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Ncenglish Language Arts 12 Cr 1819 Central Ideas in a Vindication of the Rights of Woman

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Philosophic feminist volume by Mary Wollstonecraft

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
Vindication1b.jpg
Author Mary Wollstonecraft
Country Great britain
Language English
Subject field Women'south rights
Genre Political philosophy

Publication date

 1792

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), written by the 18th-century British proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In information technology, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th century who believed that women should non receive a rational education. She argues that women'due south educational activity ought to match their position in society, and that they are essential to the nation because they heighten the children and could deed as respected "companions" to their husbands. Wollstonecraft maintains that women are homo beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men, and that treating them as mere ornaments or property for men undercuts the moral foundation of club.

Wollstonecraft was prompted to write the Rights of Woman afterwards reading Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord's 1791 report to the French National Assembly, which stated that women should merely receive a domestic educational activity; from her reaction to this specific event, she launched a broad attack against sexual double standards, indicting men for encouraging women to indulge in excessive emotion. Wollstonecraft hurried to consummate the work in direct response to ongoing events; she intended to write a more thoughtful second volume but died earlier completing information technology.

While Wollstonecraft does call for equality between the sexes in item areas of life, especially morality, she does non explicitly state that men and women are equal. Her ambiguous statements regarding the equality of the sexes have made information technology difficult to classify Wollstonecraft as a modern feminist; the word itself did non emerge until decades after her death.

Although it is commonly assumed that the Rights of Woman was unfavourably received, this is a modern misconception based on the belief that Wollstonecraft was every bit reviled during her lifetime equally she became after the publication of William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). The Rights of Woman was generally received well when it was kickoff published in 1792. Biographer Emily W. Sunstein chosen it "perchance the most original book of [Wollstonecraft's] century".[1] Wollstonecraft's piece of work had significant impact on advocates for women's rights in the 19th century, especially the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention which produced the Declaration of Sentiments laying out the aims of the suffragette movement in the Us.

Historical context [edit]

Portrait of a man, showing his head and shoulders. He is wearing a black jacket with a high-necked collar and a white shirt tied in a bow. His head is adorned by a curly blonde wig.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written against the tumultuous groundwork of the French Revolution and the debates that it spawned in Britain. In a lively and sometimes savage pamphlet war, at present referred to as the Revolution controversy, British political commentators addressed topics ranging from representative government to homo rights to the separation of church building and state, many of these issues having been raised in France first. Wollstonecraft first entered this fray in 1790 with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in French republic (1790).[2] In his Reflections, Shush criticized the view of many British thinkers and writers who had welcomed the early stages of the French revolution. While they saw the revolution equally analogous to Great britain'due south own Glorious Revolution in 1688, which had restricted the powers of the monarchy, Burke argued that the appropriate historical analogy was the English Ceremonious War (1642–1651) in which Charles I had been executed in 1649. He viewed the French revolution every bit the violent overthrow of a legitimate regime. In Reflections he argues that citizens practice not have the correct to revolt against their government considering culture is the result of social and political consensus; its traditions cannot be continually challenged—the issue would be anarchy. One of the key arguments of Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men, published but half dozen weeks after Burke'due south Reflections, is that rights cannot be based on tradition; rights, she argues, should be conferred considering they are reasonable and just, regardless of their ground in tradition.[3]

When Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord presented his Rapport sur l'instruction publique (1791) to the National Assembly in France, Wollstonecraft was galvanized to respond.[4] In his recommendations for a national system of education, Talleyrand had written:[5]

Let u.s.a. bring up women, not to aspire to advantages which the Constitution denies them, but to know and capeesh those which it guarantees them . . . Men are destined to live on the stage of the world. A public education suits them: it early places before their eyes all the scenes of life: only the proportions are different. The paternal abode is ameliorate for the teaching of women; they have less demand to acquire to deal with the interests of others, than to accustom themselves to a calm and secluded life.

Portrait of a woman, showing her head, with a grey wig. Two large curls are sitting at the nape of her neck. Her shoulders are covered with a filmy, cream-coloured shawl.

