Mary Wollstonecraft:

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Do people have natural roles in society?

Background

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was a British Philosopher and advocate of rights, and perhaps most famously women's rights. Many of her early works were about education, especially the education of women. And this is a theme throughout all her work.

She published A Vindication of the Rights of Men in response to Edmund Burke's arguments against the French Revolution, but was very troubled by a report to the French National Assembly, written by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord in 1791. In it, he stated that women should only receive domestic education.

Let us bring up women, not to aspire to advantages which the Constitution denies them, but to know and appreciate 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 home is better for the education of women; they have less need to learn to deal with the interests of others, than to accustom themselves to a calm and secluded life.

—Talleyrand, "Rapport sur l'instruction publique", reprinted in A Vindication of the Rights of Women

To Wollstonecraft, this demonstrated extraordinary double-standards in a movement that was meant to be about universal rights.

She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.

She died aged 38, just 11 days after having given birth to her second child, Mary Shelley, who was to become the author of Frankenstein.

Till women are more rationally educated, the progress in human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.

—A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Ch. 3

The central argument

Wollstonecraft begins her book by pointing out the argument of people like Tallyrand are viciously circular. How can anyone say that women lack intellectual capacity if they are not given any opportunity to develop it?

Since women are considered incapable of participating in public life, there appeared to be no point in educating them for it.
But since they were not educated for it, they were incapable of participating in public life.

The consequence of this is that, even if it were true that women were naturally weaker (physically or mentally) than men, they become weaker still because of a lack of education and activity.

Wollstonecraft's challenge is this: educate women - see if your prejudice is true. If it isn't, how much are we losing by not educating women?

‘Should it be proved that woman is naturally weaker than man, from whence does it follow that it is natural for her to labour to become still weaker than nature intended her to be?’

She argued that women are suppressed by ideas which are ostensibly there to look after them.

Women are taught that their overring concern should be pleasure, so they're never given the opportunity to struggle with adversity and develop knowledge and 'ennoble' themselves. Instead, she argued, they are driven, not by reason by by emotions which do not prepare them to become good wives and mothers.

If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?

—A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Ch. 3

How can a rational being be ennobled by anything that is not obtained by its own exertions?

—A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Ch. 3

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

—A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Ch. 4

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish.

—A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Ch. 9

Discussion

Whilst A Vindication of the Rights of Women is obviously way ahead of its time, there are some elements of it that some might find reactionary. She is very critical, for example, of the wealthy women, saying that they didn't love their children, palming such work off on nannies and helpers. Instead, she thought they were only interested in pleasing their husbands. Wollstonecraft argued that women should breastfeed their children and take care of them because that's what nature intended, and if they didn't then they were not good women.

This is arguably problematic for two reasons. Firstly, she doesn't discuss the lives of poorer women who struggled a great deal. Secondly, she seems to have a very narrow view of what it means to bring up a child. Is breastfeeding so essential, is the use of nannies wrong? Is it fair to say that any woman who does not do these things is a bad mother?

Tasks

Explain Wollstonecraft's argument in A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
Discuss one possible objection to her argument.
Evaluate her argument.

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