Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman

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Mary Wollstonecraft is revered as a revolutionary thinker who sought to become the first of a new kind of woman. Her most famous work on the themes of women’s education and equality is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In this book, Mary Wollstonecraft shares her view of the roles of men and women as well as how they are shaped by nature, society and available educational opportunities. In order to be taken seriously in a time when women did not have a voice, Mary Wollstonecraft used masculine language because she thought that elegance and sincerity would have hurt her argument. However, how effective is Wollstonecraft’s use of masculine prose in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman? While her work was one of the first critiques of the societal restrictions placed on women, Wollstonecraft’s prose echoes the exact language that she is fighting against because by using masculine language, she isn’t moving the fight forward. In fact, Wollstonecraft is proposing that in order to be equal, she disregards feminine qualities and is therefore, playing into …show more content…
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication is one of the most famous works of the beginning of modern feminism, for good reason too. Devine, author of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Critics, speculates that Wollstonecraft never found a comfortable niche in the history of the eighteenth century ideas because her ideas were too radical even during the Age of Reason. Even after her death, Wollstonecraft’s reputation was damaged because her husband William Godwin published letters of Wollstonecraft’s love affair with an American who was involved in shady political and financial business. This scandal erased her fight for change and women’s equality for more than a century and caused both men and women to chastise her as a “hyena in a petticoat,” which brought upon shame and disbelief to her
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