Wollstonecraft dedicated the Rights of Adult female to Talleyrand: "Having read with nifty pleasure a pamphlet which you take lately published, I dedicate this volume to y'all; to induce you to reconsider the subject, and maturely counterbalance what I accept advanced respecting the rights of adult female and national instruction."[6] At the stop of 1791, French feminist Olympe de Gouges had published her Annunciation of the Rights of Woman and of the Female person Citizen, and the question of women's rights became central to political debates in both France and Britain.[2]

The Rights of Woman is an extension of Wollstonecraft'southward arguments in the Rights of Men. In the Rights of Men, as the championship suggests, she is concerned with the rights of detail men (18th-century British men) while in the Rights of Adult female, she is concerned with the rights afforded to "woman", an abstruse category. She does not isolate her argument to 18th-century women or British women. The kickoff affiliate of the Rights of Woman addresses the consequence of natural rights and asks who has those inalienable rights and on what grounds. She answers that since natural rights are given by God, for one segment of club to deny them to some other segment is a sin.[7] The Rights of Woman thus engages not only specific events in French republic and in Uk only also larger questions being raised by political philosophers such every bit John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.[8]

Themes [edit]

The Rights of Woman is a long (almost 87,000 words) essay that introduces all of its major topics in the opening chapters and then repeatedly returns to them, each time from a unlike point of view. It too adopts a hybrid tone that combines rational statement with the fervent rhetoric of sensibility. Wollstonecraft did not employ the formal argumentation or logical prose style mutual to 18th-century philosophical writing.[9]

In the 18th century, sensibility was a physical miracle that came to exist attached to a specific set of moral beliefs. Physicians and anatomists believed that the more sensitive people'south nerves, the more than emotionally affected they would be by their surroundings. Since women were thought to have keener nerves than men, information technology was besides believed that women were more emotional than men.[10] The emotional backlog associated with sensibility as well theoretically produced an ethic of compassion: those with sensibility could easily sympathise with people in pain. Thus historians have credited the discourse of sensibility and those who promoted it with the increased humanitarian efforts, such as the move to abolish the slave trade.[11] But sensibility besides paralysed those who had too much of it; as scholar G. J. Barker-Benfield explains, "an innate refinement of nerves was too identifiable with greater suffering, with weakness, and a susceptibility to disorder".[10]

By the time Wollstonecraft was writing the Rights of Woman, sensibility had already been under sustained assault for a number of years.[12] Sensibility, which had initially promised to draw individuals together through sympathy, was now viewed as "profoundly separatist"; novels, plays, and poems that employed the language of sensibility asserted individual rights, sexual freedom, and unconventional familial relationships based only upon feeling.[thirteen] Furthermore, as Janet Todd, another scholar of sensibility, argues, "to many in United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland the cult of sensibility seemed to have feminized the nation, given women undue prominence, and emasculated men."[14]

Rational teaching [edit]

One of Wollstonecraft's central arguments in the Rights of Woman is that women should be educated in a rational manner to requite them the opportunity to contribute to society. In the 18th century, information technology was often assumed by both educational philosophers and bear book writers, who wrote what one might call up of as early self-assistance books,[xv] that women were incapable of rational or abstract idea. Women, it was believed, were too susceptible to sensibility and too fragile to be able to think clearly. Wollstonecraft, along with other female reformers such as Catharine Macaulay and Hester Chapone, maintained that women were indeed capable of rational thought and deserved to be educated. She argued this point in her own deport book, Thoughts on the Pedagogy of Daughters (1787), in her children's volume, Original Stories from Real Life (1788), as well equally in the Rights of Woman.[sixteen]

Stating in her preface that "my principal argument is built on this uncomplicated principle, that if [woman] be not prepared by education to become the companion of homo, she will cease the progress of noesis and virtue; for truth must be common to all", Wollstonecraft contends that society volition degenerate without educated women, specially because mothers are the principal educators of young children.[17] She attributes the trouble of uneducated women to men and "a fake organisation of instruction, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who [consider] females rather as women than human creatures".[18] Women are capable of rationality; it but appears that they are not, considering men take refused to educate them and encouraged them to be frivolous (Wollstonecraft describes empty-headed women as "spaniels" and "toys"[19]).[20]

Wollstonecraft attacks behave volume writers such as James Fordyce and John Gregory as well every bit educational philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau who contend that a adult female does not need a rational education. (Rousseau famously argues in Emile [1762] that women should be educated for the pleasure of men; Wollstonecraft, infuriated past this argument, attacks not but it but also Rousseau himself.[21]) Intent on illustrating the limitations that contemporary educational theory placed upon women, Wollstonecraft writes, "taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming circular its aureate cage, only seeks to adorn its prison house",[22] implying that without this damaging ideology, which encourages young women to focus their attention on dazzler and outward accomplishments, they could achieve much more. Wives could be the rational "companions" of their husbands and even pursue careers should they and then choose: "women might certainly report the art of healing, and exist physicians likewise as nurses. And midwifery, decency seems to allot to them . . . they might, also, study politics . . . Business of various kinds, they might likewise pursue."[23]

For Wollstonecraft, "the most perfect pedagogy" is "an practice of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and class the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attach such habits of virtue as will render it independent."[24] In addition to her broad philosophical arguments, Wollstonecraft lays out a specific plan for national educational activity to counter Talleyrand's. In Affiliate 12, "On National Teaching", she proposes that children be sent to costless mean solar day schools as well as given some instruction at domicile "to inspire a love of home and domestic pleasures". She likewise maintains that schooling should be co-educational, contending that men and women, whose marriages are "the cement of social club", should be "educated subsequently the aforementioned model."[25]

Feminism [edit]

Three women sitting around a small table, one sewing, one sitting in front of a small cup. All three are drawn to look almost horrific. The third woman looks as if she has two heads, but it may be that there are four women. The women's heads do not look as if they are comfortable on their bodies. The palette of the picture is dark red, black, brown, and almond.

