268 Eileen Hunt Botting
commented, “but they might as well pine married as single — and would
not be a jot more unhappy with a bad husband than longing for a good
one” (58).
She offered two dignifi ed alternatives to such foolish romance: “that
a proper education; or, to speak with more precision, a well stored mind,
would enable a woman to support a single life with dignity, I grant; but that
she should avoid cultivating her taste, lest her husband should occasionally
shock it, is quitting a substance for a shadow” (58). Women could either
live “a single life with dignity,” or marry with the rational expectation that
their ongoing self-cultivation would give them a more realistic conception
of their husbands’ characters. Such realism would enable women to share
in a respectful friendship with their spouses, as Wollstonecraft later did
with her husband William Godwin. Here and elsewhere in the Rights of
Woman, Wollstonecraft spoke in the fi rst person to her sex, to expose the
foolishness of the culture of sensibility, and confi de some droll advice on
the most serious decision they would make as females: to be married or
single.
Linking women’s rights to such personal choices to the political realm,
Wollstonecraft argued that woman “must have a civil existence in the state,
married or single” (178). Coverture, or the English common law idea that
a wife was covered under and represented by her husband’s legal iden-
tity, had made married women a legal “cypher” in her time (174). The
aristocratic practices of primogeniture (giving the eldest son preference in
family inheritance) and entail (keeping the family estate in one piece) ex-
acerbated the overall economic inequality of women. Regardless of class,
women were incentivized to marry for status and wealth, rather than love
or respect of their mates.
Few chose what the unmarried author of the Rights of Woman poi-
gnantly called “a single life with dignity,” because of the diffi culty of
making an independent living as a woman; they rather fell into it, as spin-
sters and widows, or through lowly women’s work as ladies’ companions,
wet nurses, governesses, teachers, and “the next class” of “milliners and
mantua-makers” (178; Gordon 2005, 19 –102). Unveiled in chapters nine
through twelve, her solution to this systematic oppression was fourfold:
the egalitarian transformation of the family, through abolition of coverture
and other patriarchal legal and cultural practices surrounding marriage,
inheritance, and child rearing; the expansion of economic opportunities
for women, so that they might have the chance for independent careers, not
just ill-paying jobs or unequal marriages; the extension of equal civil and