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Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft

Wollstonecraft took over the care of her family at young age. She started up and was governess of school (self-educated). She decided to try to write for a living, and wrote one of the first responses to a conservative piece by Edmund Burke. She called it Vindication of the Rights of Men (1789). At first it was published anonymously, and it read as if it was written by a man; she argues that it is irrational to distinguish among classes of men. She is defending the creation of a Republic (as opposed to a monarchy). In 1792, she publishes Vindication of the Rights Woman. The "woman" is singular, "men" is plural. To talk about the woman, she is generalizing all women. Either that, or she pointing to the woman as an individual. She describes women as a class of persons who have all been treated the same throughout time. Her term "man" is used to represent all individual humans, and is shorthand for "mankind." Now,however, the word"man" is avoided because the sub-texts are condescending.

In VR Woman, Wollstonecraft describes the system of sexism as structural and systematic. Society, through education, trains women not to be virtuous, not to be rational, not to manly. It trains women to be immoral and irrational. By believing the system, women are jeopardizing their cause.They must come up with ways to react within the confines of the system, and so they become cunning and tyrannical. According to Wollstonecraft, "Every profession involving subordination is highly injurious to morality."Perhaps the system of education injures morality on both a personal and financial level through such activities as plagiarism, cheating, paying off loans, and fitting in. Furthermore, once you stop thinking for yourself, your morality is injured.

According to Chapter 2, women are degraded because the education they receive is really given to them in order to make them (sexually) desirable. Soldiers are like women because they blindly submit to authority; they are educated to behave in the same way as women. She is saying that if you educate men in the same way you educated women, they will behave in the same way. Thus, women are NOT naturally inferior; they are NURTURED to be inferior. A social system has caused this "inferiority" of women. Rousseau declares that a woman should never feel a sense of independence. She replies "What nonsense!" especially because Rousseau is a radical who is working for the equality of men (social contract). He believes in equality of men--not of women.

In Chapter 3 the same subject is continued. Wollstonecraft tells us that women sometimes boast of their weakness in order to get (illegitimate, despotic) power over men; and example of this would be a puny appetite. Women, acting as despots, have more power by playing on the weakness of men than if they had legitimate, rational power. Some examples of this include crying, fainting, and sexual allure. Women are taught from infancy that being beautiful is what they are all about. "Adorning your gilt-cage" every time you work to "beautify" yourself is the ultimate goal for all women.

Basically, this is feminism insisting that women have been given too much, and it is their turn to work, to do something legitimate in order to gain equality and power. Wollstonecraft is very hard on women, forcing them to look at their mistakes and correct them.