She also dismisses Fordyce’s sentimental sermons and Gregory’s rules of decorum. Her most detailed critique is of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argues that women only need to be educated inasmuch as it prepares them to serve men. Wollstonecraft specifically critiques several eighteenth-century writers on the subject of women’s education. This neglectful education also leaves them especially vulnerable if widowed, or if seduced and “ruined” by a man-situations in which they are left without any means to support themselves financially. Instead of learning to rely on reason, they’re allowed to be driven by emotions and delicate sensibilities, which do not prepare women to be good wives and mothers. They aren’t even prepared to build sustainable marriages or to care for their children effectively.īecause women are taught that pleasure is the overriding goal of their lives, they are never given the opportunity to struggle with adversity and thereby develop knowledge and virtue.

More often, they’re taught to please men, preparing themselves for only a brief period of life-that is, courtship and early marriage. But because women tend to be given a haphazard education, they are not given adequate opportunity to develop their reason and attain virtue. She believes that although men and women generally have different duties in life, they should strive for identical virtues. Wollstonecraft rejects the common argument that men and women should aim to acquire different virtues. In her critique of contemporary views of women’s education, Wollstonecraft looks primarily at middle-class women and considers them first as “human creatures … placed on this earth to unfold their faculties.” She bases her argument on the belief that reason is what makes people human, that virtue is what distinguishes people from one another, and that virtue is attained through knowledge. Women are taught that romance is the primary goal of their lives, and they are not encouraged to develop their reason or virtue. Her argument is that if women are not “prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue.” Wollstonecraft believes that the neglect of women’s education has caused great misery.

Mary Wollstonecraft writes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in response to French politician Talleyrand-Périgord’s pamphlet on national education.

Wollstonecraft a vindication