ABSTRACT
Writing her best known treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, at the close of the eighteenth century, Mary Wollstonecraft regrets the inequality of human beings, which characterizes the decaying aristocracies of her time. “After considering the historic page, and viewing the living world with anxious solicitude, the most melancholy emotions of sorrowful indignation have depressed my spirits, and I have sighed when obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial” (VRW, 7). Wollstonecraft laments that women, in particular, are degraded by this inequality. “The conduct and manners of women . . . prove their minds are not in a healthy state; for like flowers planted in too rich soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty” (VRW, 7). Wollstonecraft condemns their education as the reason for women’s “weak and wretched” condition. “One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false sense of education, gathered from books written by men on this subject who, considering females rather as women than human, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers” (VRW, 7). Preferring beauty to brains, these men have discouraged women from more noble pursuits. Aware of the power their beauty affords women, they are complicit in their own corruption. The women of her day, Wollstonecraft laments, are willing to neglect their human qualities in order to make themselves pleasing as females. Woman, is a “half-being” or “a wild chimera” (VRW, 39). Considering women as “human creatures,” as well as females, would restore their dignity to them. In the Vindication, Wollstonecraft is seeking a way to combine the female and the human in order to fulfill her utopian dream: a woman who is both an “affectionate wife and a rational mother,” a woman who enjoys independence and equality to her husband.
