Friday, October 20, 1972 A vindica life of Wal MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, A BIOGRAPHY, by E l e a n o r Flexner. Coward, McCann & Geo- ghegan, Inc., $8.95. By DOROTHY GIES McGUIGAN Who knows what ingredients go into the production of the genus reformer - the man or woman who would break old idols and new paths, grapple with the substance of life or so- ciety and shape it in new, au- dacious ways? Whatever are those elements, the experience itself is bound to be twice as dramatic, twice as traumatic for a woman-at least in past his- tory - who had to break out of a rigid, sex-defied social pat- tern before she could begin to remake the world. For gifted wo- men like Mary Wollstonecraft, as Margaret Fuller remarked a century ago, "in breaking bonds they became outlaws." Mary Wollstonecraft was born in mid-eighteenth centdry Lon- don and her troubled childhood might have been the syuff of a Dickens novel. Her father, a silk weaver who yearned to be a gentleman f' rmer, failed in ev- erything he undertook a n d drowned his frustrations in drink. It was the spirited eldest daugh- ter Mary who flung herself be- tween the violent; and abusive father and the submissive moth- er, who lay on the landing out- side their chamber at night ready to leap into the fray if she were needed. At nineteen she left home to earn a living at one of the mea- ger choices open to middle-class girls for whom no suitor had presented himself, who had no dowry, or who were damaged by smallpox. Mary was succes- sively companion to a rich old woman in Bath, mistress of a small school she started herself, governess to the children of an Irish landowner. But the school failed, and she was fired from her job as governess. At twen- ty-eight, with a few pounds in her pocket, she set off for Lon- don to make her living as a writ- er. Few careers could have been more difficult in that day for a woman without private means, S without connections, with the scantiest, of educations. Yet make it she did. "You know I am not born to tread in the beat- en track, the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on," she wrote her sister, If Mary Wollstonecraft's un- happy and rebellious childhood shaped her unique life in part, nevertheless, as Alice Rossi pointed out in a paper given at the University of Michigan last year, it has been adult experi- erice that shaped the lives of e most feminists in decisive ways. The germinal years of Mary Wollstonecraft's life were the London years of 1787 to 1790, when she fell in with the coterie of radical intellectuals who ga- thered regularly around the din- ner table of the publisher Jo- seph Johnson, in his house in St. Paul's Churchyard. She had already written two *mall books, including a tract called "Thoughts on the Educa- tion of Daughters," and John- THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five tion of the I stonecra ft I Before Vietnam was Laos Professors as gentlemen sA engaged her to writeand to translate. This self-educated wo- man had taught herself French and German thoroughly enough to translate important works for a discriminating reading public. Among the circle of men of tal- ent she met at Johnson's were Thomas Paine, William Blake- who did the engravings for the second edition of her Original Stories William Godwin, the philosopher and anarchist, "with, a head too big for his body and a nose too long for his face," the painter Henry Fuseli, and the mathematician John Bonny- castle. They called her simply "Wollstonecraft," accepted her as one of them, this spinster ap- proaching thirty, not unattrac- tive, with great serious dark eyes ' and hair pinned up any which way or. left to fall loose on her shoulders, arguing and ask- ing what she called "men's ques- tions" - why? and why not? In t h a t brilliant company of freethinkers Mary was infected once and for always with a pas- sionate interest in "the grand causes which combine to car- ry mankind forward and dimin- ish the sum of human misery." When Edmund Burke de- nounced the French Revolution with all the powerful logic of traditional conservatism, it was Mary , ollstonecraft who first leapt to a blazing defense of re- volutionary principles in her Vindication of the Rights of Men. Her intense and often per- sonal polemic was widely read, though it was also rather quickly out-classed by the more finely- reasoned Rights of Man, which her friend Thomas Paine brought out soon after. Less' than a year later, in 1791. Mary Wollstonecraft hammered out