Ladies and the mighty business of female life

In the opening pages of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft writes: “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to them to their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.”Footnote ¹⁰ For Wollstonecraft, these “unchangeable morals” are accessible to men and women alike: “I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty.”Footnote ¹¹ A revolution is necessary because the lives of middle-class women in the late eighteenth century are defined not by these unchangeable morals, but by superficial manners. For a representative sample of the conduct manuals in the late eighteenth century, here is Erasmus Darwin in his A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools:

Ladies (as opposed to the women for whom Wollstonecraft reserves the label “rational”) are docile, meek, and modest and are aware that they are constantly on display: their appearance (including their outward behavior) is all that matters and they are not supposed to have much of an inner life, let alone a moral character.Footnote ¹³ They have been taught—and have come to believe themselves—that weakness makes them appealing:

As Wollstonecraft points out, these ladies are not admirable but contemptible. Yet the conduct writers of the time set up these displays of weakness and mental and physical fragility as something to worship.Footnote ¹⁵

Wollstonecraft quotes several conduct writers at length, but she saves the brunt of her outrage for Rousseau’s Emile. How can someone who so sensibly pleads for equality and liberty refuse women the respect and rights he believes are owed to all men? Wollstonecraft cites Émile again:

According to Rousseau, what matters most to a girl is that she is considered pretty. And of course, in order to be thought pretty, you need people to look at you and draw their attention. Rousseau considers this attention-seeking natural not to young children in general, but to girls in particular. Boys should be raised differently from girls because boys are not naturally concerned with their appearance or how their behavior comes across. From a young age, boys can and should be taught to consider themselves as autonomous individuals meant to develop independent moral characters. Girls, on the other hand, should be raised always to look at themselves through the eyes of others. Once more, Wollstonecraft cites Emile:

As Rousseau makes clear in this quotation, girls should not only be concerned with how others see them, but also with pleasing these others—primarily men.Footnote ¹⁸

“The mighty business of female life is to please,” writes Wollstonecraft, and much of her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is devoted to showing the reader how the preoccupation with this mighty business destroys the female moral character.Footnote ¹⁹ According to Wollstonecraft, boys and girls should be raised the same, in the same schools, and taking the same classes.Footnote ²⁰ Only then, Wollstonecraft argues, will there be respect between the sexes. As it is, men set up women as fragile, dependent angels and worship their weakness. But there is a more sinister aspect to this angel-worship because, in the process, “ladies” are reduced to something less than human: “Such a woman ought to be an angel—or she is an ass—for I discern not a trace of the human character, neither reason nor passion in this domestic drudge, whose being is absorbed in that of a tyrant’s.”Footnote ²¹ “Angel” may suggest a being elevated above regular mortals, but Wollstonecraft points out that all this misplaced admiration makes women subhuman “asses.” Women are venerated for their beauty, timidity, and dependence and thus have little incentive to develop strength or any virtue beyond a superficial kind of modesty. Most importantly, they never learn to think for themselves the way a rational being should because they are taught from a young age to look at themselves always through the eyes of others in general and men in particular. Their lives are always derivative of the lives of their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons: “[T]he whole tenour of female education (the education of society) tends to render the best [of women] disposed romantic and inconstant; and the remainder vain and mean.”Footnote ²² At best, women develop a sense of cunning, a way of tricking others into believing that they are meek and timid when, in fact, they are using their wiles to get what they want: a wealthy husband, status, a way to escape the confines of their parental home.

