A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Summary

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in about six weeks in the autumn of 1791, and Joseph Johnson published it in London early in 1792. Two years earlier she had answered Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France with A Vindication of the Rights of Men. She dedicated the new book to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the former Bishop of Autun, whose 1791 report to the French National Assembly on public instruction would have educated girls only at home after early childhood. If the Revolution proclaimed the rights of man, she argues, it must not leave half the nation in ignorance. The library text, from Project Gutenberg, gives the complete work with an anonymous nineteenth-century biographical sketch drawn from William Godwin's memoir of her, the dedication, an introduction and thirteen chapters. The argument rests on a religious and rational premise. God gave human beings reason so that they might grow in virtue and knowledge, and virtue has one standard for both sexes. Chapter 1 traces the rights and duties of mankind to reason and criticizes hereditary rank, standing armies and the clergy's dependence as sources of vice. Chapters 2 and 3 answer the opinion that women have a separate sexual character of softness, docility and charm. Women taught from infancy that beauty is their sceptre, she writes, learn only to adorn their prison; they should instead strengthen body and mind, gain the respect of their husbands, and become rational companions and capable mothers. Chapter 4 describes how a narrow education makes women creatures of sensation and cunning, and says she wishes them to have power not over men but over themselves. Chapter 5 examines writers on women's conduct: Rousseau's portrait of Sophie in Emile, the sermons of James Fordyce, John Gregory's Legacy to his Daughters, several women authors, among whom she praises Catharine Macaulay, and Lord Chesterfield's letters. Chapters 6 to 11 consider the early association of ideas, modesty as a virtue for both sexes, reputation and chastity, the harm done by hereditary wealth and rank, the affection of parents, and duties to parents. Here she proposes that women might study medicine and practise as physicians and midwives, run businesses and take part in public life. Chapter 12, on national education, proposes free government day schools in every parish where boys and girls of all ranks would be taught together from five to nine, followed by schools that would separate pupils by future occupation. Chapter 13 shows the follies ignorance produces, from fortune-tellers and the magnetisers who claimed to heal by animal magnetism to sentimental novels, love of dress and ignorant child-rearing, and closes by calling for a revolution in female manners.

Top Lessons

• Virtue has one standard

  Wollstonecraft's central claim is that God gave women and men the same reason and the same calling to virtue. Courage, prudence, honesty and self-command are not masculine or feminine; they are human, and an education that trains women only to please denies them the means of becoming good.

• Education shapes character

  Using the idea of the association of ideas, Wollstonecraft argues that early habits shape the whole mind. Girls taught from infancy to care chiefly for beauty and approval will form those habits; girls taught to reason, exercise and work will form others. Character, she holds, is largely made by education.

• Marriage as friendship between rational companions

  Wollstonecraft argues that love founded on beauty fades, but friendship founded on respect lasts. A wife who is educated and virtuous can be her husband's companion and a wise mother, and she will need no artifice to keep his esteem.

• A revolution in manners as well as laws

  Writing during the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft argues that new constitutions are not enough without a reform of character and habits. Her revolution is chiefly moral and educational: women reforming themselves, and so the world, by reason and virtue.

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Medical Lens

Health runs through the Vindication's argument. Wollstonecraft attacks the cultivated delicacy and 'sickly' sensibility recommended to women by conduct writers and argues that exercise, fresh air and a robust tone of nerves are as necessary to women as to men, so that strength of body supports strength of mind. In Chapter 9 she proposes that women study medicine and practise as physicians and midwives, regretting that the man-midwife (accoucheur) was displacing the midwife. In Chapter 13 she addresses women who consult the magnetisers, practitioners of Mesmer's animal magnetism, and asks whether they know anything of the human frame: chronic disorders, she writes, are cured slowly by regimen, air, exercise and a few medicines prescribed by those who have studied the body. The same chapter blames ignorance for the deaths of infants and describes women ridiculed for following medical advice on infant care. Her own death from puerperal fever in 1797, after the birth of Mary Shelley, gives these passages a historical poignancy, though the book itself does not discuss childbirth at length. Her views belong to eighteenth-century medicine and the regimen tradition; modern readings are interpretive.

• Ch. 2-3

  Bodily weakness and sickly delicacy cultivated as feminine charms, contrasted with exercise and the healthy tone of nerves and muscles.

• Ch. 9

  Women as physicians, nurses and midwives, and the replacement of the midwife by the accoucheur.

• Ch. 12

  Ignorant child-rearing blamed for infant deaths, and women mocked for following physicians' advice on the care of infants.

• Ch. 13, sect. 1

  Fortune-tellers and magnetisers, with Wollstonecraft's account of regimen, air, exercise and medicine as the only sound means of restoring health.

• Ch. 13, sect. 5

  The rearing of children as laying a foundation of sound health of body and mind, and the cost of ignorance in nurseries.