Wollstonecraft found women to be lazy and thought that laziness would continue to be a female characteristic unless both mental and bodily moral stamina were required of them. She believed that a sound moral education could enlarge the mind. As a result, feminine blind obedience would cease, and women would no longer be veiled in ignorance under the guise of innocence. Wollstonecraft’s idea of virtue was a composite of goodness, justice, respect, honesty and chastity. Furthermore, she advised the female sex to cultivate modesty and reserve, for women could not remain complacent to be mere objects of pleasure with many vices and follies.
In Mary Wollstonecraft’s book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman her argument is that woman have always been viewed as the weaker sex. She goes on to say that she hopes this changes for woman and her biggest argument is that woman deserve the same educational opportunities as men. Although she was arguing that woman
She proposes that women have put themselves in this situation themselves and to prevent this from happening women need to sustain themselves and not allow men to make all the decisions and do all the work. Instead these women should be educated in the same way as men and have the same expectations as men in their civil and work duties and then they will no longer be put in the situations where they are helpless if the man leaves or dies. Mary Wollstonecraft explains how women should be included in tasks that are not small, and that they should not be included in tasks that men think are beneath them. The following quote from Wollstonecraft exemplifies how women were treated during her time: "The few employments open to women, so far from being liberal, are menial; and when a superior education enables them to take charge of the education of children as governesses, they are not treated like the
This is the major object Wollstonecraft recognizes concerning why women are secondary to men: every side of their background from the instant they arrive the world is positioned toward making them feeble, passive, and reliant on upon men. Women are entertained to only want to be attractive so they can appeal men. They take pleasure in their own humbleness and weakened physical strength. They partake in covetousness with other ladies. Since they are so restricted and restrained to the secluded domain, they become absorbed on no other responsibilities.
The society, and more precisely men, didn’t understand why the ‘weaker vessel’ should be educated, and thought it wasn’t important. Thus, women did not receive a very important education. Girls went to school to learn the basics, like reading and sometimes writing, but never stayed long . Girls were taught how to be good wife and a good mother, and to take care of her household. Fletcher explains that a woman ‘had been well-trained for the role of household manager in adolescence’ .
In her book, Wollstonecraft argues and slams Jean Jacques Rousseau’s multiple times on his view on education and his belief that women should only have education on how to be a better wife and mother (Poonacha 428). Wollstonecraft critiques him, “Rousseau declares that a woman should never, for a moment, feel herself independent that she should be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire…” To add, Rousseau is advocating for the rich and upper-class families, while Wollstonecraft is speaking up for middle class women who most of them are forced to please men and take care of their children (Poonacha 430). Rousseau is not the only guy she critiques, she also mentioned Edmund Burke in her pamphlet The Vindication of the Rights of Men. Despite education for women being an emotional and personal topic for Wollstonecraft, she balances her writing with reason (Volkova 896). She provides details and logic that back up her statements.
Women are treated as inferior being and used by men as sex objects. Wollstonecraft believed that the quality of mind of women is the same with that of men, and therefore women should not be denied a chance for formal education that will empower them to be equal with men. In the book of Wife of Bath’s Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer shows the role of a woman being weak creatures while men are economically powerful and educated. Women are seen as inheritor of eve and thus causes
In that particular book, Rousseau argues that sciences and arts progression has led to the corruption of virtue and morality. He thinks it is right for them to give up all their rights, not to a king, but to “the whole community,” all the
As an advocate of women rights, Wollstonecraft’s conception of intersubjectivity is universal as she conceptualizes a range of patriarchal institutions and practices related to marriage, education, law, government, and political economy. She strongly acknowledges “to the proposition that women, first and foremost, are human beings, who, like all other people in our society, must have the opportunity to build up their fullest human potential.” From this reality, she caught on that the concept of women’s human rights grew not from the heavily invoked, revolutionary-era idea of the “rights of man” but rather from the more radical idea of the “rights of woman.” As she theorized the necessity of including women in any universalistic and egalitarian definition of
Rousseau felt that if women were accorded equality with men in the household which was the only domain open to them, it would bring about the dissolution of society. These are just a few illustrations of the andocentric thinking of Rousseau who is upheld as one of the founding fathers of conventional social science theory. For Rousseau women are closer to nature than men. Women are caught up in their biology because of their attachment to the family they are both the source of devoted inspiration and