2. Wollstonecraft’s definition of dignity

Wollstonecraft made liberal use of the term “dignity,” and sometimes its applications are not consistent in her work. She was, after all, a polemicist, whose immediate purpose in any given work was to bring the concept of dignity to bear in her argument, not to construct a grand theory of human dignity.Footnote ⁶ Nonetheless, across her works she did consistently link dignity with the same set of other ideas, offering us the outline of a definition.

What did dignity mean for Wollstonecraft? As we might expect given her intellectual milieu, it was closely associated with freedom. Her mentor, Richard Price, thought that having dignity was contingent upon having liberty, and Wollstonecraft similarly declared that, unless man has freedom, “it is impossible for him to become either a reasonable or dignified being” (Price 1991, 83, 112; Wollstonecraft 1794, 234). But her analysis was more nuanced than that of Price: for her, dignity was a condition of freedom as well as a product of it (see for example Wollstonecraft 1794, 81–82, 87). In the same vein, to be dignified, it was above all necessary to be independent. She thought that “independence, … of whatever kind, always gives a degree of dignity to the mien”: indeed, the sole basis of kings’ claim to (superficial) dignity was that they stood in the position of ultimate independence.Footnote ⁷ Among the many affronts to independence, and thus to dignity, were rank, primogeniture, hereditary property, and the limited experience of life that was afforded to women (James 2016, 152–53).

Wollstonecraft likewise frequently links the concept with reason, which she treats as a necessary pillar of dignity. While the passions may create an illusory sense of a person’s dignity, the cold scrutiny of reason sooner or later reveals it to be lacking: “the most energetic appeals to the passions always lose half their dignity, or, perhaps, appear to want the support of reason, when they are cooly perused” (Wollstonecraft 1794, 374). In the end only that speech and action which is founded on reason may be said to be dignified, although this is not to say that the passions are themselves intrinsically undignified; they must simply be under the tutelage of reason.

These are the ideas that Wollstonecraft positively linked with dignity. But with such an acerbic writer, it will be no surprise that the outline of her concept of dignity emerges still more clearly when juxtaposed with its negations. In Wollstonecraft’s thought, dignity could be lost to a wide variety of things, most of them forms of frivolity, coquettishness, and general unseriousness. However, dignity was not their direct opposite: it was no more to be found in austerity, or what she called “Spartan discipline,” than in triviality (Wollstonecraft 1995, 82, 92). Rather, dignity was a balancing act. It consisted in modesty, the correct degree of emotional distance—reserved, but not cold—and elegance without affectation (Wollstonecraft, 2014, 19–20, 27, 97). The ideal disposition to cultivate was a “humble softness of manners,” which had to be motivated by an absolute emotional sincerity; it was all too obvious when a person tried to feign it with politeness alone (Wollstonecraft, 2014, 31–32). In An historical and moral view of the origins and progress of the French Revolution (1794), she identifies “the heart” as “the source of all real dignity, honour, virtue, and every noble quality of mind” (Wollstonecraft 1794, 23). Authenticity in one’s social relations and simplicity in one’s appearance, then, were the axes of dignity; and they were lost all too easily to a poor upbringing or lifestyle.Footnote ⁸

Clearly, given the above, dignity was not an intrinsic human trait for Wollstonecraft, since not everyone was independent, sincere, serious, self-aware, and unpretentious. However, the capacity to become dignified, to cultivate these characteristics, was both natural and universal: throughout her work, she referred to the “native dignity” which inhabited even the most wretched pauper (see for example Wollstonecraft 1995, 11, 14). Clearly, to her mind, every human being had the seed of dignity in them; however, to achieve true and full human dignity, they had to bring this seed to maturity through their comportment. As such, we can identify two different phenomena to which Wollstonecraft applied the term dignity: on the one hand, a contingent mode of being in the world that consisted in independence and seriousness, and on the other, an innate capacity to develop these personal traits. Although Wollstonecraft was content to use the same word to describe both, following her example in this regard might risk leading us into analytical confusion. To prevent this, we may distinguish here between natural, “germinal” dignity on the one hand, and fully developed “human” dignity on the other. This restructuring of her language may seem somewhat artificial, but we can justify it on grounds that, while she did not herself devise and consistently employ separate terms for the undeveloped and developed forms of dignity, she did draw a semantic contrast between the feminine, which represented unrealized dignity, and the human, which was cultivated, serious, and hence dignified.Footnote ⁹ For reasons that will presumably be obvious I prefer not to adopt this nomenclature myself, so “germinal” and “human” seems preferable.

