Females According to Christina Rossetti and Mary Wollstonecraft
What is it that separates and elevates human beings from the rest of the animal world? It is the ability to logically explain an action, decision, or conviction; it is the capacity to reason. As Rousseau states, “Only reason teaches us good from evil” (Wollstonecraft 238). According to him, as well as countless other intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the exercise of reason men become moral and political agents. Of course, this Enlightenment theory does not include women. Rousseau declares his opinion of the female, “O how lovely is her ignorance!” (253) The woman is the man's fantasy, the man's student, the man's plaything. Controlled, contained, and defined by the man, the woman is inferior to him and thus, not human.
Eighteenth century writer and mother of female liberalism, Mary Wollstonecraft refutes this supposedly natural state of man being superior to woman in her treatise, "A Vindication of The Rights of Woman":
It is farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues
do not result from the exercise of reason... This was
Rousseau's opinion respecting men: I extend it to
women....till the manners of the time are changed...it
may be impossible to convince [women]that the illegitimate
power, which they obtain, by degrading themselves, is
a curse, and that they must return to nature and equality
...(239)
She proclaims the female to be equally capable of reason as the male. In order for the female to recognize and utilize this capability, society's males and females must alter their prejudicial definition of the feminine.
Wollstonecraft addresses the fema...
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...cquire virtues which they may call their own, for how can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?” (254) Indeed, it is only when the woman may call her skill, her experience, or her truth, all derived from reason, her own that she shall be independent. As Rossetti states, “Only my secret's mine...” (6). And, only when the societal norms change, shall the keeping of such a secret be by choice and not necessity.
Works Cited
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Women. The Longman
Anthology of British Literature. Vol 2A. Ed. David Damrosch. 2nd ed.
London: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 2003. 227-255.
Rossetti, Christina. “Winter: My Secret.” The Longman Anthology of British
Literature. Vol. 2B. Ed. David Damrosch. 2nd ed. London: Addison-Wesley
Educational Publishers, 2003. 1617.
Both Mary Wollstonecraft and Sor Juana de la Cruz are writers of the Enlightenment period, but they each approach women’s rights in a different way. While De la Druz was a Catholic nun from Mexico ad preferred to study and be alone, Wollstonecraft asserted women’s rights for all through publications directed at the masses. During the Enlightenment, people began to question old authoritative models like the Church. Our texts states, “thinkers believed inreason as a dependable guide. Both sides insisted that one should not take any assertion of truth on faith, blindly following the authority of others; instead, one should think skeptically about causes and effects, subjecting all truth-claims to logic andrational inquiry” (Puchner 92). Indeed,
She draws a picture of her equality to men by expressing her strength and hard-working efforts as she “ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me.” Again, following this statement, “Ain’t I a woman?” She rhythmically continues this pattern, making a claim to her equality she feels with males and then following it with the powerful question “Ain’t I a woman?”.
In examining how women fit into the "men's world" of the late eighteenth century, I studied Eliza Fenwick's novel Secresy and its treatment of women, particularly in terms of education. What I found to be most striking in the novel is the clash between two very different approaches to the education of women. One of these, the traditional view, is amply expressed by works such as Jean-Jaques Rousseau's Emile, which states that women have a natural tendency toward obedience and therefore education should be geared to enhance these qualities (Rousseau, pp. 370, 382, 366). Dr. John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters also belongs to this school of thought, stating that wit is a woman's "most dangerous talent" and is best kept a well-guarded secret so as not to excite the jealousy of others (Gregory, p. 15). This view, which sees women as morally and intellectually inferior, is expressed in the novel in the character of Mr. Valmont, who incarcerates his orphaned niece in a remote part of his castle. He asserts that he has determined her lot in life and that her only duty is to obey him "without reserve or discussion" (Fenwick, p.55). This oppressive view of education served to keep women subservient by keeping them in an ignorant, child-like state. By denying them access to true wisdom and the right to think, women were reduced to the position of "a timid, docile slave, whose thoughts, will, passions, wishes, should have no standard of their own, but rise, or change or die as the will of the master should require" (Fenwick, 156).
Wollstonecraft, Mary. “From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Class handout.
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Also obvious is her increasing frustration with the unnecessary limitations of femaleness. “For man and woman,” she maintained, “truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same...Women, I allow, may have different duties
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Wollstonecraft, Mary. “A Vindication of the Rights of Women with Structures on Political and Moral
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Feminism as an ideology has only really taken force since the late 18th century. (Fraser: 2014) In Mary Wollstonecra...
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Mary Wollstonecraft: the Mother of Modern Feminism Mary Wollstonecraft was a self-educated, radical philosopher who wrote about liberation, and empowering women. She had a powerful voice in her views on the rights of women to get good education and career opportunities. She pioneered the debate for women’s rights, inspiring many of the 19th and the 20th century’s writers and philosophers to fight for women’s rights, as well. She did not only criticize men for not giving women their rights, she also put blame on women for being voiceless and subservient. Her life and, the surrounding events of her time, accompanied by the strong will of her, had surely affected the way she chose to live her life, and to form her own philosophies.