The Ongoing Battle of Women's Rights

As I picked up this excerpt from A Vindication on the Rights of Women, I had heard the name of the author, Mary Wollstonecraft, before, but I had never really known about her or about what she stood for. Upon reading the biography provided and the title of her novel, I figured it out pretty quickly. She was one of many women's rights activists that existed from the late 1700's until women finally achieved suffrage in 1920. I also noticed that she was different from the others: she was self-educated, fighting against the movement for women to have little schooling and remain uninformed, uninvolved members of early American and 18-century European societies, or, as Wollstonecraft puts it in her novel, "innocent" and "children".

These words appear quite frequently throughout the essay, as, in my opinion, a teasing, sarcastic way to make fun of the way men thought of women of the time. Women in the time of Wollstonecraft were treated the same as children. No voting rights, no property owning rights, and they could be (and often would be) punished by almost any means necessary to get them to follow rules. Women were also expected to act similar to children in terms of doing what they were told, with no exceptions and no excuses. The word "slave" appears quite often as well, as another piece of satire criticizing the "titles" given to them by men of the period

Besides criticizing the "titles" given to women of the 18th-century Western world, she criticizes the thought process of many of the famous authors of the time period, such as John Milton. Although she says Milton does account for women being appealing to the senses and thus higher than children, she still says that "into similar consistencies great men are often led by their senses". Basically, she is saying that men let their brain overcome their senses, and that women aren't as "innocent" as men think. They have the capabilities to become a smart, productive member of society just as well as a man does. She also insults the works of French thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau, but not as extensively as she does Milton and his works.

The writing style of Wollstonecraft is that of 1790's England, thus making it harder to read and understand 220 years later. If you slow down and clearly try to develop and digest what is in front of you, however, you find pure literary gold and a piece of history in the ongoing battle of women's rights.