These superficial goals have harmful consequences for women’s minds they are not trained to provide for themselves or to be resourceful.

Wollstonecraft demonstrates that insofar as women are educated at all, they are mostly taught to value maintaining beauty and securing a man’s love above all else. Wollstonecraft argues that women are typically only taught to attract husbands, with the result that their mental and moral faculties are never fully developed-an injustice that will only be rectified if girls are educated according to the same system and toward the same goals as boys. However, she determines that this deficit is not due to some inherent weakness in women, but rather to the inadequate system of education that most middle-class English girls are subjected to. 13.In the late eighteenth-century treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft agrees with some of her contemporaries that women do not seem to attain the same level of virtue as their male counterparts. – Of the pernicious effects which arise from the unnatural distinctions established in societyĬh. – Morality undermined by sexual notions of the importance of a good reputationĬh.

– Modesty.-Comprehensively considered, and not as a sexual virtueĬh. – The effect which an early association of ideas has upon the characterĬh. – Animadversions on some of the writers who have rendered women objects of pity, bordering on contemptĬh. – Observations on the state of degradation to which woman is reduced by various causesĬh. – The prevailing opinion of a sexual character discussedĬh. – The rights and involved duties of mankind consideredĬh. Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men.Ĭh. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be “companions” to their husbands, rather than mere wives. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th century who did not believe women should have an education.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy.

Mary wollstonecraft a vindication