This distinction between a formal but not necessarily concrete attribute and its fully actualized counterpart is quite common in Wollstonecraft’s thought. Susan James notes that, in her thought, rights are best understood as a combination of power and duty: to assert that women have a right to education was not to demand that they should receive it as a matter of course, but rather that they had a moral duty to pursue one, and hence should have the opportunity to do so.Footnote ¹⁰ The same idea defined her conception of citizenship, which Melanie White suggests she thought of as something to which each person certainly had some kind of claim, but that they must grow into if they were to merit it, by gaining their independence from others and learning how to discharge their duties toward them responsibly (White 2019, 452–55). In the same way, then, she thought that all people had an obligation to realize their dignity, and thus should not be obstructed from doing so; however, their entitlement extended only to the opportunity to realize it, and not to have it realized for them.

This was in turn linked with her understanding of liberty as the capacity of human beings to govern themselves, without which, clearly, no demands could be made of their moral, political, and civic choices. Moreover, if germinal dignity was universal and unconditional in human beings, but also exclusive to human beings and perishable in those who did not successfully develop it, this is on account of the aforementioned link with reason. Within Wollstonecraft’s moral psychology, reason represented the uniquely human capacity for improvement, both that of our skills and that of our character. Animals may be apt at particular things, such as building nests, but humans alone can perfect our aptitudes over time. Dignity represented this faculty within the realm of one’s moral and social character, consisting in the growing perfection of our disposition and of our comportment in society.Footnote ¹¹ The attainment of dignity was thus entirely dependent on the proper exercise of our reason, employing our divinely bestowed liberty to make the correct moral choices.

We have seen in what kind of behaviors a person must engage to be considered dignified. Cultivating such a mode of comportment would set a person on a virtuous cycle insofar as it would excite the respect of those around them, which in turn would help to reinforce their sense of their own dignity. Respect, according to Sylvana Tomaselli, had a particular place in the Wollstonecraft lexicon. In essence, it constituted recognition of what we have described in the previous paragraph: to respect someone was to make a positive appraisal of their aptitude in seeking to realize their wisdom and virtue (Tomaselli 2016, 22, 24–25). To merit the respect of others was thus to affirm one’s success in developing dignified traits, and in turn the affirmation represented in other people’s respect would stimulate further development toward meriting it.

However, to have its desired effect of driving the development of our germinal dignity into human dignity, this respect had to meet certain criteria. It had to be earned: a person did not merit respect simply by being human. To rely on another person’s gift of esteem would, after all, constitute a kind of dependency. And it had to be emotionally authentic: “Civility is due to all, but regard or admiration should never be expressed when it is not felt” (Wollstonecraft 2014, 32; see also Bergès 2013, 79). One of the more reliable topics of complaint in her correspondence was other people’s failure to show proper respect for evident merit in the people she admired (Wollstonecraft 2003, 165, 172–73). Conversely, one of her objections to Edmund Burke in the Vindication of the rights of man was that he vested his respect in superficial, undeserving things, “the accidental distinctions of rank” and the “rust of antiquity”, whilst insulting that which he should have admired, namely Dr Richard Price’s “grey hairs of virtue” (Wollstonecraft 1995, 7, 17; see also Abbey 2019, 369). It is easy to see why, in one of the most famous passages of this work, she was so exercised by his fulsome praise for Marie Antoinette; there was a high premium on the esteem that he had squandered on the French queen.

