A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Mary Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th century who believed that women should not receive a rational education. The word “feminist” did not emerge until decades after her death.
About A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in brief
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Mary Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th century who believed that women should not receive a rational education. She argues that women’s education ought to match their position in society, and that they are essential to the nation because they raise its children and could act as respectedcompanions to their husbands. While she does call for equality between the sexes in particular areas of life, especially morality, she does not explicitly state that men and women are equal. The word “feminist” did not emerge until decades after her death, and her work had significant impact on advocates for women’s rights in the 19th century, particularly the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention which produced the Declaration of Sentiments laying out the aims of the suffragette movement in the United States. The Rights of woman was generally received well when it was first published in 1792, but not as well as her earlier work on the rights of men, which was published just six weeks later. It was written against the tumultuous background of the French Revolution and the debates that it spawned in Britain. In her response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, she argued that rights cannot be based on tradition; rights, she argues, should be conferred because they are reasonable and just, regardless of their basis in tradition.
She was reviled during her lifetime as she became after the publication of William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindications of the Right of Woman. She intended to write a more thoughtful second volume but died before completing it. In his memoirs, Godwin writes that Woll stonecraft was as reviled as she was in her lifetime. The book was dedicated to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the author of the 1791 report to the French National Assembly, which stated that women only should receive a domestic education. 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, she writes. In the book, she also criticizes men for encouraging women to indulge in excessive emotion, indicting them for encouraging them to be too emotional. She also argues that treating them as mere ornaments or property for men undercuts the moral foundation of society. In. his recommendations for a national system of education, Charles Maurice De TalleyRandord had written: Let us bring up women, not to aspire not to advantages, but those which it guarantees. Public education denies them to know and appreciate the stage of the world. A.Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Stricture on Political and Moral Subjects: A suits them: it only suits them early places before their early life.
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