Wollstonecraft vs. Edgeworth's Freke

6. Wollstonecraft takes a less-severe tack than the “militant feminism” Edgeworth attributes to Mrs. Freke. To begin, Wollstonecraft defends modesty, calling it “the fairest garb of virtue!” (371). She argues that France is indecent, having currently associated their ideas towards modesty with prudishness. Freke, on the other hand, takes great pleasure in making a scene. “There’s nothing I like so much as to make good people stare” (542) Freke tells Belinda, clearly trying to render a response (or, perhaps, a disciple). Later, she claims that “all virtue is hypocrisy” (543) showing not only that she does not value virtue, but that she does not even believe in its honest existence.
Wollstonecraft states her main argument thus: that woman must be prepared to be the “companion of man” through education and socialization (371). Without rendering that reality, she warns, “progress of knowledge and virtue” will cease for both sexes (371). Freke, however, seeks what she sees as retribution for the enslavement of women. “The present system of society is radically wrong:– whatever is, is wrong” (544) she says, but this is a statement of only broad, sweeping terms. Freke’s arguments all seem haphazard and unsubstantiated not because they are not legitimate injustices (assuming that the goal is equality amongst the sexes) but because she has no support to back them. She takes the opposite view of education than Wollstonecraft. She mocks Belinda for reading, telling her that the only people for whom reading is fruitful are those who cannot think for themselves.
It is supremely important to recognize that Freke is not Edgeworth. Further, in Edgeworth’s caricature of a militant feminist, she was highlighting the aspects of the breed with which her own opinion differed. Edgeworth’s heroine, at least in the excerpts we read, is Belinda – the quietly resolute follower of the good Mr. and Mrs. Percival.