In a 1795 letter, Horace Walpole favourably compared Hannah More—writer, renowned abolitionist, and prolific philanthropist—to Mary Wollstonecraft, calling More the “reverse of that hyaena in petticoats.”
Even though these two remarkable women agreed on many vital issues—from the abolition of the slave trade to the need to reform female education—history has remembered them as foils. Wollstonecraft is the radical philosopher, we are told, and More is the prudish but virtuous bluestocking. If you like the one, the story goes, you simply can’t like the other.
This sharp dichotomy is both unhelpful and inaccurate. The truth is, although they did hold distinctive views on some important topics, More and Wollstonecraft also shared many key insights. Those shared insights can help us navigate the troubled waters of contemporary debates about femininity, motherhood, and family life—debates that are vividly personified by the social media phenomenon of “tradwives.”
The tradwife is the contemporary version of a figure that both Wollstonecraft and More critically engaged throughout their lives: the “accomplished lady.” Such ladies learnt a smattering of dancing, singing, modern languages, painting, and embroidery in order to attract a suitable husband and impress fashionable society. Once married, they ran their households with the substantial help of staff and governesses. Likewise, the modern tradwife influencer is a wealthy woman with significant practical help and financial resources. She performs her wifely skills not so much to care for her family as to hold the attention of her audience.
Tradwives are right to emphasise the inherent value of homemaking and caring for children, but their lifestyle is not attainable—or perhaps even desirable—for most families. We need a better model for womanhood. Together, More and Wollstonecraft can help us find it.
Mary Wollstonecraft: “Hyaena in Petticoats”?
It’s no secret that More agreed with Walpole’s biting condemnation of Wollstonecraft. Yet More claimed never to have read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She simply disdained Wollstonecraft’s use of the language of universal rights, language she feared fomented the worst violence of the French Revolution and made women discontented with the role “assigned them in this world” by God.
Even more, she despised Wollstonecraft’s novel Maria: Or, The Wrongs of Woman Illustrated (1798), which was published a year after the author’s death and a year before More’s own treatise, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. In The Wrongs of Woman, Maria seeks to escape her abusive husband and, in a state of despair, begins a (mostly platonic) relationship with another man. More interpreted the novel as a defense of sexual immorality, writing that, for Wollstonecraft “adultery is justifiable, and… the restrictions placed on it by the laws of England constitute part of the wrongs of woman.”
With the gift of time and distance, and the reading of Wollstonecraft’s full corpus, it seems clear that Wollstonecraft was not in fact justifying adultery. Rather, she was exposing the injustice of laws that trap women in abusive marriages and illustrating the lengths to which a mistreated, despairing woman will go to escape.
But More didn’t have the privilege of hindsight. She was writing just as Wollstonecraft’s own tumultuous personal life had been exposed for the public to judge. When William Godwin published the biography of his short-lived wife just a few months after her death, her character was immediately marked by English society as unvirtuous. The book detailed Wollstonecraft’s suicide attempts and her complex “marital” relationship with Gilbert Imlay (whose name she took, acting as his wife and bearing his child, but whom she never legally married). Indeed, historian Christopher Lasch suggests that “More was put off not so much by the ideas advanced in The Vindication of the Rights of Woman as by Wollstonecraft’s personal history.”
Since More claimed to be “invincibly resolved never to read” The Rights of Woman, biographer M. G. Jones believes it to be “unlikely” that More would have perused Wollstonecraft’s earlier work Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). But, as we will see, Wollstonecraft’s treatise on education reveals many significant points of agreement between the two famous writers.
Hannah More: Repressive Bluestocking?
Much more popular than Wollstonecraft in her own day, Hannah More is now largely forgotten. If remembered, she is normally cast as a prudish, overly didactic, overtly religious bluestocking. In one way, she really was all these things. She was a devout evangelical, a staunch supporter of the monarchy, and a firm believer that women belong to a decidedly separate sphere from men. If the term had then been in use, she would probably have called herself an anti-feminist.
Yet More was also a prominent advocate for social reform. Once a prolific playwright, later in life she became associated with the “Clapham Sect” of British abolitionists. She worked with William Wilberforce both on the abolition cause and on her project to reform and expand schooling for the poor. She believed that social hierarchies were the product of providence, but also that slavery was an abuse of that God-given hierarchical system; that monarchy was the best form of government, but also that the lower classes deserved a better education so that they could become more virtuous; that women’s role in society was to be virtuous mothers and wives, but that, in order to do so, they needed a much better education, too. In short, More was a rich and complex thinker.
