Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women

Throughout history, women have been oppressed and seen as subservient to men. Gender differences denied women the right to education, among many factors that men had. Women lived their lives to be wives and mothers while men went to school, held careers, interests passions and individual lives outside of the homes women so rarely left. Mary Wollstonecraft expressed her abhorrence for this injustice in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Later in the same year of 1792, Anna Barbauld responded by attacking Wollstonecraft with her “The Rights of Woman.” Both women present a clear, though opposing argument allowing the reader further insight of the oppression plaguing women in the late eighteenth century.
At the time Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, females were extremely limited in their education, careers and life choices. Women were educated in coquettish arts such as to sing, paint, and play music, or essentially to entertain. Their careers were limited to servants, nurses, wives and the like and they often did not choose for themselves what became of their lives (Lecture PowerPoint). Wollstonecraft, was understandably angered by these

A more adequate education for women would be more advantageous in a myriad of aspects. She argues that either women and men are too fundamentally different, or society has been very biased towards the latter (Wollstonecraft 213). If men and women are found to be the same, they should be educated equally. Wollstonecraft did not want to reverse social order by making women more powerful than men. She merely wanted women to have a proper education they deserved (Wollstonecraft 223). Wollstonecraft wanted to inspire and persuade women to seek physical and mental strength as this along with education would make them better wives, mothers, patrons to society, and