A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Fashion, Fun and Play

In her seminal work A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft (feminist, philosopher, all around great gal) states:

“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.” 

Just over two hundred years later , one would expect that a  woman who was one of the founding feminist philosophers, a social activist and a political radical, would be remembered exactly how she desired women to be treated - rationally. Her work has influenced hundreds of key political and feminist thinkers, from George Eliot, to Virginia Woolf, to Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, who references Wollstonecraft frequently in his theory of Asia's missing girls. As with many renowned writers, Wollstonecraft's life came with its fair share of excitement, and as well as being remembered for her work she is also known for her tempestuous love life, her unorthodox marriage to anarchist William Godwin and her bouts of depression. Fascination with these particular 'graces' is inevitable, but on the whole her legacy is as it should be - influential and necessarily respected.

Imagine then how surprised / bemused / reluctantly entertained I was to discover that the children's website 'Stardoll' has also tapped into Wollstonecraft's legacy. Stardoll is an online dress up site, and have very kindly honoured the world's first feminist with her own page. Just look at those bloomers:

Yes, there she is, staring at her interactive wardrobe with a fabulously ironic expression of distaste. Dollstonecraft comes with several outfits and a whole range of accessories - with brains, beauty and a clothing line like this, this really is 'have it all' all feminism. I should at this point admit that I stumbled across the site in a desperate bid to dress up as Mary Wollstonecraft (long and pretentious story), and that my initial reaction was unbridled laughter, but her presence on the website is really very curious. Sandwiched between MIA and 'McFly Tom', and across from Camilla Parker-Bowles we have an 18th century political writer in nought but her underwear.

Perhaps this is a strategic move by the website. Perhaps somewhere a child got bored of styling members of JLS and decided to Google this Mary lass. For all I know Stardoll could be starting an educational phenomenon of nine year old girls burning their Barbies and trading in their Unofficial Harry Styles biographies for some straight up feminist discourse. We can hope, but the more likely outcome is that, like me, they'll sit and ponder whether the mustard skirt, fan and headdress combo is a bit too much for afternoon tea with Mr Godwin. 

For all its light-heartedness, there is something truly unsettling about a website that quite literally dolls up the woman who called for the end of femininity being treated like domestic ornamentation. Reducing any figure to a silent 2D image and a series of dresses is surely a bad thing - it is a literal representation of style over substance. Wollstonecraft may be remembered rationally by most, but Stardoll have certainly restricted her to the "perpetual state of childhood" that she sought to defy. I wonder what she'd have made of it?