Colonial Life Of A Woman Rhetorical Analysis

One of her most dramatic and radical assertions was to question the role of women as purely domestic beings. The idea that women were intellectually inferior, therefor they performed the least stimulating (though in no way easier) duties of colonial life was an idea she utterly rejected. She argued the opposite-that no one can reasonably expect a woman, who is continually forced to perform the same mundane tasks day after day to have the same intellectual vigor as an even slightly educated man. “Is the needle and kitchen sufficient to employ the operations of a soul..?” page 133. She believed that because women are intellectually equal to men, they should be privy to the same educational opportunities as men. The division of the sexes is something
that happens throughout childhood, meaning that a male toddler would not be considered intellectually superior to a female toddler. “But from that period what partiality! how is the one exalted, and the other depressed, by the contrary modes of education which are adopted! the one is taught to aspire, and the other is early confined and limited. As their years increase, the sister must be wholly domesticated, while the brother is led by the hand through all the flowery paths of science.” The mundane duties of the average housewife discourage any sort of advancement in education. Murray explained the contradiction that if a women were, god forbid, to read, it was more acceptable for the book to be fictional, or foolish, as any sort of educational advancement was as unaccepted as it was to be ignorant. “They rob us of the power t'improve,
And then declare we only trifles love;”
The oppression of the female sex affected all women, educated or not.