In her 1791-92 A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, now considered a classic of feminist history, Mary
Wollstonecraft argued primarily for the rights of woman to be educated. Through education would come emancipation.
In defending this right, Mary Wollstonecraft accepts the
definition of her time that women's sphere is the home, but she does not
isolate the home from public life as many others did and as many still do. For
Mary Wollstonecraft, the public life and domestic life are not separate, but
connected. The home is important to Wollstonecraft because it forms a
foundation for the social life, the public life. The state, the public life,
enhances and serves both individuals and the family. Men have duties in the family,
too, and women have duties to the state.
Mary Wollstonecraft also argues for the right of woman to be
educated, because she is primarily responsible for the education of the young.
Before 1789 and her Vindication of the Rights of Man, she was known primarily
as a writer about education of children, and she still accepts this role as a
primary role for woman as distinct from man.
Mary Wollstonecraft goes on to argue that educating women will
strengthen the marriage relationship. Her concept of marriage underlies this
argument. A stable marriage, she believes, is a partnership between a husband
and a wife -- a marriage is a social contract between two individuals. A woman
thus needs to have equal knowledge and sense, to maintain the partnership. A
stable marriage also provides for the proper education of children.
Mary Wollstonecraft also acknowledges that women are sexual
beings -- but so are men. Thus female chastity and fidelity, necessary for a
stable marriage, require male chastity and fidelity too. Men are required, as
much as women, to put duty over sexual pleasure. (Perhaps her experience with
Gilbert Imlay, father of her elder daughter, made this point more clear to her,
as he was not able to live up to this standard.) Control over family size, for
instance, serves the individuals in the family, strengthens the family, and
thus serves the public interest through raising better citizens.
But putting duty above pleasure did not mean that feelings are
not important. The goal, for Wollstonecraft's ethics, is to bring feeling and
thought into harmony. The harmony of feeling and thought she calls reason.
Reason was of primary importance to the Enlightenment philosophers, a company
to which Mary Wollstonecraft belongs. But her celebration of nature, of feelings,
of "sympathy," also make her a bridge to the Romantic philosophy and
literary movements which follow. (Her younger daughter much later married one
of the best-known Romantic poets, Percy Shelley.)
Mary Wollstonecraft sees women's absorption in such purely
sensing and feeling activities as fashion and beauty denigrate their reason,
makes them less able to maintain their part in the marriage partnership and
reduces their effectiveness as educators of children -- and thus makes them
less dutiful as citizens.
In bringing together feeling and thought, rather than separating
them and dividing one for woman and one for man, Mary Wollstonecraft was also
providing a critique of Rousseau, another defender of personal rights but one
who did not believe that such individual liberty was for women. Woman, for
Rousseau, was incapable of reason, and only man could be trusted to exercise
thought and reason. Thus, for Rousseau, women could not be citizens, only men
could.
But Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication, makes clear
her position: only when woman and man are equally free, and woman and man are
equally dutiful in exercise of their responsibilities to family and state, can
there be true freedom. The essential reform necessary for such equality, Mary
Wollstonecraft is convinced, is equal and quality education for woman -- an
education which recognizes her duty to educate her own children, to be an equal
partner with her husband in the family, and which recognizes that woman, like
man, is a creature of both thought and feeling: a creature of reason.
Today, it may be naïve to imagine that simply equalizing
educational opportunity will ensure true equality for women. But the century
after Wollstonecraft was a progression of newly opened doors for women's education,
and that education significantly changed the lives and opportunities for women
in all aspects of their lives. Without equal and quality education for women,
women would be doomed to Rousseau's vision of a separate and always inferior
sphere.
Reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman today, most
readers are struck with how relevant some parts are, yet how archaic are
others. This reflects the enormous changes in the value society places on
women's reason today, as contrasted to the late 18th century; but it also
reflects the many ways in which issues of equality of rights and duties are
still with us today.
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