A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Apart from Class ridden snobbery condemming working classes to manual work and paying attention to current social mores, Wollestonecraft makes a reasoned case for women to shove off the fripperies of womanhood and get into some solid educational DIY.
Her thesis is a woman is a better wife etc if she is educated rather than an uneducated bimbo who is more concerned with the latest fashion than by the state of her brain. I think this holds true.
Well worth reading, well written and an easy read in comparison to other philosophy texts. ( )

Upon my third dedicated attempt to read The Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft, I loved it! I was in the right mood to read it, and I gave myself a fixed block of time to get started in it.

Wollstonecraft’s prose is rather dense, and she is arguing against Rousseau’s comments and philosophies, which were unfamiliar to me. She seems to me to repeat herself. And yet, much of what Wollstonecraft argued resonated with me. I also loved her bits of sarcasm. Except, given her era, I’m certain she did not intend it to be funny. She’s completely serious.

More thoughts on my blog
One read of this long essay is certainly not enough. I’ll have to read it again in the future to expand on other insights, especially given that my own notes of this read were lost.

This is a valuable tool for understanding late 18th century thought, and how a real live woman ahead of her time framed her opinions on the rights and education of women long before modern feminism. ( )

This is often called the first major feminist text, in some ways I actually think it is the first "equalist" text. She is answering some of the male thoughts on women in the Eighteenth century. In this book Wollstonecraft argues for the right of girls to be educated alongside boys, taught to the best of their abilities not just "trained" to be wives.

Not an easy read unless you are familiar with the Eighteenth century style of writing. Some words have veered away from the meanings as used and the context is two centuries away from modern time. But get beyond that and what she has to say is as valid now as it was then. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1702882.html

One of those classic political texts which everyone should read, written in the revolutionary moment of 1792, and making the daring argument that women should be educated rather than infantilised, indeed, boys and girls should be educated together. Many of her arguments are unfortunately still valid; her analysis of power and oppression is pretty acute, and must be one of the earliest examples of applying arguments about socieo-economic equality to gender relations. I was interested that she clearly has a great deal of respect for Talleyrand, who I'd always thought of as wily statesman rather than advanced political thinker in his own right, which may just show my ignorance.

I was startled by a line in the introduction by Pamela Frankau, who writes that "with feminism we are surely done. It went out - didn't it? - some twenty-five years ago." This was written in 1954. I'm glad to say that a second reading (not sitting in the warm sunshine) reassured me that she was being ironic. ( )