Initially, then, dignity was a meeting of the internal and the external: we must make ourselves deserving of esteem, and esteem thus earned would confirm our dignity. Ideally our sense of our own dignity would become self-sufficient: we should thus avoid an “immoderate desire of human applause” and instead develop a “rock to rest on, which will … give true dignity” to our person.Footnote ¹² In its highest form, this version of self-respect meant respecting oneself as a beloved creation of God, since, if it was important to be “respectable to ourselves,” it was still more so to win the respect of “that Being, whose approbation is of more value than life itself” (Wollstonecraft 2014, 78; see also Wollstonecraft 1995, 34, 40, and Tomaselli 2020, x). God was thus both the origin and the end of dignity (Wollstonecraft 2014, 133). The theological component here is vital, and aligns her with the Scottish Enlightenment: Gershom Carmichael had also exhorted, in order, reverence for God, respect for oneself as part of Creation, and respect for others in the same capacity (Moore 2006, 297; see also O’Neill 2007, 455). More directly, in this she was perhaps following Price, who wrote that one of Christ’s aims was to reveal “to us our own dignity as heirs of a glorious immortality” (Price 1991, 104).

Still, self-respect must never be pushed too far, lest it become arrogance: humility was for Wollstonecraft tied to the artlessness that supports dignity. Thus dignity lay in self-respect that was self-aware but not affected or complacent.Footnote ¹³ The task of negotiating these thin boundaries seems to have preoccupied her: in a letter to Everina Wollstonecraft in 1790, she asked whether it were “mistaken pride or conscious dignity” which made her despise Milton’s Adam and Eve (Wollstonecraft 2003, 180). (By 1792, at least, she had plumped for the latter: Wollstonecraft 1995, 94.) Whatever its difficulties, attaining self-respect without arrogance was an absolute imperative. After all, in social life, “[o]ne principle of action is sufficient—Respect thyself” (Wollstonecraft 1794, 18).

This description might run the risk of making Wollstonecraftian dignity seem somewhat solipsistic. In fact, however, she makes very clear that a dignified person necessarily treats others with dignity. In her condemnation of women who participated in the evil of slavery, she asked:

This extended to those who could not enjoy dignity themselves. Wollstonecraft regarded dignity as a necessarily human quality, one that indeed separated human beings from animals: she castigated Burke for his suggestion that a woman’s virtues lay in her weakness and beauty, calling this a mere “animal perfection” in contrast with “the qualities that dignify a rational being” (Wollstonecraft 1995, 48). Nonetheless, she wrote in one of her earliest works, the manual Thoughts on the education of daughters, that cruelty toward animals was one of the cardinal sins for which a child must be punished (an expedient to which one should resort only rarely) (Wollstonecraft 2014, 15). Displaying viciousness toward others degrades our own dignity as well as theirs, and this is a lesson of such import that it must be drummed into us from our earliest days. As we shall shortly see, the idea that our dignity must necessarily manifest itself in just and decent treatment of others would underpin her theory of education.

We have seen that when Wollstonecraft used the term “dignity” she was referring to two separate but related things: a set of moderate, serious, and self-sufficient emotions and behaviors, worthy of the respect of others, and the innate potentiality to develop these emotions and behaviors. To achieve this self-development, a person had to cultivate the respect of the people around them, with the ultimate aim of accumulating a store of self-respect, inspired by divinity, that would serve to liberate them from dependency on other people’s respect. In the next section we will explore how this conception of dignity informed Wollstonecraft’s political thought, especially her criticism of the subjection of women.

3. Dignity, education, gender, and politics

I have sketched the outlines of Wollstonecraft’s conception of dignity, showing that she linked it with freedom and independence, and arguing that in her mind it began in each human being as nothing more than a potentiality that needed to be actualized by respect properly earned from the people around them. In this section I will show how it informed her commitment to education and her critique of (unnatural) hierarchy. As will be clear, for Wollstonecraft dignity was not an ethical or legal category so much as it was a social and affective one, displayed in a person’s comportment and dependent on a certain kind of education and disposition.Footnote ¹⁵ Since human dignity rested on comportment, it could only be developed in a social setting, and the present organization of society, with its gross inequalities of wealth, rank, and gender, militated against it. As a result, her social and affective dignity also took on important political implications.