The Debutante (1807) past Henry Fuseli; "Woman, the victim of male person social conventions, is tied to the wall, fabricated to run up and guarded past governesses. The movie reflects Mary Wollstonecraft's views in The Rights of Women [sic]".[26]

It is debatable to what extent the Rights of Woman is a feminist text; because the definitions of feminist vary, different scholars accept come to different conclusions. Wollstonecraft would never accept referred to her text equally feminist because the words feminist and feminism were not coined until the 1890s.[27] Moreover, there was no feminist movement to speak of during Wollstonecraft'south lifetime. Even so, Rights of Adult female is often considered "the ur-certificate of modern liberal feminism."[28] In the introduction to her foundational work on Wollstonecraft'due south thought, Barbara Taylor writes:[29]

Describing [Wollstonecraft's philosophy] as feminist is problematic, and I do it only subsequently much consideration. The characterization is of grade anachronistic . . . Treating Wollstonecraft'south idea every bit an anticipation of nineteenth and twentieth-century feminist argument has meant sacrificing or distorting some of its primal elements. Leading examples of this . . . have been the widespread fail of her religious beliefs, and the misrepresentation of her as a conservative liberal, which together have resulted in the displacement of a religiously inspired utopian radicalism by a secular, class-partisan reformism as alien to Wollstonecraft's political project as her dream of a divinely promised age of universal happiness is to our own. Fifty-fifty more than important nonetheless has been the imposition on Wollstonecraft of a heroic-individualist brand of politics utterly at odds with her own ethically driven case for women's emancipation. Wollstonecraft'due south leading ambition for women was that they should achieve virtue, and it was to this end that she sought their liberation.

In the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft does not make the claim for gender equality using the same arguments or the same language that late 19th- and 20th century feminists later would. For example, rather than unequivocally stating that men and women are equal, Wollstonecraft contends that men and women are equal in the eyes of God, which ways that they are both subject to the same moral law.[30] For Wollstonecraft, men and women are equal in the about of import areas of life. While such an idea may not seem revolutionary to 21st-century readers, its implications were revolutionary during the 18th century. For instance, information technology implied that both men and women—not just women—should be modest[31] and respect the sanctity of marriage.[32] Wollstonecraft'due south argument exposed the sexual double standard of the tardily 18th century and demanded that men adhere to the same virtues demanded of women.[33]

Even so, Wollstonecraft's arguments for equality stand in contrast to her statements respecting the superiority of masculine forcefulness and valour.[34] Wollstonecraft famously and ambiguously states:[35]

Let information technology non be ended, that I wish to capsize the social club of things; I take already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to exist designed by Providence to accomplish a greater degree of virtue. I speak collectively of the whole sexual practice; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I reason consequentially, every bit strenuously maintain that they take the same simple direction, as that there is a God.

Moreover, Wollstonecraft calls on men, rather than women, to initiate the social and political changes she outlines in the Rights of Woman. Because women are uneducated, they cannot alter their ain state of affairs—men must come up to their assist.[36] Wollstonecraft writes at the end of her chapter "Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society":[37]

I then would fain convince reasonable men of the importance of some of my remarks; and prevail on them to weigh dispassionately the whole tenor of my observations. – I appeal to their understandings; and, as a fellow-creature, claim, in the proper noun of my sex, some interest in their hearts. I entreat them to help to emancipate their companion, to make her a assist meet for them! Would men just generously snap our chains, and exist content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more true-blue wives, more than reasonable mothers – in a word, amend citizens.

It is Wollstonecraft's last novel, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), the fictionalized sequel to the Rights of Woman, that is normally considered her most radical feminist piece of work.[38]

Sensibility [edit]

One of Wollstonecraft's about scathing criticisms in the Rights of Woman is against imitation and excessive sensibility, specially in women. She argues that women who succumb to sensibility are "diddled about past every momentary gust of feeling"; considering these women are "the casualty of their senses", they cannot think rationally.[39] In fact, non but do they practice damage to themselves but they besides do damage to all of culture: these are not women who can refine civilisation – these are women who volition destroy information technology. But reason and feeling are not independent for Wollstonecraft; rather, she believes that they should inform each other. For Wollstonecraft the passions underpin all reason.[40] This was a theme that she would return to throughout her career, simply particularly in her novels Mary: A Fiction (1788) and Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman. For the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume reason is dominated by the passions. He held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, famously proclaiming in A Treatise of Homo Nature that "Reason is, and ought only to exist the slave of the passions."[41]

