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The portrayal of women in 19th century literature
Mary wollstonecraft vendication of the rights of women
Mary wollstonecraft a vindication of the rights of woman
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During the weeks that we discussed The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless by Eliza Haywood we explored how naïve and simple Betsy was. Her character lacked a lot of qualities that we, as a class, felt would make her more likable. While exploring her shortcomings, we did not think to look at her with a different light. In the two excerpts one from Vindications of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft, and the other from Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze by Eliza Haywood, we see two very different ideals for women during the 18th century. The first explains how young girls should be brought in a rational and educational manner. The other is a 1700 erotica novella written to entertain young girls trained in the art of flirtation, wifey duties, and nothing more. By using these two portrayals of women one can argue that Miss Betsy Thoughtless had a more mature and rational disposition than what can be seen at first look. Fantomina is about a girl, fresh from the country, in town with no one to look after her. A dangerous fact for the time. As the story progresses you are swept into a world of flirtations, disguises, …show more content…
One of Wollstonecraft’s main progressive movement is to give women the same education as men. She states the irony in the belief, “that [women] should be created to enable man to acquire the noble privilege of reason, the power of discerning good from evil, whilst we lie down in the dust from whence we were taken, never to rise again.” Her writing expresses the absurd notion that a woman’s education is so small compared to men, and yet they, women, are expected to enable a man’s reason, and understanding of good and evil. How is that to happen, she asks, if women are only trained in the art of
The title character of Catharine Maria Sedgewick’s novel, Hope Leslie, defies the standards to which women of the era were to adhere. Sedgewick’s novel is set in New England during the 17th century after the Puritans had broken away from the Church of England. Hope Leslie lives in a repressive Puritan society in which women behave passively, submit to the males around them, and live by the Bible. They allow the men of their family to make decisions for them and rarely, if ever, convey an opinion that differs from the status quo. However, Hope Leslie does not conform to the expected behavior of women during that time, behavior that only further expressed the supposed superiority of males. Hope portrays behaviors and attitudes common in a woman today. Hope is capable of thinking for herself, is courageous, independent, and aggressive. Sir Philip Gardner describes Hope as having “a generous rashness, a thoughtless impetuosity, a fearlessness of the… dictators that surround her, and a noble contempt of fear” (211). In comparison to Esther Downing, Hope is the antithesis of what a young Puritan woman should be, and in turn, Hope gains a great deal of respect from the readers of the novel through her “unacceptable” behavior.
"This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves" (Wollstonecraft 63). Wollstonecraft made this statement in response to Roseau dictating that if society "[Educated] women like men..." (Wollstonecraft 63), and women would resemble the male sex, and then carry less power over men. Instead of succumbing to men, Wollstonecraft stressed how education could elevate a women to reach equal statue in society. Following similar ideas to the Tao Te Ching and the Art of War, Wollstonecraft serves education as a tool of discipline to women who can use it to help elevate them in society. Wollstonecraft points out in her introduction that, "One cause to [the problem of women sacrificing their usefulness and strength to beauty attributes] to a false system of education..." (Wollstonecraft 6), and how a reformation and push for women to better educate themselves and look past what is currently there will help them reach higher status in society; therefore giving them their own independence. As Wollstonecraft dictates, "It follows then, I think, that from their infancy women should either be shut up like eastern princes, or educated in such a manner as to be able to think and act for themselves (Wollstonecraft
After this obstacle in her life, Mary must decide whether to return to the husband she despises or follow the man she loves. Wollstonecraft expresses: “one moment she was a heroine, half-determined to bear whatever fate should inflict; the next, her mind would recoil – and tenderness possessed her whole soul” (1788: 46). Provided that Mary must now make important decisions in her life, she demonstrates that she is evolving into an independent woman. She has developed from being a sentimental eighteenth-century woman, which Wollstonecraft portrays in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, to speaking what she believes is true. She now incarnates the type of woman the feminist Wollstonecraft truly wants to characterize in her fiction. In other
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism. Ed. Carol H. Poston. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975.
The notion of constriction is evident throughout Kant and Wollstonecraft’s text as they discuss the psychological confinement people are placed in. Kant thoroughly explores the ‘immaturity’ of men that causes them to cower away and instinctively listen to authoritative individuals. He claims that it is difficult for men to escape immaturity because this has become a part of their “nature”, “fondness of this state” and incapability of acting freely without guidance (p.g 2,reader). Contrastingly, Wollstonecraft discusses the inequality women faced in society because of the perception. She further suggests that women can only be free from inequality if they are given the chance to receive proper education, which would deject the inferior perceptions that were imposed upon them. Although these writers individually represent a case of confinement throughout their respective texts, they both portray an idea of challenging a predicament that particular people
Mary Wollstonecraft believes that education in the European society needs to change and it should be what the national government is most concerned about because it will change how women will be viewed. Women are viewed as week, vain, and indolent, which is why society deems them not good enough to be educated. Girls did not receive the same education as boys and the two genders were not allowed to ...
