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Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of The Rights of Woman

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13 views2 pages

Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of The Rights of Woman

Uploaded by

Paula
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Paula del Carmen Domínguez Benítez and Sofía Hernández Linares

Wollstonecraft is an English writer and philosopher born in London, in a financially unstable family
that forced her to face a difficult childhood, including the denial of education. When she was a child,
she had to defend her mother against her violent and abusive father, which led her to leave her home
at the age of 17 and learn how to survive independently, building up a career as a writer and
intellectual and becoming one of the most influential feminist thinkers of her time. In one of her most
famous works “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, an essay published in 1792, Mary
Wollstonecraft defended women's rights and argued for the equality of women and men, maintaining
that women are human beings and that they’re not naturally inferior to men, but only appear so
because of their lack of opportunities for intellectual development. Her works built the base of future
feminist movements, she is a crucial figure in the history of feminist thought.

Although she was influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, at the beginning this movement was
exclusively focused on the inequities of social classes “Many are the causes that, in the present
corrupt state of society,contribute to enslave women by creeping their understandings and sharpening
their senses”, but not really on the unjust roles of gender in society. Wollstonecraft and other female
intellectuals of the time began to point out this unfairness by demanding those ideas of liberty,
equality and individual rights to be applied to both sexes. ”Women are, in fact, so much degraded by
mistaken notions of female excellence I do (…)that this artificial weakness produces a propensity to
tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of strength, which leads them to play off
those contemptible infantile airs that undermine esteem even whilst they excite desire. Wollstonecraft
also intended to end the vision that women only exist to please men and to be likable for them, stating
that this point of view makes us women seem weak and less capable than men and is not only harmful
for women but, in consequence, it is for society in general since it is blocking its progress.

She also believed in the possibility of a better and more advanced society through education and
reason, talking about the possibility of women and men being educated together and in the same way.
“(…) not only in private families, but in public schools, to be educated together. If marriage is the
cement of society, mankind should be educated after the same model (…) till they become enlightened
citizens, till they become free by being enabled to earn their own substance, independent of men; in
the same manner (…) as one man. Is independent of another”.

A Vindication of the Rights of Women it’s, above all, a work in which the defense of reason stands
out, whether we’re a man or a woman. She states that reason is what makes us human beings better
than animals, but women are not naturally educated to act like rational creatures, but only according to
their sentiments and feelings, and the main traits associated with them are elegance, purity and an
obsessive attention to the superficial. “women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to
acquire what really deserves the name of virtue”. Wollstonecraft proposes that women get the same
intellectual and rational education as men to train their understanding as well: “their lively senses will
ever be at work to harden their hearts, and the emotions struck out of them will continue to be vivid
and transitory, unless a proper education store their mind with knowledge.”

Bibliografía:

Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Feminist Papers : A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Layton, Utah:
Gibbs Smith, 2019. Print.
“A Vindication of the Rights of Women: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. By Mary
Wollstonecraft.” Eighteenth Century Collection Online demo (Digital collection) University of
Michigan Library Digital Collections. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecodemo/K046614.0001.001.
Accessed September 26, 2024.9

Filosofía&Co. (2024, 22 mayo). La filósofa Mary Wollstonecraft reivindicó los derechos de la mujer.
Filosofía & Co. https://filco.es/mary-wollstonecraft-la-primera-filosofa-feminista/

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