Read Vindication for Free Online Page A

compliant paragon. It’s often assumed that Mary Wollstonecraft was a born depressive, though at this time her cause for gloom is patent in her father’s losses and the inferior positions for single women.
    Her depression was temporarily relieved by a visit to Southampton that summer. Sea bathing, recommended by a doctor, refreshed her, as did Southampton hospitality: ‘I received so much civility that I left it with regret.’ Depression hadn’t ‘frozen’ her feelings for others, she was relieved to find; attachments sprang up with all her old warmth. No complaint of Mrs Dawson ever crossed her lips; yet away from her, Mary revived. The problem lay in the post itself: the companion who treads the round of another’s life.
    In April 1780, Mary moved with Mrs Dawson to her family home on St Leonard’s Hill in Windsor. If anything, she found Windsor more frivolous than Bath: ‘–nothing but dress and amusements are going forward;–I am the only spectator’. Women sported enormous ‘heads’ as much as two feet high. In order to cover the wire and cushions of the structure, hair from the top of the head was pulled upwards, teased or ‘frizzled’, then dressed with plumes for added height, while hair from the back and sides was arranged in tiers of curls like horizontal sausages curving round the neck. The whole structure was then smothered with white powder. As Mary put it, ‘truth is not expected to govern the inhabitant of so artificial a form’.
    It took prolonged efforts to look as theatrically artificial as the Quality aimed to be. The main ingredient of face powder was a lethal white lead (which did for two beauties of the age, the Gunning sisters). Mary was aware that ‘white’ was ‘certainly very prejudicial to the health, and can never be made to resemble nature’, since it took away the glow of modesty, affection, or indeed any expression. This chalky mask was set off by spots of rouge, and black ‘patches’, sometimes at the corner of the mouth, meant to be alluring. Mary disagreed with contemporary opinion that bathing was unhealthy: people disguised theirsmell with pomatum (a fragrant ointment) which she found ‘often disgusting’. The many layers of women’s clothes–the stays, the wide hoop (balancing on either side of the hips so that the feet had to process in a stately way to avoid seesaw sways), the skirts under satin panniers–all fastened at the back, and so required the help of a lady’s maid. Without a maid, Mary dressed with a plainness that made her appear ‘a poor creature’. She added, in the defensive tone she often adopted when she found herself in a weak position, ‘to dress violently neither suits my inclination, nor my power’.
    Although privately she defied fashion as a badge of slavery, certain concessions to society were unavoidable: she did powder her hair, and did wear stays (marked with an ‘MW’). It was indecent for any woman to appear without encasing her flesh in a whalebone cage that lifted the breasts and held the frame upright from shoulder to thigh. * Stays limited a woman’s movements: when she read, she could not recline but must hold the book upright; when she curtsied, she sank from the knees with rigid back. The head, rising from the cage on the pliant column of the neck, could turn from side to side, the lowered lids or widened eyes transmitting the coded signals of their class.
    â€˜I am particularly sick of genteel life, as it is called,’ Mary told Jane, ‘–the unmeaning civilities that I see every day practiced don’t agree with my temper;–I long for a little sincerity, and look forward with pleasure to the time when I shall lay aside all restraint.’
    Then, too, her continued stagnation in a ‘state of dependance’ weighed on her, and she began to think anything would be better. Later,