As we have seen, dignity had to be grounded, at least in its fully developed form, in our own subjective emotional core, outside our awareness of the gaze of others. However, she thought that hierarchical society exerts on us a pressure to suppress our true natures, which “makes man vicious, by depriving him of that dignity of character, which rests only on truth” (Wollstonecraft 1794, 17; cf. O’Neill 2007, 457). It encouraged the development of a kind of vain, ostentatious sensibility over real emotional authenticity, a “refining of the senses at the expence of the heart; the source of all real dignity, honour, virtue, and every noble quality of the mind” (Wollstonecraft 1794, 23). Additionally, the process of striving and competing for distinction tended to strangle self-respect and dignity in the cradle (Wollstonecraft 1995, 23, 43–45; Wollstonecraft 1794, 18).

In recompense, society offered another kind of dignity, associated with a lofty social position. But this was false dignity, and fragile: Marie Antoinette had received a harsh lesson in what it meant to hold a title “to which power alone lent dignity” (Wollstonecraft 1794, 35; see also Johnson 2019, 107). The nobility, too, were “only great by the courtesy of the imagination” (Wollstonecraft 1794, 81; 1989, 385). Real dignity was rooted in the heart, and came to maturity in the hearts of others; but it was difficult to actualize in a society that encouraged people to be untrue to themselves. Moreover, this false dignity deprived all echelons of society of the chance to develop true human dignity. Since the upper orders gained a kind of false respectability by birthright, they had no incentive to develop their true, human dignity, and luxury soon lulled them into an idle decadence (Wollstonecraft 1995, 7, 30; 1794, 20; see also Tomaselli 2016, 21–23; Halldenius 2016, 9). These indolent creatures, being incapable of respecting others, in turn denied respect and thus dignity to the low-born. Wollstonecraft singled out for particular criticism their refusal to acknowledge other people’s economic independence: by treating fair exchanges between equal independent agents as if they were instead services that those in trade performed for their genteel betters, they humiliated those who provided for them, since “the man who is employed and gives a just equivalent for the money he receives” must “behave with the servile obsequiousness of a servant” (Wollstonecraft 2003, 209). Meanwhile, those who sought to make their fortune in an unequal society by clustering around rich men in search of advancement would soon lose the emotional authenticity whose cultivation was necessary for dignity, as “the manners are rendered stiff, and the heart cold” (Wollstonecraft 1794, 60). Inequality of rank was thus hostile to the development of personal dignity at all levels of society.

Gender inequality took a further toll on dignity: the degraded man would attempt to restore his own sense of dignity by oppressing his wife, and, more generally, women were denied dignity by the paucity of their education and their opportunities for mental exercise (Wollstonecraft 2009, 76–77; Wollstonecraft 1995, 117, 121). High-born women who, given only the tools they would need to draw the eyes of men, and none of those required to live a self-sufficient life, thus frittered away their lives in superficial chit-chat, flirtation, and coquetry, come in for particular opprobrium in Wollstonecraft’s fiery prose: “In the fine Lady how few traits do we observe of those affections which dignify human nature! … We cannot be too careful not to verge on this character; though she lives many years she is still a child in understanding, and of so little use to society, that her death would scarcely be observed” (Wollstonecraft 2014, 158). Some women compensated for their disadvantages by abusing their weaknesses to manipulate men, thereby regaining some power, but not dignity; as Natalie Fuehrer Taylor makes clear, for Wollstonecraft, true human dignity could never be achieved by gaining power over others (Taylor 2006, 47–48).

