It seeks to reclaim midwifery for women, against the encroachment of men into this profession, and contends that women could be physicians just as well as nurses.
It urges women to extend their interests to encompass politics and the concerns of the whole of humanity. It also contains advice on how to make marriages last. Husbands and wives ought not, moreover, to be overly intimate and should maintain a degree of reserve towards each other.
This said, she thought sex should be based on genuine mutual physical desire. Wollstonecraft wanted women to aspire to full citizenship, to be worthy of it, and this necessitated the development of reason. Rational women would perceive their real duties. That she embraced the social and economic consequences of her vision of happy marriages, based on friendship and producing the next moral generation was spelled out further in her subsequent work, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe In that work, she endeavoured, amongst other things, to assess the merits and demerits of the progress of humanity and establish the causes of French despotism.
Borrowing from Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments and Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations she had drawn on previously, she sketched a possible future society in which the division of labour would be kept to a minimum and the sexes would be not only educated together but encouraged to work in family units. Single sex institutions and, for instance, all-male workshops encouraged lasciviousness in her view. She thus looked forward to a society in which small businesses and farms would provide basic, instead of superfluous, needs.
The combination of her experience of her unrequited love for Imlay, the dictates of her own emotions, and the tribulations of a trip in Northern Europe led her to reconsider her view of the power of reason. Indeed, she was also to review her opinion of France, polite culture and manners, even Catholicism which she had abhorred, a loathing that her stay in Portugal had done much to strengthen. The Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark , whose influence on travel literature as well as the Romantic movement is by no means negligible, show Wollstonecraft to have begun to espouse an increasingly nuanced view of the world, and to have sought to develop an even more fluid account of the relationship between reason, the imagination, and the passions, as well as of modernity.
Thus she grew a little closer to Burke in that she came to think that the tyranny of commercial wealth might be worse than that of rank and privilege. Whilst in France, she had already begun to write less critically of the English system of government. She had witnessed the Terror, fallen in love, born a child out of wedlock, been rejected, and attempted suicide.
A second suicide attempt lay ahead. So did the prospect of happiness with William Godwin, a prospect cut short by her death in childbirth. Posthumous notoriety was to follow as Wollstonecraft became identified only with the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and that work was ironically, in turn, equated with a flouting of social conventions, principally in relation to marriage.
Although she was very much encouraged by her publisher, Joseph Johnson, she received little support from fellow intellectuals in her lifetime. Even Godwin did not take to her on their first meeting. Relatively few of the foremost women writers gave Wollstonecraft their wholehearted support in the eighteenth century.
Some mocked her, but rarely were her ideas genuinely assessed in the way they have come to be since the second half of the twentieth century. The leading poet, Anna Barbauld — was one of the few members of the radical intelligentsia of the time whose opposition to Wollstonecraft was the product of a real engagement with her views on women. By the end of the s and for most of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft was derided by many, if only because of what was deemed to have been a scandalous personal life.
There were, to be sure, important exceptions, especially in America Botting and Carey But such praise as she did receive on both sides of the Atlantic came from arguably limited acquaintance with her ideas or her intellectual persona. It revealed, amongst other personal details, her relationship with Imlay and thereby cast a deep shadow over her reputation. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, however, a growing number of commentators have looked at A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in its historical and intellectual context rather than in isolation or in relation to subsequent feminist theories.
Wollstonecraft has now long ceased to be seen as just a scandalous literary figure, or just the embodiment of a nascent feminism which only reached maturity two hundred years later, but as an Enlightenment moral and political thinker whose works present a self-contained argument about the kind of change society would need to undergo for men and women to be virtuous in both the private and the public sphere and thereby secure the chance of a measure of happiness.
What is more, with growing interest in reception history, the extent of her influence in Europe and beyond as been the subject of reassessments. She was translated into several languages, in the s and throughout the nineteenth century Johns Moira Ferguson places Wollstonecraft in dialogue with nineteenth-century representations of sexual exploitation within the colonial context by such women authors as Jane Austen and Jamaica Kincaid.
In recent years, scholars have also made use of Wollstonecraft to inform modern feminist discussions, especially those regarding autonomy, education, and nature. Barbara Seeber places Wollstonecraft within the tradition of ecofeminism: she argues that Wollstonecraft linked social hierarchies with the domination of nature by human beings.
Whether Wollstonecraft is best seen as belonging to one tradition or any other will remain a matter of dispute. What is important to remember is that she responded to a fast changing political situation and that she continued to engage critically with public opinion, the leading intellectual and political figures of her age, and most remarkably, her own views in the light of her experiences in France, Northern Europe and Great Britain.
