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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

  • Dec 15, 2019
  • Mary Wollstonecraft
  • 521 responses.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Written during a time of great political turmoil social anxiety and against the backdrop of the French Revolution Wollstonecraft s argument continues to challenge and inspire This revised and expan

  • Title: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
  • Author: Mary Wollstonecraft
  • ISBN: 9780393929744
  • Page: 299
  • Format: Paperback

    • Written during a time of great political turmoil, social anxiety, and against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft s argument continues to challenge and inspire This revised and expanded Third Edition is again based on the 1792 second edition text and is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations Backgrounds and Contexts is also signifWritten during a time of great political turmoil, social anxiety, and against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft s argument continues to challenge and inspire This revised and expanded Third Edition is again based on the 1792 second edition text and is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations Backgrounds and Contexts is also significantly expanded and contains twenty four works organized thematically into these groupings Legacies of English Radicalism, Education, Wollstonecraft s Revolutionary Moment, and The Wollstonecraft Debate Opinions on a variety of reforms that may be compared and contrasted with Wollstonecraft s include those by John Milton, John Locke, Mary Astell, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Hannah More, Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin, among others Criticism includes six seminal essays on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Elissa S Guralnick, Mitzi Myers, Cora Kaplan, Mary Poovey, Claudia L Johnson, and Barbara Taylor.A Chronology of Wollstonecraft s life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

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    About "Mary Wollstonecraft"

    1. Mary Wollstonecraft

      Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth century British writer, philosopher, and feminist Among the general public and specifically among feminists, Wollstonecraft s life has received much attention than her writing because of her unconventional, and often tumultuous, personal relationships After two ill fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement they had one daughter, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty eight due to complications from childbirth, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts.During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children s book Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792 , in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.After Wollstonecraft s death, Godwin published a Memoir 1798 of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for a century However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft s advocacy of women s equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences.Information courtesy of

    521 Comments

    1. Wollstonecraft is not passionate; she does not offer any inspiring words or flowery language. Wollstonecraft writes with no embellishment or artistry; yet, her words are commanding and exceedingly persuasive because what she does have is cold, hard, logic. And she knows it. “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.” She [...]

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    2. OH MY GOD , this uncoventional, feminist woman is mother of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, who was one of my favorite author only after Rowling, Wilde, Plathc.?SHELLEY, you never tell me how cool your mother was!!! . I thought we were best friends.

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    3. Idly I wondered if to "kiss the rod" in the context of women's behaviour after being chastised by her husband was meant to be a double entendre - but probably not as she is high minded, but luckily I made my idle observation in a dejected off- hand way because later she says Respect for man, as man, is the foundation of every noble sentiment. How much more modest is the libertine who obeys the call of appetite or fancy than the lewd joker who sets the table in a roar! (p232), so shame on you if [...]

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    4. HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY TO EVERYBODY!"Make them free, and they will quickly become wise and virtuous, as men become more so; for the improvement must be mutual, or the injustice which one half of the human race are obliged to submit to, retorting on their oppressors, the virtue of man will be worm-eaten by the insect whom he keeps under his feet."Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (c. 1797)

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    5. Ce livre est un pamphlet politique britannique paru en 1792, en réaction aux débats de l'Assemblée Constituante en France quant à l'établissement de l'instruction publique, plus particulièrement un rapport de Talleyrand(view spoiler)[ (hide spoiler)] de l'année précédente invitant à écarter les femmes à l'accès aux fonctions publiques. Par là on néglige de les instruire, puisque cela serait parfaitement inutile et dispendieux. Mary Wollstonecraft(view spoiler)[ (hide spoiler)] s'e [...]

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    6. As convenient as it can sometimes be, a disadvantage of reading from anthologies is that one can graduate from college with the vague notion that one has read a work in its entirety, only to discover later that in fact one has read only a page and a half of it in a long-forgotten Eighteenth-Century British Literature class. Which, as you may have guessed, is exactly what happened to me with Mary Wollstonecraft's seminal 1792 treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. I'm happy to have rectif [...]