in the space of a few weeks her great and original work, A Vindication of the Rights of Wo- men, one of the last important works to emerge in the twilight of the Enlightenment. Unerringly she focused atten- tion on the huge fallacy, in con- temporary liberal thought: that one-half the human race had been totally ignored in all the doctrinaire philosophy of egali- tarianism, and even by. the re- volutionaries so busy creating a brave new world in France. She had been stirred to the writing of it by Talleyrand's Re- port on Public Education," pre- pared for the Legislative Assem- bly in Paris - a plan for na- tionalizing French education but exclusively for boys. Mary Wolstonecraft challenged Tal- leyrand and all "reasonable men" to prove that women were not also creatures- of reason and therefore educable; she pled with them "to emancipate their companions so that they might win rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience. She de- manded equal access to educa- tion for women, to employment and to full civil rights. It was independence Mary Wollstone- craft was after, for herself and for all women, autonomy, the right to choose, "the grand blessing of life, the basis of ev- ery virtue." One of those unique contribu- tions to human thought, "so true THE GENTLEMAN'S ALPHA- BET BOOK, by Harvey Korn- berg, with Limericks by Donald Hall. E. P. Dutton, $5.95. Ah, the good old days are sadly past when the only ground for expulsion of a tenured pro- fessor was "gross immorality." This week's gross immorality, from the pen of ore 'of Ann Ar- bor's leading citizens, will, for the price of one football ticket, a m u s e the most demanding juvenile for at least five minutes. -E.S. Aphrodisiac One Thursday, at tea with the Vicar, ai(d's maidenhood disappeared quicker Than the blink of an eye When he dripped Spanish Fly In her tea, and she prayed him to prick her! VOICES FROM THE PLAIN OF JARS: LIFE UNDER AN AIR WAR, compiled by Fred Branfman. H a r p e r Colophon Books, S$.95. By MICHAEL CASTLEMAN Question: what is the most de- structive force at manknd's dis, posal for use in warfare? Nu- clear weapons? Wrong: Automat- ed air war. Although the air war over Vi- etnam is the first publically vis- ible example of the automated battlefield, it is not the first air war to be waged. That dubious honor falls to the secret war ov- er Laos between 1964, and 1969; a war waged against the people of the Plain of Jars, a war we never knew about. The Plain of Jars is located in northeastern Laos near the bor- der Laos shares with North Viet- nam. It is a beautiful, fertile, minerally rich area surrounded by rugged mountains. It has in- spired western travelers for over 200 years, and has been for the past 700 years one of the most fought-over areas in Southeast Asia, for it served several arm- ies as a strategic springboard for invasions of Vietnam and Cam- bodia with their fertile coastal plains, and more importantly the rice bowl of Southeast Asia, the Mekong River Valley and delta. After World War II the French set up a succession of pro-West- ern regimes as the Royal Lao- tion Government with its capi- tal in Vientiane. These govern- ments immediately set out to destroy the communist-led na- tionalist forces of the Viet-Minh who reorganized after the war and proclaimed themselves the Pathet Lao or "nation of Laos" in 1950. The Plain of Jars lay midway between Vientiane and the Pathet Lao headquarters to the north. In 1958 a coalition of' Pathet Lao and various other left-nationalist parties won 13 of 21 seats in a special parliamen- tary election designed to inte- grate the Pathet Lao held areas into the Royal Laotian Govern- ment. This majority was unac- ceptable to the now U.S.- finan- ced regime of General Nosavan in Vientiane. Nosavan engineer- ed a coup in May 1959 with the aid of his U.S. advisers who had administered over $480 million of U.S. aid to the Vientiane re- gimes between 1955 and 1963. (Although North Vietnam aided backed Vientiane troops for the Plain during the early 1960's, and by 1964 had consolidated its rule over the area, instituting "a mild but thorough social revolu- tion ranging from land reform to greater equality for women." American policymakers found themselves faced with a new situation as a result of the Pa- thetLao victory on the Plain. On one hand, they remained committed to 'maintaining Wes- tern control of the Mekong Val- ley by weakening the Pathet Lao to the north as much as possible, and to using north- ern Laos as a base ford