Women In Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women?

In Mary Wollstonecraft 's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, she contemplates the subordinate role of women in society and the many factors, natural and artificial, that contributes to this inequality of power among the sexes. She advocates for the equal playing field of education. Women are only educated to the degree of what is seen as useful to what is considered their natural, sexual character. She says virtue cannot be held to different standards or criteria because that would make virtue relative. Although there are obvious differences and physical inequalities between the sexes, these cannot make one sex superior to the other because what truly sets mankind apart from other brute creatures is our ability to reason. All of mankind

However, it is quality of education that either facilitates the flourishing or suppression of reason. For women, their limited education, enforced by men, suppresses their reason and only encourages feminine virtues, this creates the illusion that frivolity and agreeableness are their only natural interests. They serve only as companions to men, as objects of desire, and as the vessels for carrying offspring. These assumptions are incorrect and are based on insufficient evidence. Wollstonecraft looks to reveal that the natural inequalities of the sexes, should they exist, can only be truly established on the equal playing grounds of education. You cannot effectively oppress, create a relationship based wholly on dependence and judge the behavior of the subordinate group of people as their natural inclination. Wollstonecraft doesn 't shy away from the visible evidence that would lead to the conclusion that, in society, men posses superior qualities to women. She feels that she is “obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world

If the concern is that, if given equal forms of education as men, women will not perform their given domestic roles then this fear is easily rebuked. If their true roles are merely domestic, then if given higher education, they will just perform better at what truly interested them naturally. If given the resources to develop her rationality towards pure virtue, she will be virtuous rather than just appearing virtuous. Women are “kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence” (Wollstonecraft, 51). This shallow form of “innocence” reveals that these women aren 't virtuous at all. They are merely alluring in manners. Wollstonecraft urges, “let it not be concluded that I wish to invert the order of things” (Wollstonecraft, 55). She isn 't looking to destroy the nuclear family, or to hurt the odds of men and women having good and healthy marriages. Equal education would only improve these roles and relationships, and the idea that not facilitating the growth of female rationality keeps the order of things in some sort of perfect balance is false. The marriages that lack virtuousness from either party often include a woman who 's only conduct and manner are the taught superficial ones, and “The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams, and they cannot have much effect on her husband 's heart when they are seen everyday, when summer is passed and