Loving Both Mother and Child: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Case for a Maternal, Pro-Life Feminism

In her recent article for the Political Theology journal, “Reproductive Justice: Mary Wollstonecraft on Women’s ‘Rights Against Domination’ for the ‘Cause of Virtue’” (2024), Emily Dumler-Winckler enlists eighteenth-century philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft for the pro-choice side of the culture wars. Dumler-Winckler argues that we have good reason for thinking that, if she were alive today, Wollstonecraft “would heartily support contemporary movements for reproductive justice including rights to abortion.” On the other end of the political spectrum, many pro-life conservative thinkers, for example, Carrie Gress in her 2023 book The End of Woman, agree with Dumler-Winckler’s characterization of a progressive Wollstonecraft, though finding this to be a reason to condemn rather than to praise. The inevitable conclusion of this line of thinking is that, if Wollstonecraft is the face of first-wave feminism, then feminism must be rejected wholesale.

On the surface, this appears to be a debate about how to interpret the thought of a philosopher who, however influential, is now long dead. But I think the partisan appropriation and weaponization of Wollstonecraft—the so-called “mother of feminism”—is symptomatic of much greater issues than academic squabbles: it reveals our continuing struggle to see the needs of mothers and children not as in opposition to each other, but instead as both essential and worthy of protection in a just and healthy society. Fortunately, if Wollstonecraft is the figure that uncovers such profound polarization, she can also help us move forward in the debate about “reproductive justice,” as Dumler-Winckler puts it.

Dumler-Winckler: Claiming Wollstonecraft for the Pro-Choice Cause?

First, what is Dumler-Winckler reacting to in writing such an explicit case for a pro-abortion Wollstonecraft? In her (overall excellent) 2022 book Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent, she largely avoided controversy, instead emphasizing the central importance of faith and the life of the virtues for Wollstonecraft. With this article, Dumler-Winckler means to challenge those in the pro-life movement who, in her own words, “claim the label ‘feminist’ for the anti-abortion cause.” She believes it to be “deeply anachronistic” to “enlist Wollstonecraft in the contemporary antiabortion, anticontraception, and heterosexual family-centered cause,” as “Wollstonecraft is not only an unlikely but a wholly unfitting heroine for this cause.” Dumler-Winckler thus accuses pro-life Wollstonecraft scholars like Erika Bachiochi of being blinded by their own political priorities.

For Dumler-Winckler, evidence that Wollstonecraft would have been in favor of legalized abortion is found partly in Wollstonecraft’s “own life experience,” and partly “in her late novel The Wrongs of Woman.” Dumler-Winckler quotes but then discounts Wollstonecraft’s strong language against abortion in her most famous text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pointing her reader to Wollstonecraft’s own life and her later novel instead. But does the evidence actually support Dumler-Winckler’s claims? Wollstonecraft was poignantly aware, through the experience of her own mother and later, her sister Eliza—of the cruelty that women in her own time could be subjected to by abusive husbands, with little recourse to the law. From this, Dumler-Winckler seems to infer that Wollstonecraft would have been sympathetic to women seeking to abort a child, and from this sympathy, Dumler-Winckler extrapolates tacit approval of abortion. This logic is closer to guessing than to inferring based on reliable records; in any case, over-analyzing a thinker’s biographical details as evidence of her thoughts comes with its own set of issues. But even setting this aside, what remains is the evidence presented by Wollstonecraft’s novel Maria: Or, The Wrongs of Woman Illustrated.

Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman: Pro-Life or Pro-Choice?

The Wrongs of Woman was left unfinished by Wollstonecraft and the partial manuscript was published posthumously. It’s a story of two women, the titular Maria, a noblewoman wrongly accused by her husband of being mentally ill, and Jemima, a lower-class woman who works at the asylum where Maria’s husband has had her imprisoned. Both women suffer at the hands of men who fail to recognize their dignity as human persons; both women experience pregnancy as a grave burden because of the abuse to which they are subjected. 

Maria gives birth to her child and endures the added burden of having her taken away from her by her husband; Jemima, on the other hand, is first raped, then coerced into an abortion by the father of her child, her previous employer. She’s responsible for ending the life of her unborn child by ingesting the abortifacient he gives her. But she’s also an object of pity for the reader: a poor and friendless servant, she loses her employment when found to be pregnant, then pressured into committing such a horrible act against her inclination, all the while thinking of her unborn child as “an object of the greatest compassion in creation.” Sadly, Jemima’s story, though it takes place more than 200 years ago, is not uncommon today. A significant number of women around the world continue to report coercion—notably from male partners—as a deciding factor in their decision to have an abortion.

Dumler-Winckler agrees with me on this interpretation of the novel so far, but draws starkly different conclusions. She admits that Jemima takes the abortifacient “not without compassion for the fetus within her,” but because she “was ultimately willing to sacrifice herself and the fetus to resist the cycle of social, economic, and gendered oppression.” Dumler-Winckler interprets this decision as an “agential refusal to reproduce those systems and cycles by generating yet another victim,” which is even more baffling. As pro-life advocates often and rightly point out, aborting an innocent child is not a brave act, saving a child from an often cruel and unwelcoming world, but rather the surest way of generating another victim. It is not freeing oneself from domination, as Dumler-Winkler suggests, but engaging in the act of domination oneself. Jemima’s decision to abort is no act of radical feminism, but a testament to what despair can do to a person’s moral compass.

