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Ethos
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a work of nonfiction, and it is considered a seminal piece of early feminist writing. Wollstonecraft intends to persuade her reader that women deserve the same civil rights as men, and her writing is therefore persuasive and succinct. The piece has an essay-like structure, and organizes its content around the tenets of her argument. Wollstonecraft’s work is a significant contribution to the world of political philosophy, especially feminist philosophy, and she is therefore clear in her aims. Because she organizes the essay around an argument, the piece builds toward a conclusion, and she intends to make her solution impossible to ignore. Her work therefore values information over description—a decision that she defends in the piece itself.
The piece reads as nonfiction in part because of how the argument is structured. Wollstonecraft presents the argument by laying out premises and then talking about their implications. She regularly locates her theoretical arguments in reality, thereby advocating for the weight of ideas and material circumstances. There is no story, and no distraction. The sense of momentum that she builds is part of what makes the piece both persuasive and focused. Her desire to prove the importance of properly educating women is imperative in the work itself; she is showing how well an educated woman might write about these issues. The longstanding influence of the work is proof of her success; she created a piece of Enlightenment-era feminist philosophy whose lessons and premises still ring true hundreds of years later.
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