Wollstonecraft's Oppression Of Women

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Wollstonecraft begins her treatise with setting out her view that the one which is greatly to be blame for the condition of the adult women is the neglect-ion of girl’s education. Women are treated as subordinate beings who are only concerned about being attractive, meek and elegant or in other word, they are only concerned about beauty. They buy into this oppression, and they have no tools to vindicate their vital rights or the awareness that they are in such a condition.

Because of that condition wherein women have no capabality to protect themselves, Wollstonecraft promotes reason and rationality and discusses the negative effects of absolute, arbitrary political power and the vices related with riches and hereditary honors. Then, she details …show more content…

This results to the cultivation of themselves to be weak and artificial in order to appear pleasing to others. This is the reason why they seldom become independent, and they tend not to exercise reason. In the middle of her treatise, she mentioned about the position of Rousseau and Dr. Gregory that women, as the two men desire, should remain virtual slaves, preserved at home and should only be concerned with their natural character as being modest, chaste and beautiful. Also, Wollstonecraft presented that women are taught to pamper their emotion; as a result, they have unhappy marriages because of the unsustained passion. Because of this condition, Wollstonecraft claims that in terms of virtue, virtue should not be relative to gender since both men and women were created by God and both have souls. They have the similar kind of propensity to exercise reason and nurture virtue. And, as for the situation of females being bound at home and their inability to participate in the pubic sphere, for Wollstonecraft, is not natural and results in insipidness and pettiness of women. She stated also that reason and common sense are usually ignored in favor of emotion, and young females are taught very early to concern themselves

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