As role of her argument that women should not be overly influenced by their feelings and emotions, Wollstonecraft emphasises that they should non be constrained past or made slaves to their bodies or their sexual feelings.[42] This detail argument has led many modern feminists to suggest that Wollstonecraft intentionally avoids granting women any sexual desire. Cora Kaplan argues that the "negative and prescriptive attack on female person sexuality" is a "leitmotif" of the Rights of Adult female.[43] For instance, Wollstonecraft advises her readers to "calmly allow passion subside into friendship" in the platonic companionate wedlock (that is, in the platonic of a love-based matrimony that was developing at the fourth dimension).[44] Information technology would exist better, she writes, when "ii virtuous young people marry . . . if some circumstances checked their passion".[45] According to Wollstonecraft, "dearest and friendship cannot subsist in the same bosom".[45] As Mary Poovey explains, "Wollstonecraft betrays her fright that female desire might in fact court man's lascivious and degrading attentions, that the subordinate position women take been given might fifty-fifty be deserved. Until women can transcend their fleshly desires and fleshly forms, they will be hostage to the body."[46] If women are not interested in sexuality, they cannot be dominated past men. Wollstonecraft worries that women are consumed with "romantic wavering", that is, they are interested only in satisfying their lusts.[47] Considering the Rights of Woman eliminates sexuality from a woman'south life, Kaplan contends, it "expresses a violent antagonism to the sexual" while at the same time "exaggerat[ing] the importance of the sensual in the everyday life of women". Wollstonecraft was so adamant to wipe sexuality from her movie of the platonic woman that she ended up foregrounding it past insisting upon its absence.[48] But as Kaplan and others have remarked, Wollstonecraft may accept been forced to make this sacrifice: "it is important to remember that the notion of woman equally politically enabled and independent [was] fatally linked [during the eighteenth century] to the unrestrained and cruel practise of her sexuality."[49]

Republicanism [edit]

Men with guns being led by a half-naked woman who is holding the French flag. She and they are walking over dead bodies. The painting is structured like a triangle, with the woman at the apex. The dead are lying at the base of the triangle.

Claudia Johnson, a prominent Wollstonecraft scholar, has called the Rights of Woman "a republican manifesto".[l] Johnson contends that Wollstonecraft is hearkening dorsum to the Commonwealth tradition of the 17th century and attempting to reestablish a republican ethos. In Wollstonecraft's version, in that location would exist stiff, but carve up, masculine and feminine roles for citizens.[51] According to Johnson, Wollstonecraft "denounces the collapse of proper sexual distinction as the leading feature of her age, and every bit the grievous consequence of sentimentality itself. The trouble undermining lodge in her view is feminized men".[52] If men experience gratuitous to prefer both the masculine position and the sentimental feminine position, she argues, women have no position open to them in society.[53] Johnson therefore sees Wollstonecraft as a critic, in both the Rights of Men and the Rights of Woman, of the "masculinization of sensitivity" in such works as Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.[54]

In the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft adheres to a version of republicanism that includes a belief in the eventual overthrow of all titles, including the monarchy. She too briefly suggests that all men and women should be represented in government. But the bulk of her "political criticism", as Chris Jones, a Wollstonecraft scholar, explains, "is couched predominantly in terms of morality".[55] Her definition of virtue focuses on the individual's happiness rather than, for example, the adept of the entire order.[55] This is reflected in her explanation of natural rights. Because rights ultimately continue from God, Wollstonecraft maintains that there are duties, tied to those rights, incumbent upon each and every person. For Wollstonecraft, the private is taught republicanism and benevolence within the family; domestic relations and familial ties are crucial to her understanding of social cohesion and patriotism.[56]

Grade [edit]

In many ways the Rights of Woman is inflected by a bourgeois view of the world, as is its straight predecessor the Rights of Men. Wollstonecraft addresses her text to the center class, which she calls the "most natural state". She also frequently praises modesty and industry, virtues which, at the fourth dimension, were associated with the middle class.[57] From her position every bit a middle-class writer arguing for a middle-course ethos, Wollstonecraft also attacks the wealthy, criticizing them using the aforementioned arguments she employs against women. She points out the "false-refinement, immorality, and vanity" of the rich, calling them "weak, artificial beings, raised to a higher place the common wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner [who] undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread abuse through the whole mass of order".[58]

