Summary Of A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman

Antonia Parrish-Brooks
History 1310 – Glass 9:30 am

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 8th ed. (New York, United States: Oxford University Press, 1993.)

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, originally published in 1792, is considered to be a declaration of feminism. It focuses mainly on Wollstonecraft’s idea of the need for women’s education and their equal rights to reason and rationality just as men had. Many of these ideas were based upon her reasoning of the equal creation of men and women as beings who could exercise their own thoughts. Being a woman in the eighteenth century one could expect a fair amount of unacknowledged free will and ideas. These are issues Wollstonecraft addresses,
in her work she speaks of ways in which women can overcome the societal oppression and become professional members of society. Wollstonecraft’s primary concern in this is education and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a defense against Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas that, women’s education should be to teach a woman how to obey and please her husband and that women are only meant to be companions of men.
Wollstonecraft starts her main argument with a discussion about reason and rationality in which she promotes the use of these things by women. She explains that reason is what gives mankind superiority over other creatures and that this is meant to be used to attain experience and knowledge. Women are treated as if they cannot reason for themselves or aren’t able to attain these things and from this Wollstonecraft explains that, “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.” Wollstonecraft believes that both men and women alike were created and meant to use this skill to better educate themselves. She wishes to acknowledge that women can stand alone independently. Argued by Wollstonecraft are also major reasons as to why women are subjugated by society, Prejudice, lack of ability to have a profession, lack of education, government systems that do not give enough power to their people, and women’s own silliness and abstinence of reason are all cases given by Wollstonecraft for the subjugation of women. In chapters two and three of the work, Wollstonecraft explains how women are rendered subordinate to men.
She addresses the many previous arguments made as a justification for man’s tyranny over woman. Arguments that the “two sexes, in acquirement of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character…” only perpetuated that women were not allowed to have sufficient strength in which to acquire real virtue. However, in response to these statements Wollstonecraft argues that “allowing them [women] to have souls that there is but one way appointed by Providence to lead mankind to either virtue or happiness.” Stating that if women have souls then there should be no difference between men and women when it came to obtaining virtue. With this, the opinion and outlook on women promoted the sanction that women were inferior to men. Women were seen as foolish without the realization that their folly was a result of young girls being taught to be weak, soft and excessively proud of their beauty and appearance. In most if not all cases women were taught that their looks were extremely important; weakness and phony appearance were pleasing to others. Being taught as young women that these things are most important was one of the main contributing factors to the silliness of women as they are viewed my men. According to Wollstonecraft, women are rarely independent and tend to not exercise reason most in part due to their up bring and childhood education. However, writers
such as Rousseau and Dr. Gregory, “…have contributed to render women more artificial, weak characters, than they would have otherwise been and consequently, more useless members of society.” Mainly Wollstonecraft argues that this viewpoint makes women seem much more useless to society than otherwise noted without these statements.
In chapters ten and eleven Wollstonecraft discusses parental affection and parental duties. According to her, parents can tend to be tyrants and delight in power without restraint over their children. Since women are slaves to the prejudices against them, they lack true maternal affection and can either neglect their child or spoil them too much. Since caring for children is the woman’s duty and forming their child’s character begins at a young stage in the child’s life it may be difficult to tell if a mother really loves her child or just cares for it out of the duty forced upon her by nature. “…unless the understanding of woman be enlarged, and her character render more firm, by being allowed to govern her own conduct, she will never have sufficient sense or command of temper to manage her children properly.” Mainly Wollstonecraft is insisting that with a lack of reason, it is challenging to be a good mother, therefore a woman must have some sort or reason and independence to be a good mom.
In chapter twelve of the work Wollstonecraft goes on to give ideas for education reform.
The reforms that she called for would fuse public and private schools together and that opposite genders should attend school together. “But I still insist, that not only the virtue, but the knowledge of the two sexes should be the same in nature, if not in degree, and that women, considered not only as moral, but rational creatures, ought to endeavour to acquire human virtues (or perfections) by the same means as men, instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half being, one of Rousseau's wild chimeras.” With this system Wollstonecraft argued that as the children grew older from school they would advance their studies and women would be involved in every step. Doing this would no longer leave women’s education minimal and broken, and they would not be geared straight towards marriage as women’s education already was. Wollstonecraft’s idea for education is directed towards women who are considered as simple objects of beauty but are meant to be meek and foolish. Overall the goal for education is to allow women independence, the ability to exercise reason and the capability to take on a profession. Having both men and women attend school together in this situation would allow for these goals to be met and would make women a more equal educational partner. If women received this equal education they would not be just blindly obedient to their husbands, would not need to focus so
much on their appearances and would not end up as bad mothers to their children.
In the last chapter of her work, Wollstonecraft sums up her main argument. In this final piece Wollstonecraft, herself, begins to criticize women for their silliness and details various ways in which they do so, these include: visiting mediums and healers; reading stupid novels; participating in rivalries with other women and overly caring about dress and their appearances. Though Wollstonecraft is the one making these point about women, she mainly blames the subordinate status of women, and being seen as useless creatures on the men who perpetuate this and expect the women to be week. These issues and others like them, including: The denial of women’s education, their ability to acquire virtues, appearances being overly important, and the ultimate life goal of attaining a husband were all taught from childhood as these are learned things. Each of these however, supports Wollstonecraft’s message that changes in education and the perception of woman needed to be implemented in order to have equality amongst men and women. Overall Wollstonecraft does not blame women for their silliness and dependence, but argues that it is a natural flaw that inevitably stems from their unsatisfactory education and their low societal status.
The historical context of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman fits into the time period of the Enlightenment. This work written in 1792 contains the complex and controversial philosophical views that were very much alive at the time. Raging at this time was also the French Revolution and with it came different views on liberties that people possessed. Many writings were going around in either support of or support against the revolution. It was at this time that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was writing works pertaining to his unequal view of women, which ultimately brought about A Vindication of the Rights of Women in response to Rousseau’s Émile. During the Age of Enlightenment is when many important new and innovative ideas came about. As a book essentially about feminism, the ideas brought forth by Mary Wollstonecraft in this work gave way to many more ideas about women’s rights and equality. Though it would be more than a century into the future women were eventually given the right to vote and in the time period before that changes were being made to women’s educations. Though Wollstonecraft’s work was not the sole piece of work that displayed feministic ideas, it did help to forward the movement.