Hello! We're going to talk today about A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft. Let's begin by talking about why Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this book. So primarily this book argued for women to be educated. At this stage in history the only education that most women receive was domestic, meaning that they were educated.
on how to fulfill their tasks as wives and mothers. But beyond what happened in the sphere of their home life, women typically received no education. Next, the book wanted to dispute the essentialist ideas about women's nature. So if you remember from our terminology, essentialism is the idea that women, that all women at their very base and core have certain features. For example, that they are weaker or maternal or emotional.
And A Vindication of the Rights of Women disputes these ideas that women are inherently the lesser sex. The third purpose that the book addresses is to dispute all the conduct manuals that were so popular during this time. You read in class a few items from Renaissance Woman which included essays on how women were to be conducted in their marriages and how women were to be educated or more accurately not educated and these conduct manuals were everywhere and most of them were very oppressive to women so one of the purposes of Mary Wollstonecraft writing this book was to try to get people to stop using those and finally while this is not quite as much at the forefront, the book does want to free women from religious oppression.
So Wollstonecraft does address the issues that come up for women from biblical sources. For example, women not being able to be in positions of power, women being inherently guilty or prone to vice, as in Eve. So she does try to emphasize the fact that those religious viewpoints are harmful to women.
So these were the prevailing ideas of the day. Some of these we've already covered, but these were the essential things that Mary Wollstonecraft was fighting against. First of all, that women were inferior based on their physicality or disposition.
So quite a lot was made of the fact that women were smaller and physically weaker than men. and a lot of people saw that as an indication not only of what was on the outside, but that that reflected also what was on the inside. So if women were physically weaker, it followed that they must be mentally weaker as well.
As we said before, there's the idea right now that women should only be educated in domestic subjects and that any kind of education outside of domestic subjects would basically lead women into evil. So as you see here in the next point, there was the idea that women were inherently lustful or prone to excess. And so this arises from the Madonna-whore complex that we've addressed before. There's this idea that at their very cores, women are sort of lustful or easily tempted. And if we educate them beyond what they must know to run a household, it was believed they would fall even deeper into these vices to which they are naturally disposed.
Number four here, we have this idea that women should never be in positions of authority. So during our reading of some biblical texts, you saw in 1 Timothy, I believe, the idea that women should never be allowed to teach specifically, but more broadly, be in any position of authority over a man. And so that's another thing that was based in religion but had quite a great deal of power over women in general during the time. And finally, as we've mentioned, we have this idea that women's original sin is based with Eve and that Eve and her temptation accounts for women's essential inferiority and sinfulness. So here's how Mary Wollstonecraft responds to each of these kind of norms of the day.
So first of all, she says that educated women equals better society in general. So she says, you know, the women are the ones who are going to be raising the children, so if you educate women, you're going to get better children. You'll have more educated members of society to decide on public policy and those kinds of things. So there's really no downside, she says, to educating women.
Next, she says that women should not be treated like children. So there is a running theme throughout human history and literature of women being infantilized, meaning that they are treated by men the same way that children are, as incapable of making their own decisions. as incapable of knowing what's best for themselves.
And this is going to continue long after the Renaissance as well, but Mary Wollstonecraft says we should really stop this right now because women are adults and complete people just like men are. She says, My own sex, I hope, will excuse me if I treat them like rational creatures instead of flattering their fascinating graces and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. So many men treated women like children as kind of a backhanded compliment.
Like they might say, oh, they're too gentle and delicate to be concerned with these adult matters. So the men would maybe even believe that they were paying the women a compliment, but essentially they were keeping them from adult society. Um, next, Wollstonecraft addresses this idea that if women are inherently sinful or excessive or prone to addictions. She doesn't dispute that that might be true, but she says if those things are true of women, it's men's fault. So she says, slaves and mobs have always gone to excesses in that way once they have broken loose from authority.
The bent bow straightens with violence when the hand that is forcibly holding it is suddenly relaxed. So she says if women are behaving badly it's because you have basically kept them as slaves for so long that the minute they get a taste of freedom they act a little bit wild but she says this is part of human nature if you've kept people so suppressed for such a long time of course they're going to behave a little bit extravagantly when they get a taste of freedom. Next she says if women are shallow it's because they're forced to be.
So again one of the Faults levied against women by men was that they were shallow and therefore not really equipped to participate in matters of any kind of importance and Mary Wollstonecraft says well if that's true then that's because that's how you forced us to be or how you raised us to be She says taught from their infancy that beauty is a woman's scepter meaning power The mind shapes itself to the body and roaming around its guilt cage only seeks to adorn its prison. So women are often accused of being shallow, of being obsessed with clothes, beauty, cosmetics, that sort of thing. And Mary Wollstonecraft says, well, what choice did you give us?
If you keep us in this kind of prison, then all we can do to stay sane is to embody it and try to decorate ourselves. So she says, Absolutely we're shallow but it's because you've given us absolutely no other alternative. Finally, she kind of appeals to the men's selfish natures by saying that if you allow women to better themselves and you allow them to be educated, it's naturally going to benefit you as well.
She says make them free and they will quickly become wise and virtuous as men become more so. So she says if you educate women, you're going to have just as good a result as when you educate men. For the improvement must be mutual, or the injustice which one half of the human race are obliged to submit to, retorting on their oppressors, the virtue of men will be worm-eaten by the insect whom he keeps under his feet.
So she says if you only educate half of the populace, if you only educate men, then women are little better than insects or worms, and they cannot not only can they not support men, but they actually will be kind of a detriment to men. They are these worm-eaten insects under the men's feet. And so if we educate women, then they will not only be, or rather, they won't be a hindrance to men, but will in fact be a benefit. So these were kind of the central ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft at the time and keep in mind that these were very radical ideas.
Mary Wollstonecraft was one of our first sort of documented feminists and this book of hers, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, caused quite a stir when it was released. However, now in our contemporary time many of our kind of feminist treaties are drawn from Wollstonecraft's origins. So we can't underestimate the power of this early work of feminism.
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