The Rights of Woman
Yes, injured Woman! Rise, assert thy right!
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest;
O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,
Resume thy native empire o’er the breast!
Go forth arrayed in panoply divine;
That angel pureness which admits no stain;
Go, bid proud Man his boasted rule resign,
And kiss the golden sceptre of thy reign.
Go, gird thyself with grace; collect thy store
Of bright artillery glancing from afar;
Soft melting tones thy thundering cannon’s roar,
Blushes and fears thy magazines of war.
Thy rights are empire: urge no meaner claim, —
Felt, not defined, and if debated, lost;
Like sacred mysteries, which withheld from fame,
Shunning discussion, are revered the most.
Try all that wit and art suggest to bend
Of thy imperial foe the stubborn knee;
Make treacherous Man thy subject, not thy friend;
Thou mays’t command, but never can be free.
Awe the licentious, and restrain the rude
Soften the sullen, clear the cloudy brow:
Be, more than princes’ gifts, thy favours sued; —
She hazards all, who will the least allow.
But hope not, courted idol of mankind,
On this proud eminence secure to stay;
Subduing and subdued, thou soon shall find
Thy coldness soften, and thy pride give way.
Then, then, abandon each ambitious thought,
Conquest or rule thy heart shall feebly move,
In Nature’s school, by her soft maxims taught,
That separate rights are lost in mutual love.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) is thought to have written these verses in response to Mary Wollstonecraft’s ground-breaking treatise on the place of women in society, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). A productive author and educator, Barbauld held radical views on various topics; she supported the French Revolution and the abolition of slavery. But The Rights of Woman is not the call to revolution it may first appear. It might even be read as satire. Unlike Wollstonecraft, Barbauld stringently limits her vision of women’s rights, while presenting them in supposedly triumphalist terms of war, perhaps even holy war. Her address to women – and, implicitly, men – is arguably a mockery of the complex issue of “rights”.
“Rise, assert thy right!” is a command that simplifies rights by losing the plural, and thus the plurality of the concept. The imagery of national conquest dominates the earlier stanzas. Coronation is envisaged, and the “bright artillery” which is now at Woman’s disposal is gleaming seductively in her direction. Yet the socially approved, restrictive feminine stereotypes enter early into these calls to power, fearless with references to the traditionally conceived sex-war weapons of “melting tones”, “blushes and fears”, “wit and art”.
The closing command of the first stanza to “resume thy native empire o’er the breast” is the strongest hint of doubled intentions in the portrayal of conquest: there might be a suggestion that the imperial victory is connected to the wearing of a breast-plate, but it’s more likely that women’s true field of activity and power is being defined as the nursery, and, of course, that supposed nursery of tender feeling, the heart.
In the cleverly argued fourth stanza, the object of attack is the too-easy acceptance of women’s rights in terms of intuitive approval rather than rational discussion. Rights are not to be equated with “sacred mysteries”. This is compelling. Unfortunately, the poem falls short elsewhere of its good advice concerning the discussion of female emancipation.
The force of the feminine stereotype becomes clearer in stanzas five and six. “Thou mays’t command, but never can be free” asserts without explanation the impossibility of success for the woman who attains power. The last line of the next stanza gives aphoristic form to the risk traditionally considered to beset the female when male courtship is rejected: “She hazards all, who will the least allow.” Barbauld’s verse structure favours her talent for the ringing final line.
The earlier verses of The Rights of Woman suggest an imagined, metaphorical transfiguration, in which “soft power” achieves social and political force. But since Barbauld establishes images of empowerment and equality through metaphors of military action and statecraft, there is little to deflect the rigid mockery of her presentation. When she comes to her concluding stanzas, it’s less than surprising that she declares the “proud eminence” that represents women’s victory, as the “courted idol of mankind”, to be unsustainable.
The last stanza, energised by the repetition of “then”, begins by insisting on the abandonment of “each ambitious thought” and subsequently re-reads gender equality from a romanticised – and biologised – perspective. Nature is responsible for women’s presumed lack of desire for “conquest”, and this is all to the good. “Rights” founded on rational and fair-minded construction become irrelevant. While the assertion that “separate rights are lost in mutual love” sounds eloquent, it withdraws all credibility from the idea of vindication. As an independent woman such as Barbauld might have recognised, any lover worthy of the name would be first to resist such a loss of autonomy, either for themselves or for their partner.
