Analysis Of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women

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The perspective of women from men and society are used to manipulate the way women perceive themselves in order to create dependent, useless human beings so that men can keep their superiority in society over women. Although this is an issue that still occurs in modern society, this idea can be dated back to as early as the 1700s, a time when this matter was even more prominent. The first feminist-centered writing in history was written and published as a novel in the midst of a controversial era in 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft called A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The entire novel serves as an argument against the educational and political theorists of the 18th century who did not believe that women should have an education; she argues …show more content…
In chapter four of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, she states that, “Pleasure is the business of woman's life, according to the present modification of society, and while it continues to be so, little can be expected from such weak beings. Inheriting, in a lineal descent from the first fair defect in nature, the sovereignty of beauty, they have, to maintain their power, resigned the natural rights, which the exercise of reason might have procured them, and chosen rather to be short-lived queens than labour to obtain the sober pleasures that arise from …show more content…
Despite the fact that they were human beings and their gender did not limit them physically and/or intellectually of being equal to men outside of the views of society, women were so used to being oppressed and deprived from their natural rights - such as education - that most women became manipulated by these views and began to believe that they did not need to be educated because the only characteristic they possessed that provided them with value and/or power in society was their outward appearance. Because the level of their beauty was the only useful part of them to men, and men were the real superior gender from the society’s perspective, they centered all their self-worth around how they could please men with what’s on the outside, rather than displaying the value of their mind. This concept is still a factor in today’s society, although people may argue that it’s present to a lesser
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