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    7. 3.5/5Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same.Sound familiar? The quote I started my review of Beauvoir's The Second Sex with runs in a similarly powerful vein, and is why I am, for the first time, rounding my half star up instead of down. When it comes to this work, one must mercilessly separate the wheat from the chaff if the aim is Wollstonecraft's spirit [...]

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    8. I imagine Mary ruffled a few feathers when this book was published in 1792, but she only said what needed to be said. Examples of the suppression of women were many, but Wollstonecraft chronicles the ones that were most important to her and provides an intelligent, common sense analysis of what needed to be done in each instance. One of the most important was education, and her belief that young girls needed and deserved the same type of education that was made available to young men. Progress h [...]

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    9. I particularly liked the bit where she said if women didn't get a proper education, they might find themselves "dependent on the novelist for amusement."Awkward.

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    10. “Make them free, and they will quickly become wise and virtuous, as men become more so; for the improvement must be mutual, or the injustice which one half of the human race are obliged to submit to, retorting on their oppressors, the virtue of men will be worm-eaten by the insect whom he keeps under his feet.”In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft had the guts and awareness to write a common sense response to the prevailing mentality of her day--that women did not share the same rights as men. Sadly, [...]

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    11. The eloquence of early feminists like Wollstonecraft simply delights me! To make her case for the proper education of women, Wollstonecraft asserts that the present state of women derives from acquired habit and learned associations — not from a fault of the innate nature of females — and censures both Milton's inconsistent discussions on the female sex in Paradise Lost as well as Rousseau's condescension of women in his work Émile. There are many instances when she appeals to the propounde [...]

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    12. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of WomanA brief introduction to a feminist classic. What is the Vindication?A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (hence the Vindication) is the classic feminist text. It was written in 1792, and it has its roots in the Enlightenment. Broadly, its aim is to apply the ideas of rights and equality to women and not just to men. This article will briefly explore the origins of the work of Wollstonecraft by looking at John Locke and Jean Jacques Roussea [...]

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    13. What a perceptive and courageous watershed work of feminism--especially for 1792! Mary Wollstonecraft, journalist, novelist, and wife of political philosopher William Godwin, eventually had three children, and died giving birth to the last, Mary Godwin Shelley, who would grow up to marry a famous, radical poet, and herself write Frankenstein and several other novels a generation later. Wollstonecraft, writing in the middle of the French Revolution, albeit in relative safety across the English Ch [...]

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    14. I stumbled upon A Vindication of the Rights of Woman for a classics challenge read, but I was also curious to read about the views of women’s rights long before it was even a movement. Mary Wollstonecraft was undoubtedly ahead of her time. Although she grew up in an unstable household and was denied education from an early age, she was an intellectual who loved to read and was interested in writing about political and philosophical issues. She decided to support herself by pursuing a career as [...]

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    15. Ótimo livro.Mary Wollstonecraft com certeza viveu a frente do seu tempo, seus questionamentos são pertinentes E necessários ainda em nossa época.Juro que quando um desavisado me perguntar novamente, "pra quê serve o feminismo" em nossa tão evoluída época (de grandes conquistas e realizações, quá quá), vou sugerir a leitura desse livro. Tivemos grandes mudanças em termos de direitos, SIM, mas a mudança que é necessária (e definitiva), é a mudança de mentalidade, e essa ainda est [...]

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    16. I've read a few feminist texts in the past, but none quite compare to this, which is often deemed as the classic feminist text. Unlike others which can be on the painfully dry and weary side of things, Wollstonecraft's attitude just jumps out at you with every page that you turn of this book. Reading it is like listening to her perform a speech in front of millions, it's so strong and passionate. It really is incredible when you remember that this was published in 1792, I don't think I've read a [...]

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    17. The language might be a little hard but i love this first piece of feminist literature, if only Rousseau didn't talk too much

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    18. I've had to give up on this one, the language isn't doing my dyslexic brain any good. I understand her intentions but by chapter 2 I was struggling to understand what she was saying with all the old way of speaking.

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    19. It has been 221 years since A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published. In that time women have come along way in a fast time, it could be said as muchWomen's suffrage movement in the UK began in 1872; the first woman to vote in Britian was 1867;in Ireland the Dublin Women's Suffrage Association was established in 1874; Women in Britian were given the vote in 1918 for women over the age of 30 and had property (which means wives of householders or wives who lived in a rent of over 5 pound [...]

