Wollstonecraft Mother

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Wollstonecraft believes that women need to become better wives and mothers. The role of mother and wife is valued because it is a duty and therefore carries with it the recognition of citizenship. Yet it is a role that places woman strongly in the family and therefore carries a very specific set of identity options. Wollstonecraft envisioned the ideal family to which the man returned home in the evening and in which the woman tended to the needs of the children as well as those of her husband; her role was to be a comfort to him and to satisfy his needs. Together they should form a perfect whole. She should be nurturing yet educated enough to understand his cares and worries in the public sphere and her existence should complement his. The …show more content…

The mother provided the earliest example of how to be dutiful, virtuous and of how to submit to reason, and this was her aim: ‘She lives to see the virtues which she endeavoured to plant on principles, fixed into habits, to see her children attain a strength of character sufficient to enable them to endure adversity without forgetting their mother’s example’ (Wollstonecraft [1792] 1995b: 57). Watching her children develop this character should be a source of great satisfaction for a mother. However, Wollstonecraft maintains that some women, privileged and wealthy women, were a danger to the project of child-rearing. These women failed to cultivate their own faculty of reason because their lives consisted of ‘the pursuit of pleasure’ . Without sufficient reason and living a life in which they had ‘every extrinsic advantage’ (Wollstonecraft [1792] 1995b: 51), they knew little of reason and had been ‘educated for dependence’ (Wollstonecraft [1792] 1995b: 54) and also lacked bodily strength, exhibiting ‘lovely weakness’ (Wollstonecraft [1792] 1995b: 43). This made them dependent on men for themselves and rendered them incapable of educating their children sufficiently . These women were also accustomed to having their every whim catered for and exercised ‘arbitrary authority’ (Wollstonecraft [1792] 1995b: 178). This did not fulfil the criteria for

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