ABSTRACT
Separated by almost a hundred years, Mary Asteli and Mary Wollstonecraft give us a common portrait of the position of women in the world and a common sense of the limitations imposed upon the women of the relevant classes. No sketch could be more familiar than that they provide. For Mary Wollstonecraft, afflicted with the same dissatisfaction with women's opportunities and artificially induced limitations of character, the discovery of a solution to the problem with women took a very different form and much longer to find. While Asteli's works begin with a Proposal and decline to Reflections, Wollstonecraft begins with desultory Thoughts and ends with a Vindication. In the early and innocuous Thoughts on the Education of Daughters Wollstonecraft gives us most of the topics and the main lines of the position that will be developed at more length and within a different structure five years later in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
