ABSTRACT
In fact, the view of marriage which emerges from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is one based on friendship as opposed to love, companionship as opposed to passion, and common sense and trust rather than the vicissitudes of physical attraction and emotional yearning. A society which would foster men and women who aspired to that kind of relationship was clearly very far removed from the reality of eighteenth-century commercial society, even outside France. To be sure, the Vindication of the Rights of Men and the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1790 and 1792 respectively, are not likely to provoke late twentieth-century European readers in the way they did their intended audience in the late eighteenth century. But the contradictions in her thought which come to light as a result of reading the works which followed her Vindication of the Rights of Woman are potentially more interesting than some of her clear-cut pronouncements.