Wollstonecraft is in many ways as critical of these women as are the conduct writers she so despises. But unlike them, Wollstonecraft does not believe that cunning, superficiality, and vanity are part of female nature—or if they are, that men are just as susceptible to these vices. Female education, as the quotation above shows, is “the education of society,” and society teaches women that they are valued for their appearance, not their character or virtue. Virtue does not come easily, and Wollstonecraft sees that many women in comfortable positions lack the will and the incentive to fight for the respect and recognition that is their due.Footnote ²³ This puts her in a difficult position vis-à-vis her readership, as some of the people who she believes need liberating do not want to cast off their chains. This is a further factor contributing to Wollstonecraft’s own intellectual and moral loneliness, as she is regarded as a threat not just by men who fear the ascendency of autonomous women, but also by women who themselves benefit from the status quo: “Pleasure is the business of woman’s life, according to the present modification of society, and while it continues to be so, little can be expected from such weak beings.”Footnote ²⁴

It is helpful at this point to look at the way Wollstonecraft engages with Smith’s work in order to make her point about the way in which women are isolated or “localized,” as she puts it.Footnote ²⁵ Their circumstances are narrowly defined by the (informal) education they received, the conduct books of the time, and the predominant opinion of society at large. They have been taught to think of themselves in a very particular way, like a caged bird hopping from “perch to perch” with “mock majesty.”Footnote ²⁶ But there are other beings that resemble them in their “localized” nature, specifically officers, courtiers, spaniels, and Louis XIV. By comparing middle-class ladies to these groups and individuals, Wollstonecraft widens the scope of her argument and enlists Smith in her call to action.

Officers, courtiers, Louis XIV, and spaniels

About officers, Wollstonecraft writes: “Like the fair sex, the business of their lives is gallantry.—They were taught to please, and they only live to please.”Footnote ²⁷ If these officers are somehow better than the ladies she writes about, Wollstonecraft points out that it is impossible to tell what their supposed superiority may consist in. Smith talks about officers in the section of his The Theory of Moral Sentiments devoted to the way we customarily ascribe particular characters to specific professions (TMS V.ii.5). He observes, “We cannot expect the same sensibility to the gay pleasures and amusements of life in a clergyman, which we lay our account with in an officer” (TMS V.ii.5). We expect a clergyman to be grave because he is professionally preoccupied with the afterlife. Yet upon reflection, why would a military officer, whose job it is to face death, be any less serious? It turns out that the character we customarily assign to certain professions is not at all obvious: “We are led by custom, for example, to annex the character of gaiety, levity, and sprightly freedom, as well as of some degree of dissipation, to the military profession” (TMS V.ii.6). Furthermore, we expect important virtues like “truth and justice … from a clergyman as well as from an officer,” and it is only “in matters of small moment” that we “look for the distinguishing marks of their respective characters” (TMS V.ii.13).

The officers Wollstonecraft above compares to “the fair sex” have reduced their identity to gallantry, which is likely one of the “matters of small moment” that Smith notes. A big difference between officers and ladies, of course, is that an officer may quit the militia and, say, go into the church. Women have only one way of changing “careers” and that is through marriage, if we disregard the unattractive professions of governess, teacher, or personal companion.Footnote ²⁸ While officers “live to please” only for as long as they take upon themselves the stereotypical behavior customarily assigned to their profession, ladies have to be ladies for life.Footnote ²⁹ Conduct books and romance novels of the time tell young women to have no ulterior motives and marry for love alone, which means that their pursuit of wealth and status has to be concealed. Wollstonecraft points out that it is hardly surprising that women develop a sense of cunning under these circumstances. Who can blame them? Women want to better their condition just like anyone else, but they are not supposed to have this desire, which is why they have to deceive by pretending to be angelic and interested solely in the love of a good man and hiding their material interests.

Courtiers are still more localized than officers and their circumstances more closely resemble those of middle-class ladies. Their lives are devoted to flattering the kings and queens they serve, and so they always need to be aware of how their behavior will register. Smith comments on the courtier’s morally problematic role: “the assiduous courtier is often more favoured than the faithful and active servant; that attendance and adulation are often shorter and surer roads to preferment than merit or service” (TMS III.ii.34). Much like the young girls described by Rousseau, courtiers need to consider “as a law, never to say any thing disagreeable to those whom they are speaking to.”Footnote ³⁰ We may judge courtiers for their sycophantic attitudes, writes Wollstonecraft, but we would not deny that they are moral beings. And yet this is exactly what Rousseau and others do in the case of women. Women are forced always to look at themselves through the eyes of others—be it their husbands, family, or the general public—argues Wollstonecraft; their moral dependence is a product of their circumstances. It may appear to come naturally to them, but this is merely the effect of societal forces, not some kind of innate quality. Much as we may disapprove of their flattering ways, we are ready to acknowledge that courtiers aim to please not because they have no moral agency, but because of their position. The same goes for women: “[T]ill it is proved that the courtier, who servilely resigns the birthright of a man, is not a moral agent, it cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated.”Footnote ³¹ Just because a person is in a situation that limits their ability to fully develop their moral character, this does not imply that they do not have moral capacities to begin with. They simply lack the opportunity to flourish as moral and intellectual beings. This is why Wollstonecraft asks that women be given a chance before being judged as inferior: “Let their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale.”Footnote ³²

