Love, Marriage and Mary Wollstonecraft

Paper Summary:

This paper focuses on author Mary Wollstonecraft's works of writing as well as her repeated feminist affirmations that both sexes have the same intellectual and moral capacity which, in the 18th century, was considered a radical point of view. The writer explores Wollstonecraft's famous feminist treatise "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" which was a sequel to her previous book "Vindication of the Rights of Men." This paper also discusses the author's private life. Wollstonecraft considered herself a moralist who totally believed in the institution of marriage. The writer of this paper discusses the contrast between her enthusiastic defense of chastity in her writing and her subsequent relationship which produced her daughter Fanny without the benefit of marriage, which created a furor after her death.

From the Paper:

"If the first Vindication took as its jumping-off point Burkeis views of the revolution in France, the second Vindication used Rousseauis views of the education of the ideal woman as her point of departure. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a French social philosopher and writer who had tremendous influence on revolutionary ideas in France, as well as on the whole Romantic movement. In his Emily, he had propounded his ideas on education and advocated encouraging the natural abilities of children and their unspoiled nature through the power of example, and leading it to natural development, an educational theory very much in opposition to the practices in his day. May Wollstonecraft, who herself had been actively involved in education, first having founded a short-lived school with her friend Fanny Blood and her sister Eliza, and then working as a governess to the daughters of the Viscount Kingsborough, was very much interested in reforming educational practices, a theme which dominates the Vindication of the Rights of Woman."

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