opera- tions against North Vietnam. On the other hand, they could no longer rely on their ground strength to maintain a foothold in northern Laos. The U.S. sup- ported Lao and Meo right-wing armies were clearly weaker than the Pathet Lao. And large numbers of American ground troops could not be openly in- troduced for fear of opening up a second front in the esca- lating Vietnam war . . . There- fore, the decision was made to of Jars had become the first so- ciety to vanish through automa- ed warfare." This book evokes the same emotions as the books of chil- dr sn's poems written in Nazi concentration camps, but unlike those works which we now read very much after the fact, the destructiveness of automated air war is an everyday part of our contemporary world. The inter- views with former Plains resi- dents are brief, compact,. and horrifying. The illu'strations are unforgettable: a constant rain of bombs from a sky literally dark- ened by planes, planes flying bombing runs so low that some of the drawings include all the planes' markings. It may be a sign of our age that horror in human terms is more difficult to grasp than hor- ror in technological terms. Branf- man's vision of the. automated electronic battlefield is particu- larly haunting for its efficiency and precision. One of the draw- backs to nuclear weapons from a military point of view is that they are messy: too loud, too vis- i i I boo.ksbooks I that they seem to contain noth- ing new," Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication appears to have been completely underivative. She had not read such feminist writings as had appeared before her time, though it seems likely, at least to this reviewer, that she may have read some of Condorcet's letters on women's rights. But chiefly the Vindication was hewn our of Mary Wollstonecraft's per- sonal experiences, the problems that had beset her own life in trying to earn a living, and her observations in teaching young children. And, as Eleanor Flexner points out, a fact frequently overlooked, Mary Wollstonecraft was inter- ested in boys' education as well. She criticized caustically the English system of educating boys, urged coeducation, the re- placement of boarding by day schools, and a far freer, more natural, more individually orien- ted system of pedagogy. Overnight, after publication of A Vindication, Mary Wollstone- craft became famous or notori- ous, depending on the circle one moved in. Horace Walpole called her "a hyena in petticoats"; more friendly readers termed her " a great genius". William Godwin wrote, "Perhaps no fe- male writer ever obtained so great a degree of celebrity throughout Europe." It was surely inevitable that Mary, so eager to apply the laws of reason to human life, should herself come to grief on the shoals of unreason. For human life always has a way of escap- ing through the nets of the ra- tional, and human beings--des- pite all Godwin and his friends argued-remain only indifferent- ly perfectible creatures. Infatu- ated with the fascinating but sexually ambivalent and already- married Henry Fuseli, Mary pro- posed forthrightly that she and the Fuselis set up a menage a trois, at which Sophia Fuseli was indignant and Henry indif- ferent. Mary fled to Paris, where the storms of the French Revolution were rapidly approaching a cri- sis. Adopted at once by an inter- esting circle of radical expatri- ates in Paris, she fell passionate- ly in love with a charming Am- erican, Gilbert Imlay, who com- bined a lucrative business in soap and alum with sundry poli- tical and amatory adventures. At the very height of the Reign of Terror Mary enjoyed an idyl-, lic love affair and in a cottage in Neuilly bore his child, quite independently as she wanted to, and was up and about next day. The idyl was short-lived; the fascinating Imlay had an incur- ably roving eye. No doubt Mary herself was a difficult woman for an ordinary man to cope with- utterly without a sense of humor (one of the first fatalities of any unhappy childhood), with a pas- sion for debate and a ferocious, penetrating intellect. For Imlay it was probably like sleeping with all twenty-eight volumes of the Encyclipedie. Or, as Virginia Woolf with marvelous fancy wrote, "Tickling minnows he had hooked a dolphin and the crea- ture rushed him through the wa- ters till he was dizzy and want- ed only to escape." Escape Im- lay did, with an actress from a troupe of strolling players. The Imlay affair nearly de- stroyed Mary. Her imploring letters pursued and flailed