The Social and Political

Philosophy of Mary
Wollstonecraft
Subject Code: - RUAPOL603

TYBA
SEMESTER – VI
(2023-24)

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3518 Diksha R Kachare 9372880475
Abstract :
According to the well-known study on Wollstonecraft’s reception
in the early 20 century, some feminists embraced her unusual life
experience as a personal model for their own experiments with,
and literary reflections on, love, sex, and marriage. She frequently
used the first-person plural to refer to herself as a part of the
greater community of women when endure patriarchal oppression
in A vindication of the Rights of Woman. There is evidence that
many intellectuals regarded Wollstonecraft's contributions to
modern women largely from a biographical and literary
standpoint. Examples include Virginia Woolf, Ruth Benedict, and
Emma Goldman, Numerous important biographical studies of
Wollstonecraft’s life and literary critiques of her writing have been
produced since the 1970s. In this research paper, per aim to
investigate the feminist theories of Wollstonecraft as well as her
experiments with gender, life, marriage, literature, and society.
Introduction:
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), a famous and prolific writer
whose work was translated into several languages during her
lifetime, reflected on the philosophical and political issues
connected with the topics current at that time. Her ideas focus on
important themes such as how a community organizes itself and
what is wrong with the general positions of women in society.
Today, her writing serves as an example of a proto-feminist
approach which articulates this special problem of the sexes as an
elementary moment in political philosophy. What makes
Wollstonecraft so controversial among feminist thinkers is, above
all, her critique of women's weaknesses and their acceptance of
their own slavery, seemingly begging for food instead of for
freedom. Women, she wrote, subject themselves to domination,
"creeping in the dust" and relinquishing their dignity.
At the forefront of this revival is Mary Wollstonecraft. As the author
of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she already has a
prominent place in many people’s minds as an inspirational early
feminist. While this has been an enormously influential book, it
does not represent the whole of her thought. Wollstonecraft was a
prolific writer whose interests covered subjects as diverse as
education, politics, history, moral theory, philosophy, and religion.
She was an activist, a novelist, and a public intellectual who was
fully engaged with the issues of her time. Wollstonecraft’s analysis
of the nature and causes of women’s subjection is understandably
seen as her outstanding contribution to the history of ideas.
Nevertheless, this analysis is embedded within her own wider
conceptual framework, which she brought to bear on the issues she
addressed. The premise of our volume is that this wider philosophy
is deserving of serious study, no less than her feminist legacy.
A Vindication of the rights of women:
Arguably, Mary Wollstonecraft can be as relevant today as she was
in 1792 when she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her
critique of societal norms and the education of women and children
was revolutionary when she wrote it, and it still has the capability to
be influential today. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is seen by
many as a suggestion for the renewal of female education; however, it
should also be included in the larger picture of the quest for liberty.
Many at the time did not want to give her ideas credibility because they
believed that she must have had ulterior motives for trying to overturn
the status quo for women. It was thought that no sensible woman
would seek to deny her place in society and defy the expectations
placed on her unless she had questionable morals.1 This same criticism
has been made of the modern feminist movement, that women are not
seeking equality with pure motives, but, rather, that they must have a
hidden agenda motivated by anger and jealousy. Since the beginnings
and up through the development and continuance of the movement,
feminism has been harshly criticized and even dismissed by many for
this reason even though its ideal objectives seek to be comprehensive
and include everyone. Feminism promotes a system based on radical
love and equality instead of patriarchy and domination and attempts to
meet the best interest of women and men, adults and children of all
races and classes.
The main point of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman seemed to
be that miseducation of women was occurring and that needed to be
changed. Wollstonecraft saw the education system that was in place
as a conspiracy by men to subordinate women and to make them
seem less rational and weaker than they actually are. She
suggested that the solution to this was to educate women
differently than they were being educated. She and her
revolutionary contemporaries viewed education as the most
essential aspect guyed that, when n subjection to they were by the
of society, everyone for causing social change. Also, education was
regarded as particularly important in childhood, because during
childhood development much of one's character and the prejudices
that one will hold are instituted. Wollstonecraft argued that, when
women are held in subjection to men the way that they were by the
rules and norms of society, everyone suffers as a result. Women
were told to value temporal and trivial things such as beauty of
appearance and being coy. Instead of these fruitless ventures,
women should be cultivating their own minds in order to become
strong and free. Also, children would be better nurtured if they and
the women who taught them were educated. If the place of women
must be in the home as nurturers of children, it would be more
advantageous to make that the best situation that it could possibly
be. In fact, Wollstonecraft suggested that women who had been
educated would be able to educate children more thoroughly
because they would value honorable things.
Wollstonecraft demanded that young girls be taught about the
moral life rather than temporal ambitions such as cultivating
physical beauty, softness of temper, and societal propriety. She
 insisted that everyone has innate rational capacities and potential.
However, in the spirit of Locke, she acknowledged that children
begin as blank slates, in that they can be taught correctly and virtues
can be learned, nurtured, and practiced, or they can be taught
incorrectly and indoctrinated with false ideas about themselves and
their abilities. Since the latter was what she observed to be the case
with women, she concluded that education had to change.
Wollstonecraft often asserted that there is but one life of
virtue and that all people should be able to pursue it in order to
better themselves. Both women and men are held morally
accountable and, thus, both sexes are moral agents. Virtue is an
objective concept based upon reason, and so to make female
virtue dependent upon and responsive toward men would make
virtue itself a subjective concept. She denied any idea of “feminine
virtues” and, instead, opted for a complete upheaval of the current
female socialization process, particularly beginning with children.
One practical suggestion that she made was to allow girls to
participate in the same educational and physical activities as boys in
order to show that what some referred to as the “natural superiority of
man” in areas such as strength was actually exaggerated by the
culture, if not completely socially conditioned. It is too difficult to
know what is socialized behavior and what is natural behavior if
women are never given the opportunity to try and if they are only
educated within a context of injustice and inequality. Wollstonecraft
granted that men seem to be physically stronger than women, but, as
mentioned above, perhaps this is because girls are not given the
same exercises to do as boys. Perhaps, Wollstonecraft argues,
women would prove themselves to be inferior once they were given
equal opportunity, but she demonstrated that until this was
empirically shown no one had a valid basis upon which to claim that
men are superior. Also, to make a normative claim that women
should be subordinate to men from the empirical observation that
men are generally stronger than women is inappropriate. Unless the
norms and expectations of society were changed, Wollstonecraft
saw her culture as committing acts of injustice.

