Wollstonecraft's A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman
‘…And Life is More Than a Dream’
Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is an early feminist treatise which includes the footprints of liberalism and can be seen as a declaration of the rights of women to equality of education and to civil opportunities. With a simple and direct rhetoric, the book offers a public polemic which differs from the Enlightenment thinkers and intellectuals of the age (such as J.J. Rousseau, David Hume, John Locke), who describe the freedom of mind and virtue within the autonomy of men. Her bona fides to reconstruct the doctrine of natural rights is germane to “persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, …show more content…
Wollstonecraft makes no bones of describing the marriage as legal prostitution and this creates a bomb-effect upon the society of time. Although she is criticized by radical feminists who claims that Wollstonecraft misapprehends the women’s place within patriarchal society and finds the men’s physical superiority not deniable and as “a noble prerogative” (p.72), Wollstonecraft dares to make a statement within a society where men exists only for God and women just for the God settling in the endocardium of men! We do not actually know whether she had a spark of revolution inside but we can be sure that she has made her best in favor of …show more content…
Furthermore, she challenges Burke also because she views him as having a mistaken conception of the nature of power. A great deal of her treatise attacks the educational restrictions and “mistaken notions of female excellence” that keep women in a state of “ignorance and slavish dependence.” She argues that girls are forced into passivity, vanity, and credulity by lack of physical and mental stimulus and by a constant insistence on the need to please, and ridicules notions about women as helpless, charming adornments in the household. She sees women as too often sentimental and foolish, gentle domestic “brutes” whose fondness for pleasure has been allowed to take the place of ambition. Wollstonecraft suggests that it is only by encouraging the moral development of every individual to success and independence that a true civilization will
Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is an early feminist treatise which includes the footprints of liberalism and can be seen as a declaration of the rights of women to equality of education and to civil opportunities. With a simple and direct rhetoric, the book offers a public polemic which differs from the Enlightenment thinkers and intellectuals of the age (such as J.J. Rousseau, David Hume, John Locke), who describe the freedom of mind and virtue within the autonomy of men. Her bona fides to reconstruct the doctrine of natural rights is germane to “persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, …show more content…
Wollstonecraft makes no bones of describing the marriage as legal prostitution and this creates a bomb-effect upon the society of time. Although she is criticized by radical feminists who claims that Wollstonecraft misapprehends the women’s place within patriarchal society and finds the men’s physical superiority not deniable and as “a noble prerogative” (p.72), Wollstonecraft dares to make a statement within a society where men exists only for God and women just for the God settling in the endocardium of men! We do not actually know whether she had a spark of revolution inside but we can be sure that she has made her best in favor of …show more content…
Furthermore, she challenges Burke also because she views him as having a mistaken conception of the nature of power. A great deal of her treatise attacks the educational restrictions and “mistaken notions of female excellence” that keep women in a state of “ignorance and slavish dependence.” She argues that girls are forced into passivity, vanity, and credulity by lack of physical and mental stimulus and by a constant insistence on the need to please, and ridicules notions about women as helpless, charming adornments in the household. She sees women as too often sentimental and foolish, gentle domestic “brutes” whose fondness for pleasure has been allowed to take the place of ambition. Wollstonecraft suggests that it is only by encouraging the moral development of every individual to success and independence that a true civilization will