Summary Of A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman By Mary Wollstonecraft

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It is widely assumed that the 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' by Mary Wollstonecraft was received by the wider public with shock, horror and division when it was first distributed in 1972 and that forces of conservative society amassed against her bold attempt to promote equality of women. However the reception was intact illuminated a critical moment in historical transformation in the status of women, Wollstonecraft passionately pushed forwards with her agenda of women's education, taking head on educationists who actively blocked female learning opportunities (Janes 1978, p.293). As Poonacha (2016 p.426-427) highlights Wollstonecraft pushed her agenda alongside those of the Enlightenment theory being discussed at the idea, she distinguishes …show more content…

As McIntosh-Varjabe´dian (2013, p.154) discusses during the years of the French Revolution radical thinkers addressed one main question, do times and customs set a legal precedent? Wollstonecraft was caught between her optimism for the advent of a new era and her own pessimism for history, she epitomized the political uneasiness of the French Revolution to advance her ground breaking feminist and social agenda. Wollstonecraft herself noted that "it is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to them their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world" (Wollstonecraft 1792). Opponents of her thinking such as Rousseau at the time use the rhetoric of the Enlightenment to insist that the 'natural' woman belonged at home, in the private sphere not the public. When women sought a voice in the evolving political order within France and Britain the language and mechanisms were in order for immediate rebuttal, frustrating Wollstonecraft providing her with the perfect context to express her works (Hufton 1991,

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