Such vicious criticism of her fellow woman might seem unwarranted, indeed bordering on misogynistic. There is little doubt that Wollstonecraft felt a personal contempt for those who exhibited such behaviors. But her true target, as she makes clear in both Vindications, was the inequality that promoted such frivolity in women for the (pretended) benefit of men (see also Wollstonecraft 1995, 22, 101, 160). Indeed, for all her disdain, she also evinced pity for the “fine lady” who, she observed, drew all her sense of worth from capricious men, and would thus be left with nothing when they tired of her and moved on to a younger woman (Wollstonecraft 1995, 78). She expresses the same emotion for the high- and low-born who, owing to the effects of unnatural hierarchy, cannot develop their dignity: “the great and small vulgar, claim our pity; they have almost insuperable obstacles to surmount in their progress towards true dignity of character” (Wollstonecraft 1995, 30). If it seems uncompromising, even harsh, for Wollstonecraft to deny that those who had failed to develop their faculties and emotional disposition had any real dignity, she did at least soften this judgment with a very Rousseauian condescension.

The development of such vicious habits in women was a particular concern for Wollstonecraft because of their role in raising the next generation. At the start of her chapter on moral discipline in Thoughts she endorsed the aphorism: “That no being, merely human, could properly educate a child” (Wollstonecraft 2014, 11). Nonetheless, some were better able than others. An undignified mother (on undignified fathers she was in this respect silent, although as we have seen, undignified men made women undignified) invariably “takes pains to sow those seeds, which have produced such luxuriant weeds in her own mind,” condemning her own child to a life of similar indignity (Wollstonecraft 2014, 12). A mother whose only pastime was performing silliness for the gratification of men, or who had devoted herself to pulling her husband’s strings, would raise children who lived the same way, boys who would condescend to girls and girls who would chase after the attention of boys. In the cut-throat world of high society, such a mother would even regard her own daughters as rivals for the affection of men, and as an unwelcome reminder, through comparison, of her own fading beauty (Wollstonecraft 1995, 120–21).

Inequalities of all kinds thus prevented anyone, high or low, old or young, from developing their germinal dignity into fully fledged dignity. It might seem contradictory that Wollstonecraft could believe dignity to be both innate and God-given, and sufficiently precarious to perish through rich living or an excessively fashionable mother. But we see this same theme in her treatment of other subjects, such as truth: in Thoughts, she asserted that “principles of truth are innate,” yet also that children were liable to have them “obliterated from their minds” by poor upbringing (Wollstonecraft 2014, 13). The same principle applied to artistic talent: “If they have [it], do not suffer it to lie dormant. Heaven kindly bestowed it, and a great blessing it is; but, like all other blessings, may be perverted: yet the intrinsic value is not lessened by the perversion” (Wollstonecraft 2014, 42). The fact that something was natural did not necessarily make it inalienable. Indeed, as we saw above, this was a defining principle of her moral psychology, structuring her understanding of reason and liberty as well as dignity. Here she followed the Rousseauian idiom of perfectibility that was common to much eighteenth-century radicalism in suggesting that human beings had developed in a way other than that intended by God.Footnote ¹⁶ The potentialities with which humans had been born would die if they were not cultivated; all the more so if they were actually smothered.

Yet Wollstonecraft was not a fatalist, indeed quite the opposite: as Tomaselli notes, she believed that authors of all kinds should avoid depicting any human beings as helplessly degraded and without dignity, since this might make people cynical and dissuade them from seeking to improve themselves (Tomaselli 2020, 74–75). If principles like truth, virtue, and dignity were innate, if only in germinal form, then there was a potential exit from the spiral of degeneration. She thought that early humanity’s natural dignity could be restored even in the fallen society in which it found itself if its youth were educated into a better set of virtues. As such, one of her aims in Thoughts was to explore the ways in which the seed of dignity could avoid corruption through bad upbringing, bad example, and bad habit, and in doing so develop itself into its fully fledged form (Wollstonecraft 2014, passim, esp. 6–8, 18–20, 28–29). In turn, inculcating this dignity in enough people could bring about a slow moral reformation of society itself, transforming it from a superficial and unjust order into an egalitarian and civic-minded one. The road to this utopia was a good education.