A courtier’s life is defined by the need to please his lord or lady, but there is yet another, larger class of people who can help us understand the situation of middle-class women: “In Dr. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, I have found a general character of people of rank and fortune, that, in my opinion, might with the greatest propriety be applied to the female sex.”Footnote ³³ Unlike the courtiers, these “people of rank and fortune” do not live to please and flatter, but to be pleased and flattered. They highlight another aspect of the lives of the ladies Wollstonecraft writes about. The rich typically meet with no resistance to their opinions or behavior, and so they cannot develop any strength of character through adversity.Footnote ³⁴ Their lives are largely devoid of friction, so they become weak and vain, just like middle-class women. “People of rank and fortune,” for Wollstonecraft, comprise women as well as men, and both sexes in this group suffer the same moral deterioration. Their vices are not tied to one sex or the other; rich men and rich women are alike in vanity, sloth, cowardice, and all the other vices attendant on a life of leisure and luxury.

Wollstonecraft calls on Smith’s description of Louis XIV (nicknamed the “Sun King”) to underscore her point about the rich, offering up the Sun King as the personification of the absurdity that marks our worship of the rich and powerful as a class. Smith’s account, Wollstonecraft writes, is

Women become like little Sun Kings, localized by the gallantry of their admirers and never given the opportunity to develop a virtuous character. She observes: “A king is always a king—and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex, ever stand between them and rational converse.”Footnote ³⁶ Just like the rich of both sexes, ladies are never tested by adversity, so their moral being is “swallowed up” by their “local situation.” Wollstonecraft concludes that “wealth and female softness equally tend to debase mankind.”Footnote ³⁷ Women and the rich alike are unable to acquire virtue because they never sacrifice pleasure.Footnote ³⁸ She notes the process by which this occurs:

Officers showed us how certain men, too, are localized (at least temporarily) by their position and circumstances. Like women, they are supposed to be pleasing, but the flattery they are expected to provide is coded as masculine because addressed to the women in the towns where they are garrisoned. Courtiers more closely resemble women because they do not even have an official (and dangerous) job like the officers do and it is their entire business to be pleasant, courteous, and flattering. And yet, nobody would deny a courtier’s moral agency, even if it has been largely suspended by his circumstances. While it is a courtier’s job to provide flattery and receive none in return, the rich as a class are prone to vanity because they receive nothing but praise and flattery from those around them. Louis XIV serves as an extreme example of this class and provides us with a helpful caricature of what Smith and Wollstonecraft both regard as the excesses of the rich and powerful.

Women, then, are in the strange position of being both courtier and Sun King: they are expected to make man’s life more pleasant by being docile, decorative, and sweet, but they also are treated as creatures who are not quite human, whether angels, as the conduct authors say, or “asses,” as Wollstonecraft says. Nobody would dare call Louis XIV an ass, and yet Wollstonecraft draws our attention to Smith’s description of him that clearly demonstrates how Louis XIV is not held to the same standards applied to regular mortals.Footnote ⁴⁰ In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith cites a historian of Louis XIV to help him make his point that the powerful often reign not through wisdom and virtue, but because of our readiness to admire their superficial qualities. In the case of Louis XIV, people fawned over the

Analogously, Wollstonecraft points out, women are admired for being scared of a scowling cow, even though the same reaction would be derided in any man or, for that matter, in poor women, who are too busy making a living to be angelic or weak.Footnote ⁴¹

