"A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"

Paper Summary:

The paper explores how Mary Wollstonecraft's book "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" embodies her views about women's education in the late eighteenth century, reflecting her own experiences and her perceptions about the roles of women, the need for more opportunities for women in the public sphere and her knowledge of the ideas of Locke, Rousseau and Thomas Paine on such issues. The paper then goes on to discuss how much of Mary Wollstonecraft's struggle with conformity and rebellion derived from the expectations and realizations of the public versus the private sphere. The paper examines numerous reviews of this work and concludes with a summary of the main ideas presented in this paper.

Outline:
Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: Private vs. Public
Chapter Three: Closer Look at A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Chapter Four: Conclusion

From the Paper:

"Mary Wollstonecraft's book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was written as a response to the proposed state-supported system of public education that would only educate girls to be housewives, a proposal made by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, the French minister of education after the French revolution (Mellor 367). The passion with which Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was derived from her personal experience of inequality as a young woman in a patriarchal society and also by the injustice she experienced in her own family growing up, an injustice experienced primarily because of her gender given that she was raised in a home where her older brother, Ned (who by law would inherit all the family wealth), was favored by their mother, leaving Mary and the rest of her siblings to compete for any affection from their mother."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Alexander, Meena. Women in Romanticism. Savage, Maryland: Barnes & Noble, 1989.
• Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.
• Cone, Carl B. Burke and the Nature of Politics. University of Kentucky, 1964.
• Conniff, James. "Edmund Burke and His Critics: The Case of Mary Wollstonecraft" Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 60, No. 2, (Apr., 1999), 299-318.
• Ferguson, Moira and Janet Todd. Mary Wollstonecraft. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

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