Mary Wollstonecraft
Thinker · 1759-1797 · Politics, stage 3: Meet the thinkers
Argued that the apparent weaknesses of women were produced by their education and legal position rather than by their nature.
Overview
Mary Wollstonecraft supported herself as a teacher, translator and reviewer, and wrote in the middle of the revolutionary debate in Britain. A Vindication of the Rights of Men answered Burke's Reflections within weeks of its publication; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, two years later, extended the same argument to sex. Its case is that women denied education, property and legal standing are then blamed for the dependence those conditions produce, and that a society which trains half its members in decorative helplessness corrupts marriage, parenthood and public life together. She wrote as a republican and a rationalist rather than in the later vocabulary of feminism, and her argument turns on virtue and reason being the same thing in men and women, so that whatever education is good for one is good for the other. The Rights of Woman can be read directly; the introduction and chapters 2, 4 and 12 carry the core.
Where to start reading
A Vindication of the Rights of Men 1790
An immediate reply to Burke's Reflections, defending the revolution and attacking the argument from inherited institutions.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792
Her main work: an argument that women are made weak by their upbringing and legal position, and a case for educating them as rational beings.
Part of
Sources
- Mary Wollstonecraft Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Mary Wollstonecraft Wikipedia