In addition to the officers, the courtiers, the rich in general, and Louis XIV in particular, Wollstonecraft also compares middle-class ladies to a number of animals. As we have already seen, they are like caged birds unduly pleased with their feathers, more like asses than angels. Most tellingly, they resemble spaniels: “Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection are consistently … recommended as the cardinal virtues of the sex; … She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.”Footnote ⁴² According to conduct author John Gregory, a young lady wishing to attract a husband should speak as little as possible and certainly not draw attention to her wits. “Be rather silent in company,” he advises his female reader, because if you display your intelligence, it “will be thought you assume a superiority over the rest of the company…. [I]f you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts, and a cultivated understanding.”Footnote ⁴³ As we saw above, Rousseau makes a similar suggestion when writing of Emile’s ideal mate, Sophia: “Oh how lovely is her ignorance!”Footnote ⁴⁴ Wollstonecraft deduces that the ideal lady is a spaniel: “‘These dogs,’ observes a naturalist, ‘at first kept their ears erect; but custom has superseded nature, and a token of fear is becoming a beauty.’”Footnote ⁴⁵ Analogous to spaniels, natural human traits like reason and virtue are displaced in ladies by docility, timidity, and coquetry. While spaniels may have actually lost their courageous nature through selective breeding, a woman’s rational capacities have not disappeared, but instead found less than virtuous outlets: “Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish, and the men who can be gratified by the fawning fondness of spaniel-like affection, have not much delicacy.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The result, then, are loveless marriages in which there can be no respect or friendship. The husband believes—at least for a while—that he has married an angel, while the wife will keep up appearances in order to improve her station in life. Once the first few months of marriage have passed, the husband will get bored of his angel who, after all, has not much more to offer than “fawning fondness” and seek his pleasure elsewhere. Additionally, the wife will soon give up the pretense of being an angel and, once her husband no longer flatters her the way he did when he was courting her, seek gratification for her vanity from others.Footnote ⁴⁷

Would it not be much better to have marriages between equals based on friendship and mutual respect? Wollstonecraft repeatedly claims that while love and passion are fleeting, friendship has a more solid foundation because it exists between rational moral agents. Importantly, friendship can flourish only when there is no economic dependence between the two parties. This means that more professions should be open to women than just the minimally remunerated jobs of governess, teacher, and personal companion (all positions that Wollstonecraft herself held at one point in her life). As long as a woman’s only path to bettering her position is marriage, she will be forced to dissimulate and coquette her way through life. It also means that there will be great loneliness at the heart of most conventional marriages because once the husband no longer feels any passion for his wife, and the wife no longer receives any flattery from her husband, they have no reason to enjoy each other’s company. Wollstonecraft writes about this loneliness from the husband’s perspective when he is denied “the calm satisfaction … of being beloved by one who could understand him. In the society of his wife he is still alone.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Immediately following this observation, Wollstonecraft turns to Smith (though she does not mention him by name): “‘The charm of life,’ says a grave philosophical reasoner, is ‘sympathy’; ‘nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast.’”Footnote ⁴⁹ Smith does not comment on lonely marriages, but he has much to say about the sense of isolation we experience when we feel like others do not see us for who we really are. This is where we move on to the more implicit philosophical kinship between Smith and Wollstonecraft.

