What Is Wollstonecraft's Argument For The Emancipation Of Women

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At the heart of Wollstonecraft’s work is a call for change in the treatment of women based on the political nature of the family unit, thus her work takes on a feminist aim. Feminism as a critical theory seeks to address and reform society’s structural inequalities between gender (Philips, 1998). As such, Wollstonecraft’s work (1792) is essentially an appeal to a major tenet of feminism: equal opportunity. Rather than socializing girls from birth to the pursuits of pleasuring men, Wollstonecraft fervently believed that women should be able to cultivate their rational faculties through education, just as men are. She condemns the arbitrary authority assigned to men within the household – however, her argument stops short there. In other words, she does not argue for a complete overhaul of a patriarchal society that penetrates every aspect of life – representation in government, career prospects, private property rights and ownership, the struggle of working class women, and so forth – but primarily for the dynamic between husband and wife …show more content…

Although Wollstonecraft touches upon many themes crucial to both classical liberalism and feminism, this paper has evaluated how her politicization of the family unit reveals her work to not simply be informed by one theory or the other, but rather as a pioneering work in liberal feminism. Thus, through an analysis of Wollstonecraft’s politicization of the relationships within the family, this paper has argued how the lack of coherency with traditional theories of classical liberalism and feminism can be explained by the simple fact that the work is more appropriately deemed as an introduction to liberal feminism. Thus, contemporary debates on the theoretical foundations of Wollstonecraft can attribute her work as being fully informed by both theories subsequently creating the offspring theory of liberal

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