Hey guys! I hope everyone has had an amazing weekend!
I have honestly been so excited to read A Vindication of the Rights of Women because of how much I loved reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft is Shelley's mother, and so I was very excited for this read.
In this blog post, I am going to be talking about a couple of paragraphs that really hit home for me and gave me a lot to think about. In Chapter Two, Wollstonecraft states: "Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives" (18).
In this part of the paragraph, Wollstonecraft is saying that young girls from the time that they are born that all they need to be is beautiful and nothing else. Later in the paragraph, however, Wollstonecraft says that this statement is, in fact, 100% false. Women are meant to be strong and have their own thoughts and have their own rights to all aspects of their life and should use what they have to teach their children. At the very beginning of the book, Wollstonecraft states: "If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot" (2). This makes perfect sense, since children learn from what their parents teach them, especially their mothers, who have one of the biggest influences on their life.
I completely agree with what Wollstonecraft was saying because of on independent and strong-minded I am today. I believe that women are not meant to sit around and be pretty all of the time. I feel like we are meant for so much more, and as the years progress, so do the rights of women. I think Mary Wollstonecraft would be very proud of where the modern age has gone and how far women have come in their rights and how they are viewed in the nation.
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