Through the eyes of others

There obviously can be no sympathy in the Smithian sense between a courtier and his king or a spaniel-like lady and her husband. These relationships are asymmetrical: the king expects flattery and deference from his courtier and either does not care about the courtier’s inner life or assumes that it reflects the courtier’s outward attitude of admiration and respect. Something similar obtains between the spaniel and her master: the spaniel’s fondness and affection are taken for granted as “natural” and as stemming from a simple, innocent, and fully dependent creature. Both the king and the dog’s master would be surprised to find that their apparently loyal inferiors do not love them but merely keep up appearances in order to get what they want. So while it may be pleasant in some respects to be king and master, a relationship based on asymmetry and dependence is not conducive to sympathy. We can only really sense fellow-feeling in others if we can trust them to be open and honest with us, which is something a dependent can do only at the risk of losing his or her position and/or livelihood. As Wollstonecraft points out, a husband can easily leave his wife in a number of ways and receive understanding or even praise for doing so, while a woman who tries to leave her husband risks imprisonment and life as a social outcast. In her unfinished novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, the titular character faces exactly this situation.Footnote ⁵⁰ After Maria’s adulterous husband tries to prostitute her to one of his friends, she decides to leave him and escapes only to be hunted down by him and locked up in an insane asylum. The novel is a raw and pessimistic exploration of the way in which women are forced to dissimulate. The price for being honest about (in Smith’s words) “all the emotions” of their “own breast” is so high that not only will they receive no sympathy, but they will also face severe punishment (TMS I.i.2.1).

Wollstonecraft again quotes Smith, but she applies his words to women as well as men: “To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which they seek.”Footnote ⁵¹ For Smith, these advantages can be enjoyed in friendships between men. He also pays attention, if obliquely, to the experience of loss or loneliness in situations where we had expected to find sympathy but did not. We feel awful when we tell a joke that we thought would land well but is amusing to nobody but ourselves (TMS I.i.2). On the other hand, “[w]hen we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion” (TMS I.i.2). The other person’s enthusiasm reawakens our own initial excitement over the poem and we feel a resonance between our own feelings and those of the other person: “[T]his correspondence of the sentiments of others with our own appears to be a cause of pleasure, and the want of it a cause of pain” (TMS I.i.2). Smith uses these examples to underscore our desire to be regarded and appreciated not just for our outward successes, but for our inward experience, “all the emotions of our own breast.” Society may put a premium on success in terms of wealth, power, and status, and there is of course the temptation to gain a reputation and respect based on these external features. But friendship implies that the other does not merely admire my wealth, but also appreciates my character and sympathizes with my emotions. The examples of the shared poem and the unsuccessful joke show Smith’s nuanced awareness of the subtle ways in which sympathy manifests and how keenly we feel the absence of it.

Friendship and sympathy between men can be obstructed by societal preoccupations with rank and fortune. A man may believe himself to be respected because of his character, whereas in fact his supposed friends only defer to him because of his wealth. Nevertheless, respect between men is at least a possibility, while, as Wollstonecraft points out, respect between men and women is practically impossible in a society that teaches women always to play a part and never show either their intelligence or any unwelcome emotions. The rules for female conduct are so strict that to defy them means one no longer qualifies as feminine. Women “were made to be loved,” Wollstonecraft writes, “and must not aim at respect, lest they should be hunted out of society as masculine.”Footnote ⁵² A woman who displays her rational capacities and aims at virtues beyond accepted feminine traits such as modesty, docility, and patience no longer fits the category “woman,” let alone “wife.” A proper woman desires only love, which is a word that Wollstonecraft reserves for a fleeting, “animal appetite” quite distinct from and inferior to friendship and esteem.Footnote ⁵³ Yet conduct authors, public opinion, and romance novels all tell women that love is the highest good. For women, love is supposed to take the “place of every nobler passion” and women’s “sole ambition is to be fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Passions and animal appetites come and go, while respect is earned over time and built to last. Love does not provide a solid foundation for marriage. Furthermore, though Wollstonecraft does not enter into the matter explicitly, it is unclear how these fickle, weak ladies could ever befriend each other in a meaningful way. To women who have been taught that their main goal in life is to marry well and be pleasant to men, other women are either rivals or completely uninteresting.Footnote ⁵⁵ As a result, however, women are doubly lonely, as they cannot strike up friendships with either men or women. What makes matters worse, they may not even be equipped to recognize their own loneliness because of their lack of moral and rational education.