after the errant lover. Back in London she twice tried suicide. The sec- ond time she leapt into the Thames from Putney Bridge, soaking her skirts first to be sure she would sink. But someone fished her out and eventually she put herself together, gathered up her child Fanny Imlay, whom she dearly 'loved, and set off at Imlay's suggestion to check out certain business interests of his in remote parts of Scandinavia. The resulting Letters from Swe- den were sensitive and brilliant. The resources of courage and resolution that had set her feet on the road to London years be- fore did not fail her, and in 1796 she was back, calling on William Godwin in his rooms-a shocking impropriety in that day. They were quite obviously made for each other. Godwin himself was a talking dolphin; as he wrote later, "friendship melted i to love." Neither one believed in marriage. "A system of fraud," Godwin called it, and before he became involved with Mary, he wrote also that "sensual inter- course is a very trivial object," proposing that friends ought to share their wives, especially if the wife were a good conversa- tionalist. So they did not at first marry, and as for living together, that too was better at not-too-close quarters, if one wanted to pie- serve love. The two lived twenty doors apart on the same London street, writing each other dozens of little notes between visits. When Mary became pregnant they finally did marry, rather apologetically, but even then each honored the other's independence. Godwin kept his separate rooms for his work and each went out separately "in mixed society." Godwin declared it all worked beautifully; combining "the novel- ty and lively sensation of a visit with the more delicious and heart-felt pleasures of domestic life." To the rest of London they were "the most - extraordinary married pair in existence." Certainly the summer of 1797 was the very best of Mary Woll- stonecraft's life. Her little girl Fanny was bouncing and jolly. Eagerly Mary awaited the biirth of her child by Godwin, mean- time happily working on a de- pressing novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, exposing the tragedy of women's lack of legal rights. In August she gave birth to a second daughter, Mary; com- plications set in, and after ten days of feaiful pain Mary Woh- stonecraft died of puerperal fev- er, at the age of thirty-eight, with all the unwritten books she had planned still imbedded in that extraordinary brain. Even posthumously tragedy dogged the woman who would have changed the world for all women. Her elder child, Fanny, faded after her mother's death from a sparkling toddler to a melancholy, introspective girl. Some years later she took a coach to Bristol and at an inn wrote an anonymous suicide note and emptied a bottle of laudanum. Mary Godwin, the child who cost her mother her life, fared somewhat better, though her life could hardly be called a happy one. She eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and wrote that' singular n o v e 1, Frankenstein. Eleanor Flexner, whose prev- ious book, Century of Struggle, is probably the best historical ac- count of the women's rights movement in the United States, has given us a superb, well- rounded, and meticulously docu- mented biography of Mary Woll- stonecraft. Every stage of her life has been carefully research- ed. Especally valuable is the il- lumination of the social and cul- tural mileu in which Mary lived and worked, and the reconstruc- tion of the personalities around her. It is a splendid volume to add to the best that has been written about this remarkable woman--William Godwin's Mem- oirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, chief source for most of what we know, Virignia Woolf's brief and brilliant little essay, and the scholarly study by Margaret George, written from a some- what different viewpoint, One Woman's Situation: A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft (1970). wage war against the Plain in secret, mainly from the air. And a new kind of warfare was launched, one to which no peo- ple in history had ever before been subjected. The bombing was a spectacle of technology on parade: spotter planes at 2000 feet calling in flareships from 5000 feet so that photo reconnaissance planes at 10,000 feet could pinpoint tar- gets for bombers also flying at 10,000 feet, all coordinated by a command ship at 35,000 feet. The goal of this bombing was, in the words of a U.S. Senate report, "to destroy the social and- eco- nomic infrastructure of