Mary Wollstonecraft views:

Wollstonecraft also suggested that women should be allowed to be
free and independent because that would ultimately prove to be
more beneficial in relationships with men. Both sexes should
cultivate modesty toward one another. Through education, women
would become stronger of mind and, after having achieved and
experienced the higher pleasures, perhaps they would be more eager
to do necessary tasks diligently. Domestic life is harmed by women
who are indolent and vain.11 The wise and educated woman who is
appreciated for who she is instead of what she does will be much more
willing and motivated to be a good partner because her true nature
will have been acknowledged. Men should treat women as their equals
and seek to be friends with their wives rather than subjecting them.
Today, it seems that Wollstonecraft’s suggestions might be taken
further to mean that equality entails that men and women share the
domestic duties. If both sexes have equally rational natures, then
neither should be subjected to the other, nor should there
necessarily be defined and rigid social roles.
Wollstonecraft proposed a national school system, which
exemplified her concern to combat not only sexism but also
classism. This principle can be directly applied to our present
society, where there is a need to combine the eradication of
racism, classism, and sexism as a whole in order to achieve the
equality of all. In theory, feminism can provide a holistic vision
containing all of the necessary elements. Feminism must include,
not only the issue of sexism, but also the issues of racism and
classism. It must involve an international pursuit of equality
against injustice or the quest will not work at all. The equality of
some is not good enough. If not all women (and men for that
matter) are treated equally, then the ideals of feminism will not
be achieved.
Another way that Wollstonecraft might be applied to our
contemporary situation is in relation to certain strains within the
evangelical church. The complementarian movement in evangelical
Christianity seems to be detrimental to the pursuit that
Wollstonecraft outlines in Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
because it insists that men and women have innate differences
which must play out as having different social and domestic roles.
To those who might argue that women have been given equal
opportunities in today's society and question the value of the
feminist movement, I would suggest that the very structures and
systems within our society must be evaluated and reconsidered
in order to provide authentic equal opportunity for all. For
example, many men still believe that it is not their job to do
housework. In upper class circles, this problem is solved by the
professional woman hiring a maid, nanny, etc. However, lower
class women, who typically work the maid and nanny jobs, are
then expected by society to hold a full-time paying job as well as
keep up their own homes. This is not equality; it is systemic
oppression. I believe that Wollstonecraft would oppose this form
of injustice in our society and call for change.

Mary Wollstonecraft called for a new system of education in

her time. The inequality of women and men was promoted by
her culture and she countered it by asserting their equality of
rationality and virtue. Her thought was revolutionary, but it can
still be applied today. Our society is full of injustice, particularly
for racial minorities and the poor, and the women in those
groups are the ones who struggle the most. The theory and spirit
of Wollstonecraft should be understood and used to change the
structures of our society that foster a spirit of domination. If we
do not educate ourselves to the reality of the experience of many
people in our midst, we are doing a great disservice to them and
to ourselves, not only pragmatically, but also rationally. It is
unfortunate that the state of our society is such that we still need to
look to thinkers such as Wollstonecraft for the same criticism that
she applied over 200 years ago, but, fortunately enough, we do have
resources like her work to help us make changes. And, indeed,
changes must be made.

Conclusion :
A variety of feminists used Wollstonecraft's atypical life
experience as a personal model for their own experimentation
in, and literary reflections on, love, sex, and marriage, as shown
by the well-known study on her reception in the early twentieth
century. However, it was this symbolic iteration of
Wollstonecraft as a personal icon that was most certainly the
most influential on feminist researchers of the second wave. But
as the comparison of the forewords to A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman editions from the centenary era shows, we
should not ignore the political and philosophical influence of A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman on first-wave feminists..
Every generation of feminists has gone back to reexamine
Wollstonecraft in an effort to reinterpret her significance for the
present. In their serious dedication to researching
Wollstonecraft's life and unique style of argumentation for their
social movements, first and second-wave feminists frequently
missed her sense of humour. Her A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman might provide the next generation of women's rights
activists with a surprisingly amusing starting point for their
new style of mimetic, sardonic, and self-referential social
criticism