Mary Wollstonecraft appeals to logic amongst her audience in order to promote the importance of individualism and education in
Women also took advantage of new literary forms as a way to politically participate in society. As female authors began to emerge, one in particular—Mary Wollstonecraft—gained significant influence. Wollstonecraft began responding to enlightened thinkers who argued that women should not receive a formal education in her best known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792). She argued that education is an integral aspect of advancement in society, thus, women should receive a formal education. Ultimately, Wollstonecraft’s ideologies can be considered as the foundations of modern day
The objective of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to examine why Wollstonecraft felt this quest into the genre of novel for the politics which she already had discussed at length in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)? The second strand of inquiry will be into the domestic ideas of despotism which arise from gender discrimination perpetuated by the state machinery, with the legal system, in particular. This second strand will envelope the prevalent issues like the legally disadvantageous position of married as well as maternal women and how the revolutionary bodies of these mothers are confined along with infliction of mental harassment by both private and state systems. The issue of the imprisonm...
“If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?” Mary Wollstonecraft articulated, responding to Voltaire.
When people think about the social situation of women in the eighteenth century, they immediately jump to the conclusion that women had no autonomy over themselves and that they were all only able to listen to the men in their lives. However, in Betsy Thoughtless by Eliza Haywood, she is able to show us that that notion was untrue and did not represent every women. Haywood shows the reader how women had a great deal more of choice in how their life was to play out, than is generally understood. In the novel, the reader is able to see how women had choices, even in situations where it might have seemed they had none.
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
The men of her society feel as though they are needed to guide women because they lack the mental capacity to have the proper morals on their own. Moreover, she argues that men try to keep women in a perpetual state of childhood, which she equates to weakness in the adult world. The greatest problem she observes arising from the obvious lack of equality is that men act as if they are tyrannous kings ruling over women, who, for all intents and purposes, are slaves to the wishes and beliefs of men. In order to prevent this, she proposes again that women be allowed to have better education so that their roles in men’s lives would be fundamentally changed. Wollstonecraft argues that in their current state, women are conditioned to act like infantrymen and blindly follow the orders of their husbands. In response to this, She suggests women be taught the ability to reason so that they are able to observe and analyze their existence and the world around them. She explains that in doing so, women will gain the proper intellect to be viewed by their husbands with respect rather than pity. The respect within marriage will ultimately allow the woman to be the friend of her husband instead of a childlike dependent. She also explains that this friendship will have a greater longevity than love because the woman and the husband will be able to derive
“Girls wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it is okay to be a boy; for a girl it is like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading” (McEwan 55-56). Throughout the history of literature women have been viewed as inferior to men, but as time has progressed the idealistic views of how women perceive themselves has changed. In earlier literature women took the role of being the “housewife” or the household caretaker for the family while the men provided for the family. Women were hardly mentioned in the workforce and always held a spot under their husband’s wing. Women were viewed as a calm and caring character in many stories, poems, and novels in the early time period of literature. During the early time period of literature, women who opposed the common role were often times put to shame or viewed as rebels. As literature progresses through the decades and centuries, very little, but noticeable change begins to appear in perspective to the common role of women. Women were more often seen as a main character in a story setting as the literary period advanced. Around the nineteenth century women were beginning to break away from the social norms of society. Society had created a subservient role for women, which did not allow women to stand up for what they believe in. As the role of women in literature evolves, so does their views on the workforce environment and their own independence. Throughout the history of the world, British, and American literature, women have evolved to become more independent, self-reliant, and have learned to emphasize their self-worth.
In Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women the need for one to be proactive in determining how virtuous their life becomes is quite prevalent. Throughout the work Wollstonecraft stresses the need for education based off of the society they live within (11), and through this education one will have the reason needed to be able to determine their own virtues. This type of education derives from continual practice of virtuous behavior until these actions no longer become exercise but habitual nature(11).This is the best example of what true freedom is: instead of being forced to follow a set rules, one is voluntarily setting rules for themselves based off of their own reasoning of what is right and wrong.It is only once one is capable to determine the outcome of their virtues, but chose to let fortune control their lives that it is seen a farce. This is also the opinion of