A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Themes

In the late eighteenth-century treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft agrees with some of her contemporaries that women do not seem to attain the same level of virtue as their male counterparts. However, she determines that this deficit is not due to some inherent weakness in women, but rather to the inadequate system of education that most middle-class English girls are subjected to. Wollstonecraft argues that women are typically only…

Throughout A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft is often concerned with unequal relationships between men and women, including in marriage. Though she doesn’t ignore questions surrounding male virtue, she devotes more attention to the inadequate moral training which, she believes, leaves women ill-prepared to find worthy husbands and to build enduring marriages and families. What’s more, she argues that these weak families and unhappy marriages are in fact destructive for society as…

Wollstonecraft laments that, while men are generally prepared for professions, women “have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties,” and, in fact, they are encouraged throughout their lives to be “ever anxious about secondary things…instead of being occupied by duties.” Even those duties which society views as inherently feminine—like motherhood—suffer as a result of this attitude. To remedy this societal malaise, Wollstonecraft argues that women must be oriented toward meaningful things throughout their lives. This…