Wollstonecraft and Fell both saw religion as a highly personal experience, and drew much of their claims for women’s rights from their experience of religion as highly personal. They also both emphasize the importance of experiencing religion as a personal relationship with God, unmediated by the church or the clergy. By doing so, both women were able to maintain the pious reputations that were necessary to social propriety, while also satisfying the possible disconnects between their desire for faith and the teachings and attitudes of the systems of faith that surrounded them.
Both Wollstonecraft’s and Fell’s desires for a personal relationship with God echo the desires of other writers we’ve read for close, personal female relationships. As in the writings concerning female education and utopias, Wollstonecraft and Fell not only experience their relationships with God as happening in a realm that is removed from the mediating world of men, but also recognize and then deliberately and actively remove the male mediation from this relationship by distinguishing “between human custom and God’s will for humanity” (Thickstun 275). Fell keeps her rationale for this distinction firmly located in the Bible; for instance, she cites the passage concerning the creation of mankind and comments “Here God joyns them together in his own Image, and makes no such Distinctions and Differences as Men do” (Fell). This distinction between God’s rules and man’s rules is central to her argument that women should be allowed to preach. By the time Wollstonecraft was writing, it appears that this idea of an unmediated relationship with god as the preferred form of female religion had become more common. Taylor cites a female preacher of the time who left her husband for her church, saying “I chose to obey God rather than man;” this reason for separation might have been calculated to justify such an unusual act, but the idea may have been appealing to other women of the time. Perhaps these personal relationships allowed each woman to view God a little differently; for instance, according to Wollstonecraft, we love god because he deserves it, not because he commands it. So if virtue, not power, deserves respect in heaven, it follows that it should deserve the same respect here on earth. Wollstonecraft uses that idea to describe how women should love their husbands; while she does not explicitly state that that idea makes it obvious that women deserve the same respect, it is not a drastic stretch to infer it.
Wollstonecraft and Fell each used this personal relationship with God to further their larger claims: Fell, that women should be allowed to preach, and Wollstonecraft, that they be allowed larger rights within society. By citing specific examples from the Bible, they may have hoped to give their arguments weight in the eyes of their readers, as arguing with the Bible would have been more difficult than arguing with a woman.
Fell, for one, “claims for herself an unmediated access to Scripture and to divine truth” (Thickstun 275). For instance, she does this by declaring that she will “lay down how God himself hath manifested his Will and Mind concerning Women, and unto women.” Of course, by saying this, she claiming knowledge of scripture in a way that is potentially as problematic as the way in which the male translators and recorders of the Bible did, but the point is, of course, that she is claiming her right to make such an interpretation. This idea of claiming the right to speak echoes Griffin’s view that Wollstonecraft addresses “questions of political and discursive authority linked to a patriarchal social order” (296). While questioning patriarchal issues of hierarchy is central to feminist thought, the fact that Wollstonecraft was so clear, logical, and persuasive makes her arguments seem fresh and innovative (as they were at the time).
One major divide between the two works occurs in the authors’ relative relationships to the idea of formal education. Fell seems to view formal education as a masculine domain that has the potential to distort the word of God. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Fell maintains that most university-educated interpreters of scripture invariably lead others away from God to their own inventions and imaginations.” In line with Quaker beliefs of her period, she believed that inner light, not human teaching, was the only true “spiritual guide” necessary (Stanford).
However, if we look at their respective uses of the word “reason,” it becomes clear that they were arguing similar things, even though they were going about it in slightly different ways. Considering Wollstonecraft’s “alternative rhetoric and system of reasoning” (Griffin 306), it looks as if Fell followed a similar line of thinking, even if she did not connect it to the idea of formal education as Wollstonecraft did. Fell presents her own alternative system of reasoning through her careful and thorough reinterpretations of Biblical passages, asserting, like Wollstonecraft, “that man’s reasoning was fundamentally flawed and inaccurate” (Griffin 296). However, Wollstonecraft tied her ideas of religious advancement to ideas of formal education. This makes sense, as at the time “Women conduct-book writers… tended to emphasize women’s intellectual relationship to God, urging close study of the Bible and familiarity with major theological works” (Taylor). This idea seems to echo Mary Astell’s idea that one must truly understand religion, on an intellectual level, in order to truly believe it. Even the protagonist of Wollstonecraft’s fictional novel believed that it was “right to examine the evidence on which her faith was built.” However, this intellectual investigation seems to go against Fell’s ideas of religion as result of divine inspiration.
