Read Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why for Free Online

writing. He had just committed to spend the rest of his life with her. And then, almost overnight, she was gone. In the midst of his grief, Godwin did something that he believed would keep Mary’s name alive.
    Godwin published the old suicide note. He published Wollstonecraft’s tender recollections of sex. He published the bitter breakup letters in which Wollstonecraft told Imlay that he was a sex-crazed, loveless asshole who would turn into a sad old man. All of it, everything: It was out there. And it was attached to a woman who had argued, of all things, that emancipating women would make them more virtuous .
    So, that was the tragedy. And here were the reviews:
William hath penn’d a waggon-load of stuff
And Mary’s life at last he needs must write ,
Thinking her whoredoms were not known enough ,
Till fairly printed off in black and white .
With wondrous glee and pride this simple wight
Her brothel feats of wantonness set down .
Being her spouse, he tells, with huge delight
How oft she cuckolded the silly clown
And lent, O lovely piece! Herself to half the town .
    That was the Anti-Jacobin (they’re the folks responsible for the “scripture” line, along with timeless zingers such as “Godhelp poor silly men from such usurping bitches.”) There was also this, from Richard Polwhele, concerned with the damage wrought by “unsex’d females” like “WOLLSTONECRAFT, whom no decorum checks”:
Come, from those livid limbs withdraw your gaze ,
Those limbs which Virtue views in mute amaze;
Nor deem, that Genius lends a veil, to hide
The dire apostate, the fell suicide .
    And this, from Robert Browning, who took it upon himself to write a poem in the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft herself, and whose “Mary Wollstonecraft” is, essentially, a blithering idiot with a stalker’s crush (she has “more than a will—what seems a power / to pounce on my prey”) who pretends to be smart in the vain hope of getting a boy to notice her:
Much amiss in the head, Dear ,
I toil at a language, tax my brain
Attempting to draw—the scratches here!
I play, play, practise and all in vain:
But for you—if my triumph brought you pride ,
I would grapple with Greek Plays till I died [.]
    It’s not quite “Stupid Spoiled Whore,” but it’s close. (The main difference, I would argue, is that it leaves out the“Spoiled” bit.) Wollstonecraft’s promiscuity and craziness ballooned outward from the facts, becoming monstrous. The Anti-Jacobin implied that we’d only heard about two instances of Wollstonecraft having premarital sex because Godwin was intentionally leaving out hundreds of others:“The biographer does not mention many of her amours. Indeed it is unnecessary; two or three instances of action often decide a character as well as a thousand.”
    The dates on these things are particularly illuminating. The Memoirs and the letters were released in 1798, shortly after Wollstonecraft’s death. Polwhele wrote his immortal verse in 1798, too, and the Anti-Jacobin was still cackling about Wollstonecraft’s “whoredom” in 1801. But Browning’s thoughts on Wollstonecraft’s desperation and stupidity went out in 1883—eighty-five years after the scandal first hit. Godwin’s Memoir didn’t affect Wollstonecraft’s reputation, it was her reputation, more or less until the dawn of the twentieth century.
    As Wollstonecraft went, so went her cause. When Vindication was first published, it seemed that women’s rights would be naturally folded into the discussion of human rights, part and parcel of the increasing democratization of culture. But after the Memoirs , they dropped out of view: Even her former employer, the Analytical Review , was forced to conclude that some people “will be apt to say, that the experience ofMrs. G is the best refutation of her theory.” Another magazine was more to the point:“Her works will be read with disgust by every female who has any pretensions to delicacy; with detestation by everyone