A Vindication of the Rights of Women

I have an opposite viewpoint than that of many of my classmates-- I actually enjoyed the chapter written by Mary Wollstonecraft. It was long and difficult, but I enjoyed what was said. It was a reading that I wouldn't have chosen to pick up on my own, so I'm glad it was assigned. I was surprised to see that the fight for women's rights wasn't something that started with the fight for suffrage, and that it was a topic written about in 1792. Wollstonecraft talked about how it was common at the time for women to be forced to act a certain way to "obtain the protection of a man." One of the reasons I enjoyed this reading is because it shows how people used to think and the way society used to be. I think similar things are done today. Not to quite the same extreme, and women have a lot more rights now than they did back then, but certain expectations are definitely still placed on them. And while they aren't the same expectations that were present in the 1790s, I believe they are just as high. Women are expected to act a certain way, wear certain clothes, and even talk a certain way so they are "accepted" by society. And while there is more freedom for women now those expectations are still unfair. They hold back women from being truly independent. 

The easiest way to hold back a society is by limiting the education of women, and I really enjoyed how the reading talked about it. It said the perfect education was one used to "strengthen the body and form the heart." I don't entirely understand what Wollstonecraft meant by it, but I really like the way it sounds. It was interesting that Wollstonecraft said that authors like Rousseau had created a step back for the progress of women's education by the way they wrote about it. She believed that those trying to help were only making things worse by making women "more artificial, weak characters, than they otherwise would have been." I wonder if the writing by Wollstonecraft made things better or worse for women of this time.