Modern readers may well question what Robert Hole calls her “moral paternalism” and have a distaste for her didactic tone, not to mention her relegation of women into the private sphere. Yet it is undeniable that she played a valuable role in bringing attention to many social justice causes that were heavily contested in her day.
Wollstonecraft was also a Christian, but—unlike More—she was a critic of the absolute monarchy, a dissenting republican, and a strong proponent of women’s full citizenship. Though both thinkers believed that women needed to be well-educated if they were to be wise and effective mothers, they framed their arguments on this topic very differently. More consistently emphasized the differences between the sexes, whereas Wollstonecraft argued strongly for a shared human nature between men and women, often taking for granted their sexual difference.
More was aware that thinkers like Wollstonecraft believed that women needed educational and professional opportunities to keep them from being entirely dependent on men, and thus vulnerable to abuse. “Is the author, then, undervaluing her own sex?” More asks of herself with rhetorical flourish. “No,” she responds emphatically. “It is her zeal for [women’s] true interests which leads her to oppose their imaginary rights.”
That is ultimately the point of contention. Wollstonecraft employed a language of “rights” that was thoroughly unpalatable to More. Rather than trying to secure abstract rights, More argued, we should follow the path laid out by God for the sexes, which is the surest way of securing social stability. More is, in many ways, misreading Wollstonecraft. For Wollstonecraft, rights were not abstract and universal; rather, they only made sense in the light of duties and a life of virtue. But to More, the very mention of “rights” smacked of the worst excesses of the French Revolution, an association she simply could not see past. It is a shame that these two brilliant thinkers were not in a more productive conversation with each other.
The “Accomplished Lady”: A Common Enemy
In spite of this disagreement over the meaning of the concept of rights, More and Wollstonecraft share a common enemy: the “accomplished lady.”
Both thinkers believed that, since most women would become mothers, they should receive the kind of education that made them good ones. In Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), published twelve years before More’s Strictures, Wollstonecraft makes it clear that parenthood is an invaluable calling: “I conceive it to be the duty of every rational creature to attend to its offspring… Indolence, and a thoughtless disregard of every thing, except the present indulgence, make many mothers, who may have momentary starts of tenderness, neglect their children.” Wollstonecraft here is especially thinking of the kind of wealthy, fashionable ladies who would not be involved in raising their own children, leaving them in the care of nursemaids in their infancy and governesses in their childhood and adolescence.
Similarly, More’s Strictures was written chiefly with the aristocracy and the upper middle class in mind. Like other evangelicals of her time, More thought the British aristocracy was Christian in name, but not in practice, and that upper class ladies, if they were better educated, could influence society at large to become more virtuous and dutiful. “Both Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft,” Christopher Lasch writes, “warned that mimicry of aristocratic ways rendered middle-class women unfit for their real obligations, discouraged self-sufficiency, and led to unproductive behavior.”
In Strictures, More laments that “there is not one more abused, misunderstood, or misapplied, than the term accomplishments.” The original meaning of the word, continues More, is “completeness” or “perfection,” but the term cannot be applied to the fashionable ladies of English society. She worried that young women were spending too long on the “excessive cultivation” of the “fine arts,” and not long enough on religious instruction, history, or philosophy. Similarly, in Thoughts, Wollstonecraft decries that “Girls learn something of music, drawing… they can play over a few tunes to their acquaintance, and have a drawing or two,” but these “acquirements” are “unsupported by solid good qualities.”
If this still sounds too abstract, consider a well-known passage from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Though it was published in 1813, the novelwas first drafted around 1795, right in-between More’s and Wollstonecraft’s respective works on education.
In this scene, Elizabeth Bennet, the Bingleys, and Mr. Darcy are at Netherfield Park. Mr. Bingley remarks that so many young ladies seem wonderfully accomplished: “They all paint tables, cover screens, and net purses,” he exclaims admiringly. Miss Bingley, his sister, is less easily impressed. She contends that “A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word.” Still not content with their definition, Mr. Darcy modifies it to something closer to More’s idea of “completeness”: “to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”
Mr. Darcy is clearly of the More and Wollstonecraft school of thought. Like both of these writers, he has nothing against the fine arts. He accepts that they may be part of a good education, just as Wollstonecraft freely admits that, if a young lady has a propensity for music or drawing, it must be because “heaven kindly bestowed it,” and it must be considered a “great blessing.” But just like Mr. Darcy, Wollstonecraft also believes that reading is essential: “Reading is the most rational employment,” she writes in Thoughts. “Judicious books enlarge the mind and improve the heart.”
