Richard Price - Influence On Mary Wollstonecraft

Influence On Mary Wollstonecraft

Arguably the congregant Price most influenced was the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who moved her fledgling school for girls from Islington to the Green in 1784, with the help of a fairy godmother whose good auspices found her a house to rent and twenty students to fill it. Her patron – or matron – was the well-off Mrs Burgh, widow of Price's friend. The new arrival attended services at NGUC: she was a lifelong Anglican, but, in keeping with the church's and Price's ethos of logical enquiry and individual conscience, believers of all kinds were welcomed without any expectation of conversion. The approach of these Rational Dissenters appealed to Wollstonecraft: they were hard-working, humane, critical but uncynical, and respectful towards women, and in her hour of need proved kinder to her than her own family. Price is believed to have secretly helped her with money to go to Lisbon to aid her dear friend Fanny Blood. She, an unmarried woman making her own way in the world, was marginal to the dominant society in just the same way that the Dissenters were.

Wollstonecraft was then a young schoolmistress, as yet unpublished, but Price saw something in her worth fostering, and became a friend and mentor. Through the minister she met the great humanitarian and radical publisher Joseph Johnson, who was to guide her career and serve as a father figure. The ideas Wollstonecraft ingested from the sermons at NGUC pushed her towards a political awakening. A couple of years after she had had to leave Newington Green, these seeds germinated into A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a response to Burke's denunciation of the French Revolution and attack on Price. In 1792 she published the work for which she is best remembered, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in the spirit of rationalism extending Price's arguments about equality to women: Tomalin argues that just as the Dissenters were "excluded as a class from education and civil rights by a lazy-minded majority", so too were women, and the "character defects of both groups" could be attributed to this discrimination. Price appears 14 times in William Godwin's diary, Wollstonecraft's later husband.