In her text A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft considers the position of gender as something that is learned. She posits that women’s limited status in society is “the inevitable consequence of their education.” (Wollstonecraft VI, 3). Thus, gender roles are not inborn, but circumstantial. We are creatures of habit: “One idea calls up another, its old associate, and memory, faithful to the first impressions, particularly when the intellectual powers are not employed to cool our sensations, retraces them with mechanical exactness,” (Wollstonecraft VI, 2). And, further, “Is it surprising that women every where appear a defect in nature? Is it surprising, when we consider what a determinate effect an early association of ideas has on the character,” (Wollstonecraft VI, 1). Women’s rigid status of weakness is thus a result of early conditioning to Wollstonecraft. She continues, “Let the dignified pursuit of virtue and knowledge raise the mind above those emotions which rather imbitter than sweeten the cup of life, when they are not restrained within due bounds,” (Wollstonecraft II, 9). Wollstonecraft proposes that to rise above the circumstances that have oppressed women, virtue and knowledge must be pursued above emotional or sensual reactions. Wollstonecraft also states that, “Women who have rushed in eccentrical directions out of the orbit prescribed to their sex, were male spirited, confined by mistake in a female frame,” (Wollstonecraft II, 11). This theory suggests that if women are in any way free, intellectually or otherwise, it is because of their male nature, not because of any liberated female qualities, which seems to contradict her position that woman can supersede gender constraints by obtaining knowledge and virtue. Knowledge and virtue are to her, it seems, distinctly male privileges, even if she believes they should not be. What is frightening is not that these problems with gender ever existed in their time, but that the text seems still somewhat relevant and necessary today.
Works Cited
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. New York: Bartleby.com, 1999. Web. http://www.bartleby.com/144/. Accessed Spring 2017.