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    20. 'A revolution in female manners [would] reform the world'Passionate, forceful, forthright, sharp, irritable, rigorous and oh so rational, what would Wollstonecraft think that over 200 years after her 1791 polemic we still have to argue about equal pay, body image, female aspiration, authorised social constructions of 'femininity' and 'masculinity' and other forms of politicised social and cultural inequality? Forging links between female subjugation and class oppression, between government tyran [...]

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    21. Mary Wollstonecraft was a 16th century mother, teacher, writer, philosopher, feminist, and journalist. She wrote several books and stood out as a rebel in her day. I HAD to read this book because of a college project. But after just the first page I understood why Mary stood out. She was a brilliant and fearless author. For my class I had to research the ways that women were treated in the 16th century as it related to the bravery of Wollstonecraft. Women HAD to be married in order to entertain [...]

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    22. Es un libro que se me ocurrio leer debido a que este tema esta más que presente en esta época, el feminimo. A pesar de ser un libro corto las primeras 100 hojas se hacen muy difíciles de llevar por la redacción (no por el léxico usado), y las 60 restantes parecen un parpadeo.Muchos de los tópicos que toca podrían considerarse ya superados, pero increíblemente la mayoría persisten (solo estan cubiertos). Más que nada la parte de la fragilidad y la imagen de la mujer. Una obra que nos re [...]

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    23. Five stars for Wollstonecraft's message: Females should be treated equally and all humans would be better off raised to value reason and modesty. Loved the energy and confidence. The writing style felt ornately oblique at times and perhaps suffered simply by following such a wonderful introduction written by Miriam Brody. So much of this is written as a response to Rousseau that I feel ill-equipped to say more given I'm not too familiar with him or his philosophy. But when have unfamiliarity or [...]

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    24. I read this nodding along and forcing myself to stop yelling "HELL YEAH" every two seconds. YOU TELL 'EM WOLLSTONECRAFT.

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    25. Główna teza tej książki - iż mężczyźni nie stanowią głównego, jedynego czy też w ogóle priorytetu kobiet - wciąż nie została przepracowana przez naszą kulturę.

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    26. In both the Preface and the Introduction, Wollstonecraft emphasizes what she sees as the root cause of the failure of men to treat women as equals. Men discourage women from achieving the same education that men routinely are given, and as long as women are denied this education, then they can never hope to achieve social and economic parity with men. In her opening remarks to Talleyrand, she is gently optimistic that her powers of persuasion will be sufficient such that he "will not throw my wo [...]

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    27. There's much to like in Wollstonecraft's writing, which is surprisingly modern in some aspects, but there are times where she does stumble and show her biases, especially regarding the lower classes. She's a daughter of the Enlightenment era, so she pays special attention to rational arguments and mental faculties, disregarding the previous sensibilities and overblown emotionality. I found her cutting remarks about other author's ideas delightful at times, since she's not afraid to call bullshit [...]

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    28. This was an important, sometimes interesting and often tedious short read. Perhaps ahead of its time. Or perhaps other (would be?) enlightened women of the time simply didn't have the resources to voice their thoughts the way Wollstonecraft was privileged to be able to. I'm growing increasingly unsure about the personal value to me of reading non-fiction classics in general. I don't often feel like I've gained that much (new understanding or enjoyment) and the sense "oh that was interesting" ten [...]

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    29. This was a difficult read: it was clear that it needed editing, there were many of the same sentiments and points re-hashed again and again and, because this was written in the 18th century, the unusual sentence structure made it a slog to read. To be fair, I did find out that she published this quickly, knowing full well it needed editing and intending to get to it later and re-publish it again--but she never did as she passed at a young age a few days after giving childbirth.Her sentences are [...]

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    30. At its core Vindication is a response to 18th century theorists (mostly men) who made some very disturbing comments regarding the education, use, and ideal of women. Wollstonecraft writes back to these theorists, both directly addressing their words and positing her own theories. The work is intellectually challenging, thought-provoking, and revolutionary (but best served in small bites).Vindication, at least in the translation I have, is not an easy read. The diction is downright imposing, gran [...]

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