A Vindication on the Rights of Women Wollstonecraft

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A Vindication on the Rights of Women  Wollstonecraft - Main Points


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In her essay, Wollstonecraft comes out against a society of men and women who live a life according to some conditioned beliefs.

She accuses the men for viewing women as a household being, valued only for their beauty. Then she accuses the women for being concerned about their beauty, and living a submissive according to the rules set by men.


In her initial chapters, Wollstonecraft launches an attack on men for making women as beings dependent on men. “The neglected education of my fellow creatures is the grand source of misery deplore”. The many books written by men have reduced. Women to their beauty and alluring mistresses than rational wives. Such books advice womenfolk not to engage in so called masculine life. It tells women how to make themselves presentable, table manners, how to please men - all things that do not facilitate the development of reason or thinking. And these have brainwashed women, making then think that being dependent on men is the right thing to do.


Women are considered weak and wretched and are not given the right resources to make them sensible, that is they are not made to fully bloom like a flower. The female sex is considered as women and not as part of the human species. 


"The male pursues, the female yields” is the law of nature. Wollstonecraft agrees that men are physically superior to women, but men endeavor to sink women still lower and consider females ae mere alluring objects, as a frivolous sex. The only way they can rise high in society is by their beauty and marriage.


Wollstonecraft demands that women ought to be educated and should be educated in order to fully function a rational being of reason. Even to be a good mother women need to be educated. She demands for a “revolution” in female manners, because women have been taught to amuse themselves with vanities and have never been encouraged  to curb their emotions.



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She wishes to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of taste, the delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste are almost synonymous with being who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love will soon become objects of contempt.


Wollstonecraft rejects romantic ideals and instead is in support of the ideals of enlightenment. She puts reason and sound logic as the force for the development of human beings.




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