Pathet Lao held areas": in short, anni- hilation of the population. Al- though article 6 of the Nurem- burg Principles forbids "wanton destruction of cities, villages and towns," this statement is based on the traditional military as- "Automated war gets the job done swiftly, neatly, and completely, without the interference of unruly human beings, who have a tendency to ask too many questions. They are easy to wage and, more importantly, easy to hide." ible, too uncontrolable, and too unpopular. It would be impos- sible to hide a nuclear attack from the population of the at- tacker, to say nothing of the re- action of the world community. However, a technological super- power like the United States has at its disposal the machinery and personnel -to wage five or six simultaneous automated wars. These wars would require no ground forces with the inevitable domestic repercussions of inflat- ed draft calls, battlefield dead, heroin addiction, and an active anti-war movement. They would require relatively few highly trained technicians virtually re- moved from the conflict, direct- ed by a handful of highly placed technocrats to whom these wars would be little more than occa- sional blips on a lighted map. The cost in human terms for our side would be near zero, and the cost in materiele could easily be swallowed up in the ever-increas- ing "defense" budget. Automated war gets the job done swiftly, neatly, and com- pletely, without the interference of unruly human beings who have a tendency to ask too many ques- tions. They are easy to wage and, more importantly, easy to hide. Every day for five and a half years the United States bombed a civilization of rice farmers who posed no threat to our nation, bombed them into oblivion. Ev- ery day, with the precision of a finely tuned machine, death and destruction rained down on a society the vast majority of Am- ericans had never heard of, in a far away place few could locate. Every day. Did you ever hear about it before now? Today's writers .. Dorothy Gies McGuigan is the Publications Director at t h e Center for Continuing Education of Women and the author of A Dangerous Experiment: A Hun- dred Years of Women at the University of Michigan. Michael Castleman is a recent graduate of the University and is sometimes very hard to find. FOREST- FIRES BURN MORE THAN, TREES i8/ ALL PANTS: One pair--$5 Two pa ir-$9i Three pair--$12 SHIRTS - $8 LEATHER VESTS 50% off IL! KNIT TOPS: 20% off LEATHER JACKETS 20% off BOOTS: 20%-75% off the Pathet Lao with advisers and materiele, this aid came no- where near U.S. aid to RLG governments. The principal U.S. agency op- erating in the area was the CIA, who expanded the Laotian gov- ernment's army from a few thousand in 1954 to over 30,000 in 1960. Most of this army was comprised of Meo tribesmen whose bases were supplied by the CIA's airline, Air America, for what CIA Colonel Edward Lansdale said in 1961 were "guerrilla operations (of) con- siderable effectiveness in Com- munist held areas." The loyalty of the Meos was assured by the CIA's guaranteed purchase of the yearly Meo opium crop, and evidence has recently come to light that the CIA is involved in the heroin smuggling business (see Alfred McCoy's new book, Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Harper and Row, $7.95). The Pathet Lao fought the U.S.- sumption that there are fairly clear lines of demarcation be- tween civilian and military popu- lations. However, these distinc- tions are blurred at best in a peo- ple's war as we now know it in Southeast Asia. The air war against the Plain of Jars was never conceived for purposes of "tactical air sup- port" of ground troops as is us- ually the case in conventional warfare. There were no longer any ground troops to support. From the beginning it was a campaign of annihilation. Even U.S. sources admit that 80 per- cent of the casualties were civil- ian. During the five and a half years of daily bombing, for a total of 25,000 attack sorties, vir- tually every structure standing on the Plain was destroyed. Any- thing that moved was bombed. By September 1969 "the society of 50,000 people living in and around the area no longer exist- ed. History had conferred one last distinction upon it: the Plain } N A- SALE EXTENDED 'TIL SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21 HOURS: MON.-FR I.: NOON-7 P.M.; SAT.: NOON-6 P.M. 2USatyrn, Inc. A 215 SOUTH STATE LAST CHANCE Sign Up for Senior pictures onega s pizza 769 3400 .s. 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