Her critique of Burke, the English political system, even the aristocracy, became more muted as she found the continued expansion of commerce and growth of the luxury economy to lead to even greater inequities than the world it was replacing. The following is a selection. Biography 2. Pedagogical Writings 3. Moral and Political Writings 4. Reputation Although she was very much encouraged by her publisher, Joseph Johnson, she received little support from fellow intellectuals in her lifetime.
London: Joseph Johnson, With illustrations by William Blake. Edited by Moira Ferguson, Delmar, N. Second imprint dedicated to M. Edited by Carol H. Poston with reprints of interpretative articles, New York: Norton, Edited by Barbara Taylor. London: Everyman, Poston, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Translations by Mary Wollstonecraft All three works are included in Works. Of the Importance of Religious Opinions.
Translated from the French of Mr. Jacques Necker. London: Joseph Johnson, ; Dublin, ; Philadelphia, Elements of Morality for the use of children; with an Introductory Address to Parents. Translated from the German of the Rev. C hristian G otthilf Salzmann. Young Grandison. With Alterations and Improvements. Further soaking up ideological commonplaces from her external contexts, Wollstonecraft creates analogies that may help her arguments relate to the broadest audience possible.
Using the social and historical contexts and making comparisons through analogies to construct arguments help Wollstonecraft reach her intended audience. Besides using contextual evidence from events alone in her rhetorical piece, Wollstonecraft also compares her claims to those of other prominent Enlightenment thinkers. Rousseau receives a thorough critique by Wollstonecraft.
The major argument that Wollstonecraft challenges in Vindication is this gender controversy; Rousseau believes that men and women have different virtues, but Wollstonecraft believes that both sexes have the same moral principles and human goals to strive for. For example, she argues that men and women are both sexual beings, so while women must value chastity and fidelity, men must do the same.
There are requirements of both the husband and wife to put familial duty over sexual pleasure. This is something Wollstonecraft presents to her audience in emotionally relatable terms, seeing as how her previous partner failed to maintain a structure with raising her elder daughter. In order to focus on keeping a stable relationship with a spouse and children, women must be educated, Wollstonecraft reasons. After all, women are the ones responsible for educating their children at home, and they are part of the give-and-take relationship that a stable marriage requires, as Wollstonecraft persuades her audience.
In order to relate to her audience, Wollstonecraft does enhance her claims about women having the potential of knowledge by admitting what most men and women of the eighteenth century did, in fact, steadfastly believe.
Wollstonecraft leaves the realm of women being able to be rational creatures by bringing feeling and thought into harmony with reason. By stating what she thinks a lack of education is doing to the woman mind — allowing no alternative to ignorance and indolence — Wollstonecraft offers the idea of education reform. Mary Wollstonecraft displays her credibility through being a published, recognizable political essayist and ardent feminist, and she is also associated with a significant group of intellectuals: Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, William Blake, and her love interest — William Godwin.
The emotional appeals this text utilizes directly are far and few between since Wollstonecraft wrote this essay with a strictly rational tone to show that women can be unemotional, too — just like men.
A few years after Vindication , in , she winds up writing about her travels to Sweden, which is full of pathos. Wollstonecraft describes being immersed in a totally different culture; so, in reading her other works and having sufficient background knowledge of her life, her audiences can understand her rational arguments in Vindication from an indirect emotional point of view.
Logically-speaking, Vindication lends observations that Wollstonecraft finds around her in society — and in her own life, in the case of her failed previous relationship. She also focused on moral improvement, liberty, sensibility, reason, and duty. 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 for causing social change.
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.
This alludes to one of the most essential aspects of feminism: a holistic view of society and concern for future generations. This stands in contrast to other views of liberation that work within the capitalistic system and encourage individual women to rise to the top of the social ladder in competition with men. 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.
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.
One of her main criticisms of the education system was that women were taught to be modest, in that they were taught which vices they must avoid. However, they were not then subsequently allowed to cultivate the virtues that are the opposite of those vices. They were taught to be submissive and to seek protection instead of fostering gentleness and forbearance.
The education of women was thus misleading and incomplete because it only included one aspect of a necessarily two-part sequence. The present system was unfair, and so she insisted upon a system of equality and substance, based upon rationality. 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.
As well as there being one life of virtue, Wollstonecraft asserted that there is one rationality. Reason is an objective toward which individuals strive. However, men are socialized to think that they are the only ones who have rationality. As a result, women are never even given the opportunity to attempt to find whether they do indeed have rational abilities as well. She held to the idea that the rational passions do not justify the world to remain as it is, rather, they call it always to renew and improve its state.
The current system did not allow for people to determine what the truth was because it did not have the proper structures in place to test the theory.
In order to determine whether women were rational or not, they had to be given a chance to exercise their potential reason. Also, she argued that virtues are not considered relative entities, but rather objective ones.
If women are to demonstrate any type of virtue, there must be something about females that is equal to males and based upon the same principles, instead of being inferior.
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