Here, then, lies the heart of the matter. In Lasch’s words, “Like Hannah More, Wollstonecraft advocated an education that would make women useful rather than ornamental.”
From Accomplished Lady to Tradwife
Some might assume that More, at least, with her conservative views on gender roles, might be pleased to see Nara Smith making Coca Cola from scratch or Hannah Neeleman parading her egg apron for all of their followers to see. But I think both More and Wollstonecraft would be scandalized at worst and amused at best to see so-called “traditional” women busy producing home-made butter (while being filmed for Instagram by a professional crew) and placing it on an “artisanal” butter dish (which you can buy on their website for $100, thank you very much), all while someone else minds the kids.
The trad-wife phenomenon is not really about homemaking—not in any meaningful sense. (Please note: I echo Felix Miller’s caveat that, when criticizing tradwives, I mean online tradwife influencers, not stay-at-home mothers, a group to which I largely feel I belong).
The appeal of the tradwife, just like that of the accomplished lady, is a matter of aesthetics, not function. In order to thrive on the internet, the tradwife has to make herself ornamental. She would not be making any money if she showed up for the camera messily dressed, her makeup-less face visibly tired from a night of nursing a newborn, and cooked in bursts of five minutes while constantly being interrupted by toddlers. Just as the accomplished lady learnt a little music and drawing to impress fashionable society, so too, the contemporary tradwife dresses, cooks, and acts not for the benefit of her family (though that may accidentally come about), but primarily for the admiration of internet users. She is not usefully inculcating virtuous habits in herself or her children. She is performing.
Being an aesthetically pleasing “traditional” woman today is as expensive as it was for late eighteenth-century ladies of the upper echelons of English society. More and Wollstonecraft both feared that upper class women were corrupting the middle and lower middle classes by influencing them to imitate a lifestyle that they could not afford, and that would increase their vanity. Likewise, today’s tradwife influencer tends to be a wealthy, privileged woman. There is something insidious about well-off female personalities selling overpriced homeware (and the ideals they represent) to less wealthy women, with the promise of making them more feminine, more beautiful, and more skilled as homemakers.
This leads me to my final point of comparison. Being a tradwife influencer is primarily oriented towards achieving higher social status and greater wealth, not towards service. The accomplished lady of More and Wollstonecraft’s time could attract the admiration of an even wealthier, high-status suitor. Once married, she could command a powerful role in fashionable society. Just so, the internet tradwife gains approval and accumulates wealth through broadcasting her lifestyle. She may incidentally end up cooking wonderful food for her family and keep a beautiful home, but that is not the primary intention. It’s about attracting admiration and developing a viable business model based on that admiration.
In spite of all these similarities, however, there is one crucial difference between the accomplished lady and the tradwife influencer: the internet. The accomplished lady may have been more ornamental than useful, but she was still largely real. Her privilege was obvious; she did not pretend her lifestyle was attainable by the masses. In fact, it was its unattainability that reinforced the appeal. Not so for the tradwife. The internet allows her to project a distorted version of her life and then sell that distortion as something at once aspirational and attainable for the everywoman. As Mary Harrington explains in her recent interview with Lauren Southern, the kind of purist ideologies sound appealing in the “free-floating world of the internet” rarely work in practice. Trad-life, when reduced to an internet aesthetic, cannot withstand the complexities of real life.
A Better Model
Thankfully, Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft’s shared insights offer an alternative model of womanhood. In our polarized society, it often feels as if our only options are to vilify homemaking or to idolize (and monetize) it.
Instead, both Wollstonecraft and More would urge mothers to develop their intellects and other capacities, developing skills and virtues that are not ornamental but useful to those in their care. For women who feel called to full-time homemaking, that means carrying out your duties to your children and your local community, and not becoming excessively concerned about whether you’re doing so in an aesthetically pleasing way. For mothers who discern a role in public as well as domestic life, that means seeking excellence in all your endeavours, and not letting the wish for praise and achievement take precedence over your duties to family, work, and community.
More might quibble on this, but I agree with Wollstonecraft that this last point applies to men and women alike. Both husbands and wives are called to homemaking, to crafting a home together. And both men and women thrive when they pursue virtue and excellence rather than admiration, which is fleeting.
Because there is no place more conducive to obsessively seeking admiration than the internet, I suspect these great female thinkers would agree on another thing, too: we should all spend less time online and more time, in Mr. Darcy’s words, cultivating our minds through reading.
