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    A Study Guide for Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"
    A Study Guide for Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"
    A Study Guide for Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"
    Ebook41 pages39 minutes

    A Study Guide for Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Themes for Students: Race and Prejudice. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Themes for Students: Race and Prejudice for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781535817455
    A Study Guide for Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"

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      A Study Guide for Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" - Gale

      1

      A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

      Mark Wollstonecraft

      1792

      Introduction

      A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), by Mary Wollstonecraft, was published in London during the third year of the French Revolution and the fifth year of George Washington's presidency of the new United States of America. Responding to other writers who praised or attacked these antimonarchical uprisings, the tone of the book is by turn confrontational, instructive, harshly critical, sarcastically funny, idealistic, and visionary. Rooting her argument that women deserve an education equal to men's on the human duty to use God's gift of reason, Wollstonecraft set traditional gender roles on their ear. Though she states that she loves man as her fellow, she is clear that his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.

      Long cited as the fundamental text of Western feminism, the book continues to contribute to modern social thought in many ways. Wollstonecraft repeatedly makes the connection between slaves and Western womeneven those in the middle class. She delves into the psychology of the materially dependent to examine why women generally play along with the prejudices held against them. She links race-based chattel slavery to gendered bondage, exposing how masters of women benefit from creating a subhuman female to fulfill their designs. Referring to gendered oppression as slavery, she brings the nebulous woman question into the spotlight of civil and human rights and lifts to public awareness the relationship between public political systems (the divine right of kings) and private personal systems (the divine right of husbands).

      Wollstonecraft sought to improve philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712–1788) educational philosophy (the goal of education is to learn how to live) by leaps and bounds. Insisting that females had been created not merely to complement males, but with duties to carry out in public and spiritual realms, she urges that children of both sexes be taught to begin to think. Rather than viewing knowledge as something to acquire and own, she suggests a process fueled by life experiences, which would allow thinkers to reason though events and ideally arrive at the practice of moral virtue. This is a process of lifelong learning. She applied her own method throughout her life, hence her philosophy (consisting of seven published volumes) kept changing. For example, in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman emphasized the view that human sexuality that was meant to be short-lived

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