Was Jane Austen a Feminist?

Prior to the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was believed that women were inferior to men both physically and intellectually. Entrapped by law, tradition and religion, women were forced into a position of subjection. Unable to own property, conduct business or vote, women had no other choice than to rely on those who could, their human counterparts- men. The close of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution brought about a rise in the demand for women’s liberty and equality, which carried through the following centuries, even until the present. Feminism was the term given to this “movement for the political, social and educational equality of women with men” (encyclopedia.com), and during this time we can begin to see evidence of these revolutionary ideas in women’s writings.
During this period, Jane Austen wrote her six main novels that focus on the same theme: love and marriage, particularly among women. It is no surprise then that Austen’s views on feminism have come in to question. Scholars and critics alike have argued that Austen was indeed a feminist, her writings offer clear proof, while others just as adamantly oppose such accusations, saying that Austen was a moralist and a conservative. In order to determine Austen’s stance on this subject, one must take a close look at her novels, such as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, along with other novels and women writers of that time. Feminism has come a long way since the 1800s, and therefore it is also necessary to gain an understanding of what aspects of this movement were present during the time period Austen wrote in, and how these developments might have affected her writing. In this case, one of the best authors to compare Austen with is Mary Wollstonecraft. Considered by many as a founder of feminism, Wollstonecraft also wrote during the late eighteenth, and quite possibly influenced Austen and her writings.
In her essay, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” Wollstonecraft creates her case for the mistreatment of females and offers suggestions for the liberation of her sex. One theme that both Wollstonecraft and Austen share is that of marriage. Austen’s stories are all quite similar, starting with young females who, having become adults, are in want of a husband, and ending with the marriage of the young lady and the man whom she has finally procured. Wollstonecraft views marriage differently. She acknowledges that women “spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of accomplishments; meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves – the only way women can rise in the world, - by marriage” (p. 86). While Austen’s novels tend to epitomize marriage as a happy ending to the trials of youth, Wollstonecraft feels that many women waste their time in preparing for an institution that will only increase their oppression.
In Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Marilyn Butler explains the importance of emotion in novels when she says, “All agree that the stress on feeling rather than on reason, and on fine sensation rather than on activity, hold particular dangers for women, since, by encouraging passivity, it leads easily to submission (p. 43). Wollstonecraft would agree, as she says in “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters”, “Feeling is ridiculous when affected, and even when felt, ought not to be displayed” (p. 30). When thinking of Austen’s “feeling” characters, Marianne Dashwood is the first to come to mind. By the end of Sense and Sensibility, the reader understands that to allow oneself to be led by one’s emotions and feelings only leads to destruction. Like Marianne, we learn to behave like Elinor, who is able to exert herself to act rationally in spite of what she feels. Although Elinor behaves in a manner nearly opposite of the sentimental Marianne, she is certainly not considered a feminist character. Even though both Austen and Wollstonecraft do not believe that women should allow themselves to be overcome with emotion, Wollstonecraft sees it as a means of liberating women from an oppressed lifestyle of wrong education, whereas Austen views the rational life as what is natural and how women have been meant to behave all their lives.
As the most forward and independent of Austen’s heroines, Elizabeth Bennet is often cited as being a feminist character. In fact, Deborah Kaplan ventures to say, “Elizabeth’s outrageous unconventionality which, judged by the standards set in conduct books and in conservative fiction, constantly verges not merely on impertinence but on impropriety” (p. 185) and claims that Elizabeth plays a dominating role in which “she refuses the silence and subordination marked out for women” (p. 186). But can we say that Elizabeth is rebelling against the confines of her society, or only acting in accordance with her distinctive personality? Marilyn Butler states, “Elizabeth prides herself on her individualism and trusts her perceptions, never recognizing that her judgments are really grounded in her feelings” (p. 209). If this is the case, then Elizabeth is behaving no differently from Lydia, who also bases her actions on her emotions. Wollstonecraft condemns women when “their thoughts turn on things calculated to excite emotion and feeling, when they should reason, their conduct is unstable, and their opinions wavering – not the wavering produced by deliberation or progressive views, but by contradicting emotions” (p. 97). Women such as this, women like Lydia, end up in “a mixture of madness and folly” when “the passions [are] thus pampered, whilst the judgment is left unformed” (p. 98). Thus, the difference between Elizabeth and Lydia, the disparity that allows one to gain the advantage over the other, is Elizabeth’s acquired ability to reason. It would seem once again that Elizabeth is a child of Wollstonecraft’s ideas, but it must also be understood that Elizabeth did not become rational until after she was humbled by Darcy, and once rational she still chooses to marry him. Since Elizabeth readily attributes her new abilities to her future husband, even claiming to be “the happiest creature in the world” (p. 319) despite her impending marriage and life of submission, it would be difficult to consider her a feminist.