By “education” Wollstonecraft did not simply mean arithmetic, literature, and languages, although these were necessary for a fully formed mind. An education should shape its subjects’ entire moral outlook. Girls’ education must be administered with a mind to reducing their dependency on men. Wollstonecraft had little patience for women who allowed themselves to be too much affected by the behavior of their husbands, seeing this as the product of an education in which “all the faculties of woman’s mind are only to be cultivated as they respect her dependence on man.” In contrast, “a proper education; or, to speak with more precision, a well stored mind, would enable a woman to support a single life with dignity”; it would armour her against any potential indelicacies committed by a husband in the event of marriage, and prove that she had a grounding in some foundation that was independent of his influence (Wollstonecraft 1995, 102).

This meant that children occupied a paradoxical position in Wollstonecraft’s notion of dignity, one that to an extent they still hold today: they did not have dignity in their own right (insofar as they could not be expected to behave in a dignified manner), but they nonetheless needed to be treated with dignity in order to become dignified beings in future. In Thoughts, she warned mothers not to humor their children’s caprices, as this “gives rise to an affection devoid of respect,” but rather to adopt a stern “[u]niformity of conduct.” For the same reason, she was suspicious of baby talk: a child should be addressed with the same concern for self-respect as an adult (Wollstonecraft 2014, 5–8).

In a society generally blessed with this kind of education, both men and women would have a strong and implicit sense of their own duties, qua citizens, to society. Mutual respect would act as an incentive to honor these obligations: she hoped “that society will some time or other be so constituted, that man must necessarily fulfil the duties of a citizen, or be despised.” In such a society women would also respect their own, differentiated duties, chief amongst which was passing on the same kind of education from which she had herself benefitted: “his wife, also an active citizen, should be equally intent to manage her family, educate her children, and assist her neighbours” (Wollstonecraft 1995, 236). None of this was possible unless she had full enjoyment of her freedom and natural rights, including with regard to her spouse: “The wife, in the present state of things, who is faithful to her husband, and neither suckles nor educates her children, scarcely deserves the name of a wife, and has no right to that of a citizen. But take away natural rights, and duties become null” (Wollstonecraft 1995, 236). The political manifestation of dignity was citizenship of an egalitarian republican society, a status consisting in recognition of one’s rights and duties alike—although, it should be acknowledged, not one in which women’s duties would be identical to those of men.

4. The French Revolution

As we have seen, it was extremely difficult but still narrowly possible to develop one’s dignity in a hierarchical society, and Wollstonecraft certainly believed every individual should strive to do so. Then, if enough children could be educated in the manner that she prescribed, society might be slowly transformed from below. But after 1789, she was suddenly presented with what seemed like an opportunity to achieve all the same aims with one blow, to construct from whole cloth the kind of society in which dignity would not be restrained and suppressed, in which the dignified traits she had identified would be more consistently rewarded.Footnote ¹⁷

The French Revolution, by overturning the established hierarchical order, initially seemed as if it might create the conditions for the society of which she dreamed: one of dignified equals humbly earning each other’s respect and drawing modest satisfaction from their own self-respect. The term “revolution,” entirely absent from her earlier writings on education, became an essential motor of the social change that she had hoped individual educators might be able to bring about from below, and thus vest the whole of humanity with much-needed dignity: in the second Vindication she refers repeatedly to a “revolution of manners” among women that would “restore to them their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world” (Wollstonecraft 1995, 117, 204, 267–94).

More prosaically, the Revolution contemporaneously taking place in France was an opportunity to begin educating women in the same manner as men, including rigorous physical education and the promotion of “masculine” virtues such as courage, for “if fear in girls, instead of being cherished, perhaps, created, were treated in the same manner as cowardice in boys, we should quickly see women with more dignified aspects” (Wollstonecraft 1995, 138). We see hints of these great hopes for the Revolution in the preface to the second edition of An historical and moral view, written after the disillusionment of the Terror, where she argued that 1789 had been an “exaltation of the human character” that must have one of two effects: it would either “sink the dignity of society into contempt, and its members into greater wretchedness; or elevate it to a degree of grandeur not hitherto anticipated, but by the most enlightened statesmen and philosophers.” (Wollstonecraft 1794, vi). Even after its apparent failure, Wollstonecraft’s conviction that the Revolution could bring—or by that time, could have brought—dignity to all layers of society was manifest.