Some of Smith’s earliest passages from his account of the impartial spectator shed light on the exact nature of the loneliness that we feel when others do not regard us in the way we want to be regarded. Smith starts his explanation of the process through which we come to look at ourselves through the eyes of others with a description of the way we look at ourselves in a mirror. Finding that we ourselves have opinions on the appearance of others, he writes, “[w]e become anxious to know” how others may judge the way we look:

We put ourselves in the position of a spectator of our own appearance in order to decide whether our outward person deserves “praise” or “blame.” Paving the way for his account of the impartial spectator, which is a moral entity, Smith here appears to set up what we might call an aesthetic impartial spectator. If, looking in the mirror “with the eyes of other people,” we find that our appearance is praiseworthy (or at least not blameworthy), we may conclude that we look alright given the prevailing standards of the society we live in. From the way we have seen others judge each other, and the judgments we ourselves have made on others, we have derived an idea of the sort of things that make one’s appearance acceptable (or not). We compare our own appearance to this idea and decide whether or not it passes muster. If we decide that our appearance meets the standards we have derived from public opinion, then actual “disadvantageous judgments of others” do not affect us. We know that our appearance is at least passable, and so we can dismiss people who slight our looks. But the inverse is true as well. If our study of our appearance in the mirror leads us to conclude that our appearance does not meet the requirements we have deduced, we realize we are the “natural object of distaste” (TMS III.i.4). Others are right to slight our appearance, and every time they do, we feel the pain of it because we know they are correct in their judgment.

Smith soon moves on from what may be described as an instance of aesthetic impartial spectatorship. Before proceeding to the next step in his argument, we should consider the implications of this mirror gazing for Wollstonecraft’s concerns about middle-class women. Proper ladies, we know from the conduct literature, always first ask themselves: How am I being perceived? Wollstonecraft laments the fact that girls are taught only manners, not morals, and that they learn to value only their appearance and not the quality of their character. In other words, as they grow up, girls are taught that what they see in the mirror is the only thing that matters. For them, the looking-glass experiment described by Smith is not a stop on the way to the recognition that what matters most is one’s inner qualities and virtues. Women are taught to care only about their appearance and then they are blamed for being vain. This state of affairs is not only unfair, but also cuts off a young woman’s moral development before it can even truly begin. For as Smith points out, we ought to leave behind the literal mirror and move on to the “looking-glass” provided by society:

Just like we can become indifferent to slights on our appearance of actual spectators because we know that we look fine, we can develop a strong moral sense of self to bolster us against unfair accusations. Similarly, we do not lose our head when we receive praise, so vanity has no hold on us either.

Bringing Smith’s account to bear on Wollstonecraft’s analysis, a woman’s moral development faces two kinds of obstacles. First, she will develop an aesthetic “impartial” spectator based on what is considered attractive in a woman. The ideal laid down in the conduct literature offers her specifics that tend to apply only to a lucky subset of young women who are gifted with a fair complexion, ready ability to blush, and “handsome arms and neat elbows” to display while playing the harp.Footnote ⁵⁶ As women age, they therefore of necessity become “blameworthy” where their appearance is concerned.Footnote ⁵⁷ Once they start aging out of the youthful ideal, they will be unable to set aside the “disadvantageous judgments of others” because they recognize that they are “the natural objects of distaste.” According to Wollstonecraft, the strictures of society ensure that many women never even think of their moral character or virtue, because they are encouraged from a young age to consider only their appearance and their manners. But even if a woman becomes concerned with the propriety of her moral conduct, it is unclear how she could even come to be “indifferent about the applause, and, in some measure, despise the censure of the world.” Again, the conduct literature prescribes that “applause” and flattery are the highest achievable good for a woman and that this is a direct reflection of her worth. More seriously, it is difficult to see how any woman could ever come to feel “secure that, however misunderstood or misrepresented, [she is] the natural and proper object … of approbation.” We again turn to Rousseau’s Emile to illustrate what Wollstonecraft is up against in her fight for women’s moral equality.