One concept I’m trying to work out is the relationship of religion to action in each of the writings. As Taylor points out, Wollstonecraft saw religion as a “principle of conduct”; I wonder if this idea of religion as a way of acting could be connected to ideas of subject formation that we’ve discussed in our theory class. This would especially make sense in light of Griffin’s point that “Patriarchy calls women into being as objects of male pleasure and creation” (306); by using the ideals of a patriarchal religion as a way of affirming subjectivity, Wollstonecraft could have been resisting the objectifying forces of the hierarchies reinforced by the church. I’m trying to figure out how that view of religion interacts with Fell’s, as Fell saw religion as more important than social propriety (Thickstun 272). The idea of religion as a way to behave properly seems to conflict with the idea of religion as more important than behaving properly (although I’m aware that Wollstonecraft’s idea of proper was more personal and Fell’s was more publicly-based, I do assume that they have some things in common; Fell’s version of propriety, as a Quaker, was probably more based in her faith to begin with, while Wollstonecraft was critiquing the behavior of the aristocracy). However, I wonder if it might be useful to see the historical distance between the two as mediating those ideas of proper behavior. Perhaps both used their understanding of social, public behavior and personal, private religion in similar ways when it came to addressing norms of behavior. If in Fell’s Quaker community it was seen as proper for women to avoid speaking (especially in religious contexts), then her idea of religion as more important than propriety is in opposition to the social norms. Wollstonecraft’s perspective seems a little less clear-cut; however, judging from her writing it seems that socially acceptable behavior for women (at least the women she was criticizing) was less focused on being proper and more intent on being charming. So it’s possible that each woman interpreted the relationship between religion and behavior in a way that opposed the behavioral norms for women at her time.
One theme that seems similar to both works is the idea of women’s spiritual qualities as superior to men’s; both writers also seem very aware of how this privileging of women’s spiritual qualities is used to justify their lack of social, economical, or political power. For instance, Thickstun discusses how women’s speech was considered more inspired or authentic than men’s (273). It seems as if this idea of authenticity is similar to the idea of women as closer to nature in the nature / civilization category within ideas of a masculine / feminine binary. It is interesting to note, however, that in this binary, the body is considered feminine and the mind masculine, but there is no gendered conception of the soul. Wollstonecraft and Fell both address this idea, using it as support for the idea that men and women are equal in the eyes of God. Indeed, according to Wollstonecraft, it is “not philosophical to speak of sex when the soul is mentioned,” and Fell reiterates, in relation to the Creation story, that “God the Father made no such difference in the first Creation, nor ever since between the Male and the Female.” However, both women were still tied to a world where they, by virtue of their bodies, were seen on that hierarchy. On a similar note, Fell also seems to believe that women’s authority is “derived from a personal experience of the Spirit rather than of the body”. I seem to be encountering in a lot of my readings recently this idea that men know things through the bodily senses, while women rely more on intuition; this idea from Fell seems to continue that theme. I’d guess that while this idea of intuition could be privileged in some situations, it also might be devalued since it relies less on hard evidence in making claims and decisions.
Wollstonecraft also encountered the idea that women’s place in religion was guided by some kind of inherent spirituality that they possessed. A woman’s emotional relationship to religion was seen as “intrinsically more powerful than that of men, a view reinforced by the idealization of pity as the primary Christian sentiment” (Taylor). This idea within Christianity of women’s more natural empathy positioned them as superior to men in matters of the spirit; however, this can appear as almost a consolation prize for the social limits they faced. For protestant women of Wollstonecraft’s time, being a proper Christian woman held many contradictions, as women were exalted for spirituality but held down socially (Taylor).
Griffin’s discussion of Wollstonecraft’s discourse discusses her in the context of Marxism: there is some evidence that Fell might have shared some of Wollstonecraft’s views about women as property. For instance, Thickstun mentions that Fell “exposes priestly hypocrisy about women’s speaking by accusing them of making ‘a trade’ of women’s words” (278). This idea of “trade” clearly relates to the Marxist feminist idea that “Women comprise not only propertyless but self-less individuals who exist as property” (Griffin 304). Wollstonecraft’s arguments “that alienation is a discursive problem encouraged by the interpellation of women as passive objects rather than as acting subjects” (Griffin 294) appear in Fell’s work as well. While I’m not as familiar with Marxist theory as I probably should be, the fact that these women were proposing Marxist ideas before Marx has to be significant. They obviously both recognized that women were used as commodities who did not possess their own subjectivity or agency, but simply existed as objects or “toys” to be used by men for their pleasure.
