a vindication of the rights of woman book

She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.Īfter Wollstonecraft's death, Godwin published a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for a century. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight due to complications from childbirth, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts.ĭuring her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement they had one daughter, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Among the general public and specifically among feminists, Wollstonecraft's life has received much more attention than her writing because of her unconventional, and often tumultuous, personal relationships.

Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth century British writer, philosopher, and feminist. The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.-One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than wives and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.

I have turned over various books written on the subject of education, and patiently observed the conduct of parents and the management of schools but what has been the result?-a profound conviction that the neglected education of my fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore and that women, in particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes, originating from one hasty conclusion.

A vindication of the rights of woman book