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Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Summary
Mary
Wollstonecraft's A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman is
a treatise on overcoming the ways in which women in her time are oppressed and
denied their potential in society, with concomitant problems for their
households and society as a whole. The dedication is to Charles M.
Talleyrand-Périgord, the late bishop of Autun whose views on female education
were distasteful to Wollstonecraft. The introduction sets out her view that
neglect of girls’ education is largely to blame for the condition of adult
women. They are treated as subordinate beings who care only about being
attractive, elegant, and meek, they buy into this oppression, and they do not
have the tools to vindicate their fundamental rights or the awareness that they
are in such a condition.
In the first chapter Wollstonecraft
promotes reason and rationality and discusses the deleterious effects of
absolute, arbitrary political power and the vices associated with riches and
hereditary honors. Chapters two and three detail the various ways in which
women are rendered subordinate. They are taught that their looks are of
paramount concern, and they tend to cultivate weakness and artificiality to
appear pleasing to others. They are seldom independent and tend not to exercise
reason. Writers like Rousseau and Dr.
Gregory desire that
women remain virtual slaves, enshrined in the home and concerned only with
their "natural" proclivities of being modest, chaste, and beautiful.
Women are taught to indulge their emotions and thus have unhappy marriages
because passion cannot be sustained. Virtue should not be relative to gender;
as both men and women were created by God and have souls, they have the same
kind of propensity to exercise reason and develop virtue. Female dependence as
seen in her day is not natural.
Women's confinement in the home and inability to participate in the public
sphere results in their insipidness and pettiness. Wollstonecraft wants to
inspire a "revolution in female manners."
In chapter
four she excoriates the premise that pleasure is the ultimate goal of a woman's
life. Reason and common sense are usually ignored in favor of emotion and
sentiment, and young girls are taught every early to concern themselves only
with their persons. Such trends are problematic for mothers, who either spoil
their children or ignore them. In addition, marriage should resemble friendship
because husband and wife should be companions. In chapter five Wollstonecraft
lambastes many of the writers who have perpetuated these ideas. In chapter six
she explains the importance of early associations for the development of
character; for women, false notions and early impressions are not tempered by
knowledge or nuance. Girls begin to prefer rakes to decent men.
In
chapters seven and eight Wollstonecraft addresses the subject of modesty and
explains that modesty is not the same as humility. The women who exercise the
most reason are the most modest. Women's modesty can only improve when their
bodies are strengthened and their minds enlarged by active exertions. Women's
morality is undermined, however, when reputation is upheld as the most
significant thing they should keep intact. Men place the burden of upholding
chastity on a woman's shoulders, yet men also must be chaste.
In
chapter nine Wollstonecraft calls for more financial independence for women,
expresses the need for duty and activity in the public sphere, argues for the
need to be a good citizen as well as a good mother, and describes the various
pursuits women might take on in society. Chapters ten and eleven concern
parenting duties, repeating that there must be reforms in education for women
to be good mothers who neither tyrannize over their children nor spoil them.
Chapter twelve concerns Wollstonecraft's ideas for education reform. These
include a conflation of public and private education, co-education, and a more
democratic, participatory educational structure.
Chapter
thirteen sums up her arguments. She details the various ways in which women
indulge their silliness. These include visiting mediums, fortune tellers, and
healers; reading stupid novels; engaging in rivalries with other women;
immoderately caring about dress and manners; and indulging their children and
treating them like idols. Women and men must have things in common to have
successful marriages. Overall, women's faults do not result of a natural
deficiency but stem from their low status in society and insufficient
education.
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