But Wollstonecraft'southward criticisms of the wealthy practice not necessarily reflect a concomitant sympathy for the poor. For her, the poor are fortunate because they will never be trapped past the snares of wealth: "Happy is it when people have the cares of life to struggle with; for these struggles prevent their condign a prey to enervating vices, only from idleness!"[59] Moreover, she contends that charity has only negative consequences because, as Jones puts information technology, she "sees information technology every bit sustaining an unequal club while giving the appearance of virtue to the rich".[threescore]

In her national plan for instruction, she retains class distinctions (with an exception for the intelligent), suggesting that: "After the age of nine, girls and boys, intended for domestic employments, or mechanical trades, ought to exist removed to other schools, and receive instruction, in some measure appropriated to the destination of each individual ... The young people of superior abilities, or fortune, might now exist taught, in another school, the dead and living languages, the elements of science, and continue the study of history and politics, on a more extensive scale, which would non exclude polite literature."[61]

Rhetoric and way [edit]

Page reads "Émile, ou de L'Education. Par J. J. Rousseau, Citoyen de Genève....Tome Premier. A La Haye, Chez jean Neaulme, Libraire. M.DCC.LXII...."

In attempting to navigate the cultural expectations of female writers and the generic conventions of political and philosophical discourse, Wollstonecraft, as she does throughout her oeuvre, constructs a unique blend of masculine and feminine styles in the Rights of Woman.[62] She uses the linguistic communication of philosophy, referring to her piece of work as a "treatise" with "arguments" and "principles".[62] Yet, Wollstonecraft as well uses a personal tone, employing "I" and "you", dashes and assertion marks, and autobiographical references to create a distinctly feminine voice in the text.[9] The Rights of Woman further hybridizes its genre by weaving together elements of the conduct volume, the short essay, and the novel, genres often associated with women, while at the same fourth dimension claiming that these genres could be used to discuss philosophical topics such as rights.[63]

Although Wollstonecraft argues against excessive sensibility, the rhetoric of the Rights of Woman is at times heated and attempts to provoke the reader.[64] Many of the most emotional comments in the book are directed at Rousseau. For example, afterward excerpting a long passage from Emile (1762), Wollstonecraft pithily states, "I shall make no other comments on this ingenious passage, than just to observe, that it is the philosophy of lasciviousness."[65] A mere page later, later indicting Rousseau'southward program for female teaching, she writes "I must relieve myself by drawing some other picture."[66] These terse exclamations are meant to depict the reader to her side of the argument (it is causeless that the reader will agree with them). While she claims to write in a plain mode then that her ideas volition reach the broadest possible audience,[67] she actually combines the plainly, rational linguistic communication of the political treatise with the poetic, passionate language of sensibility to demonstrate that one can combine rationality and sensibility in the aforementioned self.[68]

In her efforts to vividly draw the condition of women within order, Wollstonecraft employs several different analogies.[69] She oft compares women to slaves, arguing that their ignorance and powerlessness places them in that position. But at the same time, she also compares them to "arbitrary tyrants" who use cunning and deceit to manipulate the men effectually them. At ane point, she reasons that a woman can get either a slave or tyrant, which she describes as two sides of the same money.[seventy] Wollstonecraft also compares women to soldiers; similar military men, they are valued simply for their appearance and obedience. And like the rich, women'southward "softness" has "debased mankind".[71]

Revision [edit]

Wollstonecraft was forced to write the Rights of Woman hurriedly to respond to Talleyrand and ongoing events. Upon completing the work, she wrote to her friend William Roscoe: "I am dissatisfied with myself for not having washed justice to the subject. – Exercise not suspect me of simulated modesty – I mean to say that had I immune myself more time I could have written a better book, in every sense of the word . . . I intend to finish the next volume earlier I begin to impress, for information technology is not pleasant to have the Devil coming for the decision of a canvas fore information technology is written."[72] When Wollstonecraft revised the Rights of Adult female for the second edition, she took the opportunity not only to fix pocket-sized spelling and grammer mistakes but also to bolster the feminist claims of her argument.[73] She changed some of her statements regarding female and male difference to reverberate a greater equality between the sexes.[74]

Wollstonecraft never wrote the second part to the Rights of Woman, although William Godwin published her "Hints", which were "chiefly designed to have been incorporated in the second part of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman", in the posthumous collection of her works.[75] Even so, she did begin writing the novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, which nigh scholars consider a fictionalized sequel to the Rights of Adult female. It was unfinished at her death and also included in the Posthumous Works published by Godwin.[76]

Reception and legacy [edit]

When it was beginning published in 1792, the Rights of Adult female was reviewed favourably by the Analytical Review, the General Mag, the Literary Mag, New York Magazine, and the Monthly Review, although the supposition persists that Rights of Adult female received hostile reviews.[77] It was most immediately released in a 2nd edition in 1792, several American editions appeared, and information technology was translated into French. Taylor writes that "it was an firsthand success".[78] Moreover, other writers such as Mary Hays and Mary Robinson specifically alluded to Wollstonecraft'southward text in their own works. Hays cited the Rights of Woman in her novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and modelled her female person characters after Wollstonecraft's ideal woman.[79]

