A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects is a 1792 essay by British philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. It is considered a feminist or, more precisely, proto-feminist piece, and one of the pioneering works in the tradition now known as feminist philosophy.
In this essay, Wollstonecraft refutes those educational and political theorists of the eighteenth century who did not believe women should receive a full education. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives. Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men. Wollstonecraft specifically calls for equality between the sexes in particular areas of life, especially moral responsibility and educational access. Uncertainty regarding whether she believed women should have full voting rights or other political rights make it difficult to classify Wollstonecraft definitively as a modern feminist; furthermore, the word feminist did not emerge until decades after her death.
A spiritual sequel to Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Rights of Woman was inspired after she read Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord's 1791 report to the National Assembly in revolutionary France, which stated that women should only receive a domestic education. From her reaction to this specific event, she launched a broad attack against double standards, indicting men for encouraging women to indulge in excessive emotion. Wollstonecraft hurried to complete the work in direct response to ongoing events; she intended to write a more thoughtful second volume but died before completing it.
The Rights of Woman was generally received well when it was first published in 1792. The modern assumption that it was unfavourably received is a misconception. In fact, Wollstonecraft was reviled only after details emerged of her personal life after her death, based on the publication of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). Biographer Emily W. Sunstein called Rights of Woman "perhaps the most original book of [Wollstonecraft's] century".Sunstein, 3. Wollstonecraft's work had a significant impact on advocates for women's rights in the nineteenth century, particularly the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention which produced the Declaration of Sentiments, laying out the aims of the women's suffrage movement in the United States.
Historical context A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written against the tumultuous background of the French Revolution and the debates that it spawned in Britain. In a lively and sometimes vicious pamphlet war, now referred to as the Revolution controversy, British political commentators addressed topics ranging from representative government to human rights to the separation of church and state, many of these issues having been raised in France first. Wollstonecraft first entered this fray in 1790 with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).Macdonald and Scherf, "Introduction", 11–12. In his Reflections, Burke criticized the view of many British thinkers and writers who had welcomed the early stages of the French revolution. While they saw the revolution as analogous to Britain's own Glorious Revolution in 1688, which had restricted the powers of the monarchy, Burke argued that the appropriate historical analogy was the English Civil War (1642–1651) in which CharlesI had been executed in 1649. He viewed the French revolution as the violent overthrow of a legitimate government. In Reflections he argues that citizens do not have the right to revolt against their government because civilization is the result of social and political consensus; its traditions cannot be continually challengedthe result would be anarchy. One of the key arguments of Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men, published just six weeks after Burke's Reflections, is that rights cannot be based on tradition; rights, she argues, should be conferred because they are reasonable and just, regardless of their basis in tradition.Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 43–44.
When Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord presented his Rapport sur l'instruction publique (1791) to the National Assembly in France, Wollstonecraft was galvanized to respond.Kelly, 107; Sapiro, 26–27. In his recommendations for a national system of education, Talleyrand had written: Let us bring up women, not to aspire to advantages which the Constitution denies them, but to know and appreciate those which it guarantees them... Men are destined to live on the stage of the world. A public education suits them: it early places before their eyes all the scenes of life: only the proportions are different. The paternal home is better for the education of women; they have less need to learn to deal with the interests of others, than to accustom themselves to a calm and secluded life.Talleyrand, "Rapport sur l'instruction publique", reprinted in Vindications, 394–395.
Wollstonecraft dedicated the Rights of Woman to Talleyrand: "Having read with great pleasure a pamphlet which you have lately published, I dedicate this volume to you; to induce you to reconsider the subject, and maturely weigh what I have advanced respecting the rights of woman and national education."Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 101. At the end of 1791, French feminist Olympe de Gouges had published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, and the question of women's rights became central to political debates in both France and Britain.
The Rights of Woman is an extension of Wollstonecraft's arguments in the Rights of Men. In the Rights of Men, as the title suggests, she is concerned with the rights of particular men (eighteenth-century British men) while in the Rights of Woman, she is concerned with the rights afforded to "woman", an abstract category. She does not isolate her argument to eighteenth-century women or British women. The first chapter of the Rights of Woman addresses the issue of natural rights and asks who has those inalienable rights and on what grounds. She answers that since natural rights are given by God, for one segment of society to deny them to another segment is a sin.Taylor, 105–106; Kelly, 107. The Rights of Woman thus engages not only specific events in France and in Britain but also larger questions being raised by political philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Sapiro, 182–184.
Themes The Rights of Woman is a long (almost 87,000 words) essay that introduces all of its major topics in the opening chapters and then repeatedly returns to them, each time from a different point of view. It also adopts a hybrid tone that combines rational argument with the fervent rhetoric of sensibility. Wollstonecraft did not employ the formal argumentation or logical prose style common to eighteenth-century philosophical writing.Kelly, 110.
Hysteria was once seen as a physical phenomenonphysicians and anatomists believed that the more "sensitive" people's "nerves", the more emotionally affected they would be by their surroundings. Since women were thought to have keener nerves than men, it was believed that women were more emotional than men.Barker-Benfield, 9. The emotional excess associated with sensibility also theoretically produced an ethic of compassion: those with sensibility could easily sympathise with people in pain. Thus historians have credited the discourse of sensibility and those who promoted it with the increased humanitarian efforts, such as the movement to abolish the slave trade.Barker-Benfield, 224. But sensibility also paralysed those who had too much of it; as scholar G. J. Barker-Benfield explains, "an innate refinement of nerves was also identifiable with greater suffering, with weakness, and a susceptibility to disorder".
By the time Wollstonecraft was writing the Rights of Woman, sensibility had already been under sustained attack for a number of years.Todd, Sensibility, 144. Sensibility, which had initially promised to draw individuals together through sympathy, was now viewed as "profoundly separatist"; novels, plays, and poems that employed the language of sensibility asserted individual rights, sexual freedom, and unconventional familial relationships based only upon feeling.Todd, Sensibility, 136. Furthermore, as Janet Todd, another scholar of sensibility, argues, "to many in Britain the cult of sensibility seemed to have feminized the nation, given women undue prominence, and emasculated men".Todd, Sensibility, 133.
Rational education One of Wollstonecraft's central arguments in the Rights of Woman is that women should be educated in a rational manner to give them the opportunity to contribute to society. In the eighteenth century, it was often assumed by educational philosophers and conduct book writers, who wrote what one might think of as early self-help books,Batchelor, Jennie. "Conduct Book." The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 14 May 2007. that women were incapable of rational or abstract thought. Women, it was believed, were too susceptible to sensibility and too fragile to be able to think clearly. Wollstonecraft, along with other female reformers such as Catharine Macaulay and Hester Chapone, maintained that women were indeed capable of rational thought and deserved to be educated. She argued this point in her own conduct book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), in her children's book, Original Stories from Real Life (1788), as well as in the Rights of Woman.Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 169ff; Kelly, 123; Taylor, 14–15; Sapiro, 27–28; 243–244.
Stating in her preface that "my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if [woman] be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue; for truth must be common to all", Wollstonecraft contends that society will degenerate without educated women, particularly because mothers are the primary educators of young children.Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 102; Sapiro, 154–155. She attributes the problem of uneducated women to men and "a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who [consider] females rather as women than human creatures".Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 109. Women are capable of rationality; it only appears that they are not, because men have refused to educate them and encouraged them to be frivolous (Wollstonecraft describes silly women as "spaniels" and "toys"Wollstonecraft, Vindications, 144.).Kelly, 124–126; Taylor, 234–237; Sapiro, 129–130.