Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman

My theoretical framework will focus on the issues addressed by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subject (1792), Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949), and on the concept ‘Gender Performativity’, developed by Judith Butler in her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is considered to be one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy, although the term ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’ did not exist during the late eighteenth century. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is written in the form of a treatise against the background of French Revolution (1787-1799). However, Wollstonecraft’s work

Judith Butler (b.1956) is a post-structuralist American philosopher and gender theorist who has influenced a wide range of disciplines including feminism, queer studies, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, literary, film and performance studies and many more. However, I am interested in the concept of “Gender Performativity” as I consider that Butler’s concept will assist me in my analysis of Little Women and also in my exploration of my hypothesis of gender as a social construct. I will also attempt to understand Butler’s idea of ‘Performative Acts’ through my reading of her essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1990). Being influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, phenomenology, structural anthropologist and speech-act theories, Butler argues that through our daily practices of speech and movement, we perform the conventions of reality. However, Butler points out that this ‘reality’ is nothing else than social construction and by enacting those conventions we sustain them as ‘real’ as well. Therefore ‘gender acts’ are also performing certain conventions or roles as expected by the society. Butler understands gender to be “corporeal styles, an act, as it were” (Butler, 272) which has no relation to essential truths about the body but remains strictly ideological. She maintains: “The act that one does, the act that one performs, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again” (Butler, 272). Butler emphasizes that the gender acts are not individual expressions but conditional performances according to the scripts of