Although female person conservatives such every bit Hannah More than excoriated Wollstonecraft personally, they really shared many of the aforementioned values. As the scholar Anne Mellor has shown, both More and Wollstonecraft wanted a club founded on "Christian virtues of rational benevolence, honesty, personal virtue, the fulfillment of social duty, thrift, sobriety, and hard work".[80] During the early 1790s, many writers inside British society were engaged in an intense debate regarding the position of women in society. For example, the respected poet and essayist Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Wollstonecraft sparred back and along; Barbauld published several poems responding to Wollstonecraft's work and Wollstonecraft commented on them in footnotes to the Rights of Woman.[81] The work besides provoked outright hostility. The bluestocking Elizabeth Carter was unimpressed with the work.[82] Thomas Taylor, the Neoplatonist translator who had been a landlord to the Wollstonecraft family unit in the late 1770s, swiftly wrote a satire called A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes: if women take rights, why non animals too?[82]

After Wollstonecraft died in 1797, her hubby William Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). He revealed much about her individual life that had previously not been known to the public: her illegitimate kid, her love affairs, and her attempts at suicide. While Godwin believed he was portraying his wife with dearest, sincerity, and pity, contemporary readers were shocked past Wollstonecraft's unorthodox lifestyle and she became a reviled figure. Richard Polwhele targeted her in particular in his anonymous long verse form The Unsex'd Females (1798), a defensive reaction to women's literary cocky-assertion: Hannah More is Christ to Wollstonecraft's Satan. His poem was "well known" among the responses A Vindication.[83] Nigh reviewers of the poem considered it artistically uninspiring and tedious, though some conservative publications praised its political opinion.[84]

Wollstonecraft's ideas became associated with her life story and women writers felt that it was dangerous to mention her in their texts. Hays, who had previously been a close friend[85] and an outspoken advocate for Wollstonecraft and her Rights of Adult female, for example, did non include her in the collection of Illustrious and Celebrated Women she published in 1803.[86] Maria Edgeworth specifically distances herself from Wollstonecraft in her novel Belinda (1802); she caricatures Wollstonecraft every bit a radical feminist in the grapheme of Harriet Freke.[87] But, like Jane Austen, she does not refuse Wollstonecraft's ideas. Both Edgeworth and Austen fence that women are crucial to the development of the nation; moreover, they portray women as rational beings who should cull companionate marriage.[88]

The negative views towards Wollstonecraft persisted for over a century. The Rights of Woman was not reprinted until the centre of the 19th century and it still retained an aura of ill-repute. George Eliot wrote "there is in some quarters a vague prejudice against the Rights of Woman as in some fashion or other a reprehensible book, but readers who go to information technology with this impression will be surprised to find it eminently serious, severely moral, and nonetheless rather heavy".[89]

The suffragist (i.e. moderate reformer, as opposed to suffragette) Millicent Garrett Fawcett wrote the introduction to the centenary edition of the Rights of Woman, cleansing the memory of Wollstonecraft and challenge her equally the foremother of the struggle for the vote.[xc] While the Rights of Woman may accept paved the style for feminist arguments, 20th century feminists have tended to use Wollstonecraft's life story, rather than her texts, for inspiration;[91] her unorthodox lifestyle convinced them to effort new "experiments in living", as Virginia Woolf termed it in her famous essay on Wollstonecraft.[92] However, there is some testify that the Rights of Woman may be influencing current feminists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a feminist who is critical of Islam'south dictates regarding women, cites the Rights of Woman in her autobiography Infidel, writing that she was "inspired past Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist thinker who told women they had the aforementioned ability to reason as men did and deserved the same rights".[93] Miriam Schneir also includes this text in her anthology Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, labelling information technology equally ane of the essential feminist works.[94] Further prove of the enduring legacy of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication may be seen by directly references in recent historical fiction set: for instance, in The Silk Weaver (1998) set in the late 18th century among Dublin silk weavers, author Gabrielle Warnock (1998) intervenes as narrator to hold upwardly 'Rights of Adult female' for the reader to reverberate upon the politics, morals, and feelings of her female characters.[95] In Death comes to Pemberley (2011)set in 1803 P.D.James has i male person character reference Rights of Adult female in reproving another (Darcy) for denying voice to the woman in matters that concern her.[96]

Encounter too [edit]

  • Timeline of Mary Wollstonecraft
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Men

Notes [edit]