Public opinion and when to ignore it

Wollstonecraft quotes Rousseau on the different role played by public opinion in the lives of men and women:

How is a woman ever to develop a strong, independent sense of moral self-worth if she always needs to take into account “what is thought of her”? For Smith, the impartial spectator can offer a man solace exactly because it enables him to feel, in the words of Rousseau, “secure in his own good conduct” despite public opinion. Though Wollstonecraft does not mention Smith by name in her critique of Rousseau on this issue, it is clear that she is referring to his The Theory of Moral Sentiments when she writes:

Smith does not argue that we need to stop at what he would consider merely a waypoint on the route to impartial spectatorship. He agrees with Wollstonecraft that it is “not sufficient to view ourselves as we suppose that we are viewed by others.” Wollstonecraft does not mention the impartial spectator here, but she does suggest that we should look at ourselves the way God would (“that Being views us who seeth each thought ripen into action”). This is not quite the same as Smith’s “divine inmate,” but does reflect a similar idea, that is, that we should form a moral perspective independent of the fickle and often unfair judgments of the actual spectators who surround us.

Wollstonecraft’s criticism is geared at Rousseau first and foremost, but she also points at a difficult and somewhat mysterious step in Smith’s development of the impartial spectator. How do we know in any given case that we can trust our own judgment over the judgment of others? When do we have sufficient evidence in the form of partial judgments to conclude that we can ignore certain bits of actual praise and blame due to being confident in our own sense of what is proper and improper? This is a difficult phase in the moral development of a man, but an almost impossible step to make for a woman who has been told from when she was a young girl that she should never disregard public opinion (as made explicit in the quotation above from Rousseau’s Emile). This is why Wollstonecraft claims that to view oneself as others do is not “sufficient … as the foundation of our moral sentiments,” especially if one is a woman.Footnote ⁶⁰ Smith does not claim that “to view ourselves as we suppose that we are viewed by others” is a sufficient condition for a strong moral sense of self, as Wollstonecraft is no doubt aware. What Wollstonecraft wants us to recognize is that the obstacles for women to move on from the judgments of others to any kind of impartial point of view are almost insurmountable.

Smith recognizes that our moral development is not a perfectly linear progression and that there will be setbacks. The impartial spectator is strengthened gradually and will need to be fortified by what we might call reality checks as we move through life:

This makes sense if the subject is the self-confident man who is not prone to self-doubt. This person could clearly benefit from the unvarnished opinion of someone not inclined to flatter or indulge his already (too) robust sense of self. This same person would most benefit from the advice Smith has for those who are “in adversity”:

Again, we can see how a self-confident, independent man would draw strength from proving others wrong and how his impartial spectator could make itself heard more clearly because it would provide a contrast with the uncaring or even hostile spectators surrounding this person. The challenge for this man would be to consider carefully what opinions and judgments to take on board and which ones to dismiss.

Wollstonecraft provides us with an extended and deeply tragic counterexample to this self-confident man in her novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. Feeling “bastilled” in her marriage, Maria leaves her abusive and adulterous husband and seeks shelter in town, but nobody will take in a woman who has fled her husband as she is his legal property.Footnote ⁶¹ The woman who eventually offers her a place to hide betrays her because she is pressured by her own husband. Maria’s husband locks her up in an insane asylum, away from her infant daughter whom he neglects. As a runaway wife, Maria meets with unsympathetic strangers and enemies everywhere, but she is not in a situation to make them feel “how little you are affected by your calamity, and how much you are above it.” Maria believes she is acting virtuously in leaving an immoral husband and believes that God would approve of her actions, but there is not one person around her to confirm this belief and assure her that she is doing the right thing. Other than her belief that God’s judgment is in her favor, she is entirely alone.

In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft writes that “virtue, says reason, must be acquired by rough toils, and useful struggles with worldly cares.”Footnote ⁶² Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman shows that the “rough toils” with which a woman may be confronted can isolate her to the extent that she has only her moral sense to rely on. But as we have seen, it is exactly this moral sense that most women are prohibited from ever developing. When Maria is led to believe that her infant daughter has died, neglected by her husband, she tries to take her own life: “She swallowed the laudanum; her soul was calm—the tempest had subsided—and nothing remained but an eager longing to forget herself—to fly from the anguish she endured to escape from thought—from this hell of disappointment.”Footnote ⁶³ Maria is revived, but only to continue her life of “anguish” and “disappointment,” isolated from others who might recognize her virtue because she has been branded as an insane and improper woman.