soul, and gave me sufficient strength of mind to dare to exert my own reason, till, becoming dependent only on him for the support of my virtue, I view, with indignation, the mistaken notions that enslave my sex.”

Bachiochi argues that similar sentiments took root in America as well. However, it would be an oversimplification to ascribe those directly to Wollstonecraft. Her religious beliefs were informed by a Romantic Deism and Enlightenment humanism. They were therefore philosophically distinct from the Christian faith of her American contemporaries. Still, Bachiochi is correct at least in asserting that Wollstonecraft and her American sisters were looking at the stars, while many of today’s leading feminists look no further than their own navels.

Wollstonecraft also spoke without embarrassment about the necessity of chastity in having healthy relations between the sexes. (For which, by today’s standards, she would be considered socially conservative.) She pushed back against the arguments of those such as Rousseau and some of his misogynistic contemporaries that only women were capable of — and thus ought to strive for — sexual virtue. She wrote: “Alas! Husbands, as well as their helpmates, are often only overgrown children; nay, thanks to early debauchery, scarcely men in their outward form — and if the blind lead the blind, one need not come from heaven to tell us the consequence.” Wollstonecraft elaborated on what she meant by “early debauchery”:

At school, boys infallibly lose that decent bashfulness, which might have ripened into modesty, at home. And what nasty indecent tricks do they also learn from each together, when a number of them pig together in the same bedchamber, not to speak of the vices, which render the body weak, whilst they effectually prevent the acquisition of any delicacy of mind.
The little attention paid to the cultivation of modesty, amongst men, produces great depravity in all the relationships of society; for, not only love — love that ought to purify the heart, and first call forth all the youthful powers, to prepare the man to discharge the benevolent duties of life, is sacrificed to premature lust; but, all the social affections are deadened by the selfish gratifications, which very early pollute the mind, and dry up the generous juices of the heart.

Could we not say the same today about the effect of widespread pornography on the adolescent male mind? And yet, far from embracing Wollstonecraft’s insistence on the need for cultivating a sense of “delicacy of mind” and “benevolent duties” in young men, today’s progressive feminists would argue that, for instance, Cardi B’s robotically performative sexuality is empowering for women. What they don’t seem to realize, of course, is that without the exercise of private virtue, not only are personal relations degraded but the whole social order is imperiled.

The challenges facing Wollstonecraft and her counterparts in America were different from those that Western women face in 2021. In the late 18th through the 19th centuries, women had few legal rights and protections. They were not allowed to own property and were rarely granted custody of their children in the case of parental separation. America did not ratify the 19th Amendment until 1920, and cruelty, abuse, and missed opportunity on the basis of sex were commonplace and overlooked.

One can forgive Wollstonecraft, then, for attacking sex differences themselves (as gender ideologues would later do in more-extreme ways), arguing: “I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behavior. For this distinction is, I am firmly persuaded, the foundation of the weakness of character ascribed to woman; is the cause why the understanding is neglected, whilst accomplishments are acquired with sedulous care: and the same cause accounts for their preferring the grace before the heroic virtues.”

And one can, furthermore, understand the reaction of Betty Friedan — whom Bachiochi critiques in her strongest chapter — to what she perceived, in similar terms, to be the self-sabotaging attitudes and behavior of American middle-class women in the 1950s. Bachiochi explains that “for both writers,” a “conceptual shift” in how women thought of themselves was needed, but “not one intended to uproot familial obligations: no one ought to deny married women’s roles as wives and mothers; women simply ought not be solely defined by these roles, as though they were not capable of (or properly interested in) anything but.”

Bachiochi skillfully accentuates the behind-the-scenes contributions of female thought-leaders in 19th-century American life, as well as the culture they inhabited and enriched, reaching the same conclusion as Alexis de Tocqueville when he wrote, “If anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.” Tocqueville had, Bachiochi explains, “worried over 700 pages that individualism and materialism would threaten to undermine freedom in the new democracy, if not checked by the communitarian tendencies promoted by family and religion.” But he also

saw in American women an interior strength and independence that inspired them to dedicate their lives, not to their own personal aggrandizement or wealth, as American men seemed wont to do, but to the cultivation of virtue and the building of families, churches, schools, and civic associations, all of which Tocqueville viewed as essential to the survival of the new democratic enterprise.

It would be inaccurate to say that Wollstonecraft thought exactly in these terms. She leaned more individualistic than communitarian: If women “be really capable of acting like rational creatures, let them not be treated like slaves; or, like the brutes who are dependent on the reason of man, when they associate with him; but cultivate their minds, give them the salutary, sublime curb of principle, and let them attain conscious dignity by feeling themselves only dependent on God.” This might be possible in the religious sense, but most women are social creatures who also depend on community — as well as on individual freedom and principles — to thrive.

Bachiochi’s is an ambitious and complex argument. It is not always entirely clear whether she is suggesting that the early American women’s-rights movement was directly influenced by Woll­stonecraft or was merely on a parallel track. At points, she tries to squeeze too much into too tight a space. Her chapters — “The Young Republic and the Unequal Virtues of the Agrarian Home”; “Women’s Suffrage, Rational Souls, Sexed Bodies and the Ties That Bind”; “The Industrial Revolution and the Debate between Abstract Rights and Concrete Duties” — sometimes read more like an academic’s meanderings through a range of loosely connected topics than an argument distilling and tracing a “lost vision.”

Bachiochi’s treatment of all the women in her study is emotionally intelligent as well as rigorous. Woll­stonecraft’s life was fraught with contradiction and tension. In addition to her formidable political writings, her founding of a school for girls, and her fearless intellectual sparring with Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wollstonecraft is remembered for her romantic misfortunes, for her attempted suicide, for giving birth to a daughter who would become Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, and then dying soon after from an infection introduced by the hands of her male doctor. Confronting all that, and more, as you do in Bachiochi’s thoroughly researched work, you may just conclude that that Wollstonecraft statue in Newington Green is garbage after all.