  1. ^ Sunstein, 3.
  2. ^ a b Macdonald and Scherf, "Introduction", 11–12.
  3. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 43–44.
  4. ^ Kelly, 107; Sapiro, 26–27.
  5. ^ Talleyrand, "Rapport sur l'instruction publique", reprinted in Vindications, 394–95.
  6. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 101.
  7. ^ Taylor, 105–half dozen; Kelly, 107.
  8. ^ Sapiro, 182–84.
  9. ^ a b Kelly, 110.
  10. ^ a b Barker-Benfield, 9.
  11. ^ Barker-Benfield, 224.
  12. ^ Todd, Sensibility, 144.
  13. ^ Todd, Sensibility, 136.
  14. ^ Todd, Sensibility, 133.
  15. ^ Batchelor, Jennie. "Conduct Book." The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 14 May 2007.
  16. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 169ff; Kelly, 123; Taylor, 14–15; Sapiro, 27–28; 243–44.
  17. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 102; Sapiro, 154–55.
  18. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 109.
  19. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 144.
  20. ^ Kelly, 124–26; Taylor, 234–37; Sapiro, 129–30.
  21. ^ Kelly, 126; Taylor, xiv–15; Sapiro, 130–31.
  22. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 157.
  23. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 286; see also Kelly, 125–24; Taylor, fourteen–15.
  24. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 129.
  25. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, Affiliate 12; run into too, Kelly, 124–25; 133–34; Sapiro, 237ff.
  26. ^ Tomory, Peter. The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972; p. 217. LCCN 72-77546.
  27. ^ Feminist and feminism. Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 17 September 2007.
  28. ^ DeLucia, n. pag.
  29. ^ Taylor, 12; run into likewise, 55–57; run into also Sapiro, 257–59.
  30. ^ See, for instance, Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 126, 146; Taylor, 105–106; 118–20.
  31. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 102 and 252.
  32. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 274.
  33. ^ DeLucia, due north. pag.
  34. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 110; Sapiro, 120–21.
  35. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 135.
  36. ^ Poovey, 79; Kelly, 135.
  37. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 288.
  38. ^ Taylor, Affiliate 9; Sapiro, 37; 149; 266.
  39. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 177.
  40. ^ Jones, 46.
  41. ^ Hume, 415.
  42. ^ See, for example, Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 259–60; Taylor, 116–17.
  43. ^ Kaplan, "Wild Nights", 35.
  44. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 249.
  45. ^ a b Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 192.
  46. ^ Poovey, 76.
  47. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 194.
  48. ^ Kaplan, "Wild Nights", 41.
  49. ^ Kaplan, "Wild Nights", 33; see also Taylor, 118–xix; Taylor, 138ff.
  50. ^ Johnson, 24.
  51. ^ Johnson, 29; see also Taylor, 211–22; Sapiro, 82–83.
  52. ^ Johnson, 23.
  53. ^ Johnson, 45.
  54. ^ Johnson, 30.
  55. ^ a b Jones, 43.
  56. ^ Jones, 46; Taylor, 211–22; Vindications, 101–102, for example.
  57. ^ Kelly, 128ff; Taylor, 167–68; Sapiro, 27.
  58. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 111; meet also Taylor, 159–61; Sapiro, 91–92.
  59. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 169.
  60. ^ Jones, 45; see also Taylor, 218–nineteen; Sapiro, 91–92.
  61. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 311; Kelly, 132–33.
  62. ^ a b Kelly, 109.
  63. ^ Kelly, 113–14; Taylor, 51–53.
  64. ^ Taylor, Barbara (2004). "Feminists Versus Gallants: Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain" (PDF). Representations. 87: 139–141. doi:10.1525/rep.2004.87.i.125 – via JSTOR.
  65. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 162.
  66. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 163.
  67. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 111–12.
  68. ^ Kelly, 109ff; Sapiro, 207–208.
  69. ^ Kelly, 118ff; Sapiro, 222.
  70. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 158; Sapiro, 126.
  71. ^ Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 165; Taylor, 159–61; Sapiro, 124–26.
  72. ^ Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Collected Messages of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd. New York: Penguin Books (2003), 193–94.
  73. ^ Macdonald and Scherf, "Introduction", 23 and Mellor, 141–42.
  74. ^ Mellor, 141–42.
  75. ^ Macdonald and Scherf, Appendix C.
  76. ^ Sapiro, 30–31.
  77. ^ Janes, 293; Sapiro, 28–29.
  78. ^ Taylor, 25; run across also, Janes, 293–302; Wardle, 157–58; Kelly, 135–36; Sapiro 28–29.
  79. ^ Mellor, 143–44 and 146.
  80. ^ Mellor, 147.
  81. ^ Mellor, 153.
  82. ^ a b Gordon, 154
  83. ^ Adriana Craciun, Mary Wollstonecraft's a Vindication of the Rights of Adult female: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 2002, 2).
  84. ^ "Introduction". The Unsex'd Females. University of Virginia Electronic Texts Centre. 1994. Retrieved 28 Nov 2021.
  85. ^ Pennell, Elizabeth Robins p351, Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884).
  86. ^ Mellor, 145; Taylor, 27–28.
  87. ^ Mellor, 155; Taylor, 30–31.
  88. ^ Mellor, 156.
  89. ^ Quoted in Sapiro, xxx.
  90. ^ Gordon, 521
  91. ^ Kaplan,"Mary Wollstonecraft's reception and legacies".
  92. ^ Woolf, Virginia. "The Four Figures Archived 3 Apr 2007 at the Wayback Machine". Retrieved 17 February 2007.
  93. ^ Hirsi Ali, Ayaan. Infidel. New York: Free Press (2007), 295.
  94. ^ Schneir, Miriam (1972). Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. Vintage Books.
  95. ^ Warnock, Gabrielle (1998). The Silk Weaver. Galway: Trident Printing Ltd. p. 160. ISBN1900724197.
  96. ^ James, P.D. (2011). Death comes to Pemberley. Faber and Faber. p. 134. ISBN9780571283583.

