mary wollstonecraft shelley a vindication of women's rights

mary wollstonecraft shelley a vindication of women

She then insists that women’s virtues-“strength of mind, perseverance and fortitude”-are the “same in kind” if not yet in “degree” (55). A degree of physical superiority cannot, therefore, be denied-and it is a noble prerogative! (24, my italics). This is the law of nature, and does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of women. In the government of the physical world it is observable that the female in point of strength is, in general, inferior to the male. She first reduces the physical difference between males and females, rewriting the above passage thus: However, only six months later, by the end of the second edition of 1792, Wollstonecraft effectively denied the significance and even the necessary existence of male physical superiority. This physical superiority cannot be denied-and it is a noble prerogative! (24, n4). The male pursues, the female yields-this is the law of nature and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman. the female, in general is inferior to the male. True, the first edition of the Vindication (January 1792) attributed a physical superiority to the male, acknowledging his ability to overpower the female of the species with his greater brute strength: Grounded on the affirmation of universal human rights endorsed by such Enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke-the affirmation that underpinned both the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789-Wollstonecraft argued that females are in all the most important aspects the same as males, possessing the same souls, the same mental capacities, and thus the same human rights. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman proposed a model of what we would now call “equality” or “liberal” feminism.

Invoking the radical French and British political discourse surrounding the early days of the French Revolution, in 1792, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft threw down the gauntlet, not only to her male readers, but equally important, to the women of her day, as she called for a “REVOLUTION in female manners” (230).

Mary wollstonecraft shelley a vindication of women's rights