Although Elizabeth is not considered a conventional female for her period, in time she learns to value Darcy and, like Catherine in Northanger Abbey, to learn from her husband-to-be. But unlike we see in Northanger Abbey, Elizabeth and Darcy learn from each other, and even share a mutual esteem for one another. Like Wollstonecraft says in “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,” “Love, unsupported by esteem, must soon expire, or lead to depravity; as, on the contrary, when a worthy person is the object, it is the greatest incentive to improvement, and has the best effect on manners and temper” (p. 35). Even Mr. Bennet shows an understanding for his daughter when he says, “I know you could neither be happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband, unless you looked up to him as a superior. Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage (p. 314). According to Mr. Bennet, and in turn Austen, an “equal” marriage, or a good one, means a wife must submit to her husband. And yet Austen also believes that it is important for both husband and wife to respect one another’s ideas and opinions, but we do not see Elizabeth attempting to dominate as she did earlier in the novel. She has now learned to submit to and come under the leadership of her husband, while still gaining his love and respect.
Unlike Wollstonecraft, Austen believes that marriage is the fulfillment of many a young girl’s destiny. Gilbert and Gubar “concede that, as a prudent gesture of apparent submission, Austen ends each novel with the heroine’s symbolic choice of a hero plainly destined to be the dominant partner in the marriage, while the heroine remains confined in the home” (Butler, p. xxx). Submission seems to be another theme in Austen’s novels. Wollstonecraft feels that “when education has been neglected, the mind improves itself, if it has leisure for reflection, and experience to reflect on; but how can this happen when [women] are forced to act before they have had time to think, or find that they are unhappily married” (“Thoughts on the …”, p. 36). Wollstonecraft believes in learning on one’s own and on women not being forced against their will, while conservative novelists, “stressed the importance of submitting to the guidance of a wise elderly mentor rather than to the example of books, or, worst of all, to the dictates of passion” (Butler, p. 95). Although Austen’s novels do not usually contain “a wise elderly mentor,” she is an advocate of discipline and self-denial, and her characters are apt to submit to someone of higher understanding, typically the men they end up marrying.
As Tony Tanner says in Jane Austen, many of her heroines “manifest a ‘spirit of independence’ when subject to varying degrees of coercion or persuasion” (p. 33), but that is not to say that they are rebelling against society, rather Tanner compares Austen with Hannah Moore when she “asserts that the best kind of woman is ‘one who can reason and reflect, and feel and judge and discourse, and discriminate’, and that the most important quality or ability in a woman is the power to direct ‘the faculties of the understanding … and all the qualities of the heart, to keep their proper places and due bounds, to observe their just proportions and maintain their right station, relation, order and dependency’” (p. 34). Although Austen’s women are able to be rational and govern their own lives, they are also willing to submit to the social standards of propriety and womanly duty.
In comparing Austen and Wollstonecraft, it is clear that both authors think in a similar manner, and that their works have some overlapping ideas; but it is also important to note a major difference between these two women authors. While Austen may exemplify the oppression of women that Wollstonecraft is fighting against, she does not offer a resolution. Wollstonecraft is acting against society, while Austen is only portraying it. Austen’s heroines may reveal the sense of entrapment that Wollstonecraft discusses, and may even show somewhat of a rebellion against those standards of society, but in the end they find a happy existence within those principles- in marriage. We may find Austen’s novels useful in supporting Wollstonecraft’s, and other early feminist’s, ideas, but there is one thing lacking. Although Austen and Wollstonecraft have similar ideas, the main difference, the one that makes Austen not a feminist, is her unwillingness to actively oppose the institutions that many feminists find oppressive, or to pose a solution to what Wollstonecraft would refer to as the “oppression of women.”


Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. 1987.
Kaplan, Deborah. Jane Austen Among Women. 1992.
Tanner, Tony. Jane Austen. 1986.
Todd, Jane. A Wollstonecraft Anthology. 1989.