Bibliography [edit]

Modernistic reprints [edit]

  • Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. 7 vols. London: William Pickering, 1989. ISBN 0-8147-9225-1.
  • Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Vindications: The Rights of Men and The Rights of Woman. Eds. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Toronto: Broadview Literary Texts, 1997. ISBN 1-55111-088-1
  • Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. Miriam Brody Kramnick. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004. ISBN 0-xiv-144125-9.
  • Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. Deidre Shauna Lynch. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009. ISBN 0-393-92974-4.
  • Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-521-43633-8.

Contemporary reviews [edit]

  • Belittling Review 12 (1792): 241–249; thirteen (1792): 418–489.
  • Christian Miscellany 1 (1792): 209–212.
  • Critical Review New Series 4 (1792): 389–398; 5 (1792): 132–141.
  • General Magazine and Imperial Review half dozen.two (1792): 187–191.
  • Literary Magazine and British Review viii (1792); 133–139.
  • Monthly Review New Serial 8 (1792): 198–209.
  • New Annual Register 13 (1792): 298.
  • New-York Magazine 4 (1793): 77–81.
  • Scots Magazine 54 (1792): 284–290.
  • Sentimental and Masonic Magazine 1 (1792): 63–72.
  • Town and Country Magazine 24 (1792): 279.

Secondary sources [edit]

  • Barker-Benfield, G.J. The Civilization of Sensibility: Sex and Club in Eighteenth-Century United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ISBN 0-226-03714-2.
  • DeLucia, JoEllen. "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman". The Literary Encyclopedia, Volume 1.2.1.06: English Writing and Culture of the Romantic Period, 1789-1837, 2011.
  • Gordon, Lyndall. Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Keen United kingdom: Virago, 2005. ISBN 1-84408-141-9.
  • Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature one. London: John Noon, 1739. Retrieved 19 May 2020.
  • Janes, R.M. "On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft'south A Vindication of the Rights of Woman". Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 293–302.
  • Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ISBN 0-226-40184-seven.
  • Jones, Chris. "Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications and their political tradition". The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Claudia Fifty. Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-78952-4.
  • Kaplan, Cora. "Mary Wollstonecraft'southward reception and legacies". The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Claudia 50. Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge Academy Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-78952-4.
  • Kaplan, Cora. "Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Grade and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism". Sea Changes: Essays on Civilisation and Feminism. London: Verso, 1986. ISBN 0-86091-151-nine.
  • Kaplan, Cora. "Wild Nights: Pleasance/Sexuality/Feminism". Sea Changes: Essays on Civilization and Feminism. London: Verso, 1986. ISBN 0-86091-151-ix.
  • Kelly, Gary. Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: St. Martin's, 1992. ISBN 0-312-12904-ane.
  • Mellor, Anne K. "Mary Wollstonecraft'due south A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the women writers of her day". The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Claudia L. Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-78952-4.
  • Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Author: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ISBN 0-226-67528-9.
  • Sapiro, Virginia. A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ISBN 0-226-73491-9.
  • Sunstein, Emily W. A Unlike Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. ISBN 0-06-014201-4.
  • Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-521-66144-seven.
  • Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An introduction. London: Methuen, 1986. ISBN 0-416-37720-3.
  • Wardle, Ralph M. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Printing, 1951.

External links [edit]

  • 1796 edition of Rights of Woman
  • Rights of Adult female at Project Gutenberg
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Woman public domain audiobook at LibriVox
  • Mary Wollstonecraft: A 'Speculative and Dissenting Spirit' by Janet Todd at world wide web.bbc.co.uk
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects From the Collections at the Library of Congress

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