What matters, however, is not that Dumler-Winckler herself justifies Jemima’s decision, but whether Wollstonecraft does. Although, as Dumler-Winckler admits, she did not clearly advocate women’s rights to abortion, she “suspects” that Wollstonecraft was probably “an advocate of women’s gestational agency and what we would now call rights to abortion.” Her suspicion stems from this observation: “At no point in the novel is Wollstonecraft’s language or tone judgmental or condemnatory of these forms of judgment and agency . . . The novel is meant to make readers identify with these women, to recognize their agency, to sympathize with their decisions and action.”

This interpretation is key. A gifted reader of Wollstonecraft she may otherwise be, but Dumler-Winckler is not an astute literary critic. She mistakenly conflates Wollstonecraft’s sympathetic portrayal of Jemima in The Wrongs of Woman with approval and even endorsement. But this simply doesn’t square with the novel as a whole. First, it would have been impossible for Wollstonecraft to portray Jemima unsympathetically given the gravely tragic course of her life. Second, recounting an action is not the same as condoning it. Third, if Wollstonecraft doesn’t explicitly judge or condemn, it is because she is writing a novel, not a treatise or polemical text, and as a genre, fiction is not inherently didactic.

Overall, Wollstonecraft does not in fact show Jemima to be empowered or liberated by her decision to abort her child. It’s not an act of justice. On the contrary, she shows it to be a tragedy, highlighting how a difference of class may lead a poor woman (Jemima) to seek an abortion while another, her similarly friendless but more financially stable counterpart (Maria) keeps her child. As Jemima takes the “potion” procured for her by her master (and father of her child), she describes how emotions of “rage” at her mistreatment are “giving place to despair.” The abortifacient takes effect, and immediately Jemima’s heart grows “sick” at the knowledge; her “mental anguish” is entirely “swallowed up” in “the horrors of approaching dissolution.” This sense of tragedy, combined with the numerous scenes in which, in contrast to this, Maria describes what a blessing it is to be able to care for her child in spite of her hardships, renders unlikely the conclusion that Wollstonecraft would support abortion access today.

Today’s Debate: Putting Children or Mothers First?

Though on its face this is a debate about how to interpret a literary work, Dumler-Winckler’s article is symptomatic of a much wider and more pervasive issue, that is, the challenges we face in recognizing both the mother’s and the child’s well-being. The battle cry of the pro-choice progressive Left is all too often that right-wing pro-lifers only care about the child until birth, and not at all about the mother. Conversely, some pro-lifers—however well-intentioned—can, in their enthusiasm to protect the unborn child, fail to show understanding and compassion for those many women who consider abortion not because they are inherently evil, but because they find themselves in desperate situations.

In a culture where the two options most often presented to us seem to be either a pro-life, Christian anti-feminism, or a pro-choice, secular feminism, I suggest that Wollstonecraft can help us consider a third path. In The Wrongs of Woman, as well as in her non-fiction works, Wollstonecraft encourages us to care about women’s rights and place in society not because of some abstract principle of individual self-determination, but rather, with a view to women becoming more virtuous individuals, mothers, wives, and citizens. Once again, it is frustrating that Dumler-Winckler should have all the right intuitions but bring them to puzzling conclusions. She recognizes that for Wollstonecraft, the kinds of “systems of domination” to which Jemima and Maria are subjected “distort our concepts and cultivation of the virtues.” But, instead of advocating a fairer society that punishes abusive men and supports pregnant women and mothers in precarious situations, Dumler-Winckler proposes a pro-abortion “reproductive justice” as the solution that Wollstonecraft would have probably approved.

Instead, I believe Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on fostering the conditions for virtue to flourish—in her more famous work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, especially—is entirely reconcilable not only with a pro-life position but with a pro-life activism that considers the needs and well-being of mothers and their unborn children. In practice, this means being truly pro-family in supporting both pro-family public policy and individual mothers in our local communities. I am hardly making revolutionary suggestions, but paid parental leave, more flexible work schedules, the possibility of remote work, and tax breaks for large families are all policies we would do well to support. On the smaller scale, we should do what I think Wollstonecraft invites us to do with the character of Jemima: condemn abortion while being compassionate to those who believe it is their only plausible choice. 

Wollstonecraft’s Alternative: A Maternal, Pro-life Feminism

Wollstonecraft’s depiction of the tragedies of abortion suggests that a pro-life feminism is an antidote to both mainstream liberal feminism and right-wing anti-feminism. As Louise Perry has put it, despite the negative connotations of the term, some kind of feminism is still needed because the social and political interests of women and children, the most vulnerable members of our society, deserve protection. Given the concern for both mothers’ and children’s well-being throughout Wollstonecraft’s work, it seems she would be in favor of a maternal feminism, a feminism oriented not toward “choice,” but toward virtue.

I believe Dumler-Winckler is guilty of a severe misreading of Wollstonecraft that leads her to be weaponized by both the Left and the Right for their own agendas, rather than accepted as the complex and idiosyncratic thinker that she was. But even so, I want to end on a note of agreement. While I heartily disagree that Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman affirms women’s rights to abortion, Dumler-Winckler is right that “maternal health and social support” are of central importance. If Wollstonecraft were alive today, I think she would agree that better maternal health and social support for mothers are the way out of partisan disputes about feminism and reproductive justice. We must love mother and child alike: there is no other path to true “reproductive justice.” 

Image by leszekglasner and licensed via Adobe Stock.