Why, then, had “contempt” and “wretchedness” won out instead? Her attempts to explain this disappointing outcome demonstrate both the analytical confusion and the polemical advantage of the distinction between germinal and human dignity. On the one hand, Wollstonecraft argued that the diminishment of inequalities in the years leading up to 1789 had created the conditions of the Revolution, by making the people conscious of their own dignity (Wollstonecraft 1794, 3–4, 10–11). “A century before (a proof of the progress of reason) the people, digesting their disappointment, would have submitted, with brutal acquiescence”; but in 1789, “recognizing their own dignity, they insisted, that all authority, which did not originate with them, was illegal and despotic” (Wollstonecraft 1794, 50). The people who had been “slaves and dwarfs” had “suddenly appeared with the dignity and pretentions of human beings”: they had developed their dignity to the point at which their treatment at the hands of state and nobility had come to feel intolerable (Wollstonecraft 1794, 81). In other words, the revolution of dignity was created by dignity.

Yet on the other hand, there would have been no need for a revolution had the ancien régime not still been exactly the kind of society in which, by her own reasoning, developing one’s dignity should be next to impossible. And it would have been only through a revolution that the people could have attained the “much higher state of being” needed to sustain the revolutionary order (Wollstonecraft 1794, 15, 4). Indeed, she dedicated much of the final section of Historical and moral view to expounding the various ways in which the French were “the most unqualified” of all European peoples to carry out the revolution, owing to their poor education, rigid social divisions, the hedonism of the higher orders and the (consequent) mechanical brutishness of the lower (Wollstonecraft 1794, 498–511, esp. 509–11). Her bifurcated conception of dignity allowed her to present both conclusions that she wished to reach, at once that the French people’s understanding of their innate dignity had brought about the Revolution, and that they had not been sufficiently dignified to succeed in it. But this left her without much of an explanation as to how such a revolution might have been successful.

Wollstonecraft’s concept of dignity was, then, somewhat hostage to the shifting demands of her rhetoric. This is not to say her commitment to it was insincere: it was founded on an unwavering belief in dignity as something that was, at its root, natural and innate to humanity, and this belief helped to drive her support for the French Revolution. However, her decision to use dignity to explain both the origins of the Revolution and its failure rendered “revolution,” the key mechanism which she had hoped would bring dignity to the whole of society, a much more ambivalent idea in her later writings. For the later Wollstonecraft, the road to restoring dignity was thus much less clear.

Her original conviction, that dignity could be restored to society if only enough individuals could be taught how to actualize their germinal dignity and attain the proper mode of moral and emotional conduct, was also sorely tested by her post-revolutionary pessimism. However positive its future consequences for society, educating individual women in the present to be dignified human beings promised a hard struggle for the length of their own lives. In one of the most poignant passages of her whole oeuvre, in Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft contemplated the impossible choice offered to her as the mother of a daughter:

She could raise the infant Fanny in the manner she had always prescribed for dignified women, which would inevitably isolate her from the fallen, unperfected world that she was doomed to inhabit, or she could let her adopt the habits of other young women, and thus spare her the turmoil and misery that she had herself endured, at the cost of her dignity.

Nonetheless, despite the moral blow that her faith in social improvement had sustained from the frustrated hopes of the 1790s, Wollstonecraft was confident that the language of the French Revolution had permanently altered politics. Hence, even while witnessing the Terror at first hand during her time in Paris, she was still able to strike a triumphalist tone:

The reason for this unexpected optimism was technological innovation, most of all “the fortunate invention of printing,” which had now brought revolutionary ideas “within the reach of all ranks of men” (Wollstonecraft 1794, 3). That meant that every people of Europe could, through the diffusion of these ideas, come to recognize their own dignity: then nothing would be able to keep them from seizing power for themselves. In this way she merged her two dignifying mechanisms by making education—now, a form of autodidacticism driven by print, to be focused as much on enlightening readers as to their rights as on improving their manners—a necessary precondition of a successful revolution. In the long term, a true revolution of dignity might yet become possible.