An Essay on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

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After reading from the excerpts of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman I have concluded that the situations of women, as far as rights are concerned, have indeed improved vastly. However, even though their situation has been amended and they are now afforded the same equal rights as men, not all women take advantage of these rights. A fraction of women still care more about their own physical beauty, appearance, and the prospect of finding a husband than anything else. Furthermore even, some of the more juvenile women will even occasionally go so far as to play dumb, thinking to attract the affection of men; while others get so self-obsessed with their appearance that they don’t even have to act in order to be received as dim witted or ditsy, and it is this minority of women who continue to hinder the role of women in society as a whole. Nonetheless, this does not mean that most women have not taken advantage of these rights, establishing themselves as equals to men within schools, at work, and in the home. In comparison to 1792, in which A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written by Mary Wollstonecroft, women’s rights have vastly improved. In the time of Wollstonecroft, women were unwittingly oppressed by men for years through lack of education and operant conditioning that taught them to be nothing more than attractive, elegant, and essentially the subordinates of men; making independent thoughts or the use of personal reason a scarce occasion among the women of the age. It is through this lack of education that most women of the era were unable to recognize the subservient roles that they were forced into; buying into the aristocracy of man, who called their ignorance “innocence”. Wollstonecroft, being one of few excepti... ... middle of paper ... ...elieve as we get older. If the twig is bent, the trees incline to grow in that way too. For example, by teaching our sons that they were better than our daughters, and teaching our daughters that they were meant to be pretty, elegant and subservient to men; then by means of a self-fulfilling prophecy, we made it true. However, if we teach them to be equals from birth, and that one is not better than the other; within a few generations the belief will become a societal norm. It is this change that needs to occur, before women will ever be regarded by all men as true equals of man, and not just equals on paper, otherwise the ignorance of men will always get the better of us, and some oaf of a man will always claim women are subservient to men though in reality there is no difference between us. Works Cited A Vindication on the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecroft

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