A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women Essay

Mary Wollstonecraft was known for being one of the first radical feminists who, through her revolutionary yet logical thinking, was able to pave the way for women’s rights activists in the future. Her book, A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women, which was written as an argument against Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s limiting and judgmental beliefs, serves as a backbone for modern feminists almost 250 years after its publication. These activists are fighting for a fair world, where women and men are treated as they are: equals. They are working for jobs, education, voting, and many other rights that have been unjustly taken from them with the only cause being their gender. These people would be able to use the foundation put in place by Wollstonecraft

While universal female suffrage was their original goal, it has evolved over time from simply the right to vote to more important things such as “equal access to education and employment, equality within marriage, and a married woman’s right to her own property and wages, custody over her children and control over her own body” (Pruitt). They do not have the desire to be better than men, just equal. Many rights that men were handed on a silver plate, women had to fight, argue, and die for in order to gain them. When women were given the right to vote, they realized they could fight for even more things. One big thing they argued for is equality in the workplace, not only in job opportunities, but also pay. They realized that “women in the United States earned 30% less than men,” and for every dollar a man earned, a “woman earned 82 cents,” leading to a monthly pay gap of around $4,000 (Dowell). These gaps add up over time resulting in even fewer opportunities for women in the workforce as they are stuck choosing between wants, such as nicer clothes, which are often required for higher-paying jobs, and basic survival needs. The reason for these wage gaps are inadmissible, but stem from the old historical belief that a man is held at a higher value that a woman is.

Her fighting claim was that she did not want “women to have power over men” but “over themselves,” which was prevalent through most of her arguments (Wollstonecraft 139). Very similar to activists now, she did not yearn for women to be better than men, but equal. Men, in her time period, had control of not only themselves, but of the women in their household. Wollstonecraft wanted women to have control over their own affair and what happened to them, which previously had landed in the hands of men. This unjust placement was because men were seen as the stronger, more important, and higher valued sex, and Wollstonecraft hoped to change that. She not only advocated for equal rights, but for fair views of women. She wanted women to be seen as “rational creatures,” instead of being perceived as stuck in “a state of perpetual childhood” and “unable to stand alone” as well as to stop being synonymous with terms like “susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste” which “indicate weakness” (Wollstonecraft 77). The stereotypes and prejudice against women were so strong that men did not even think to give them fair opportunities because it logically did not make sense. They held such high bias against the women that it was completely out of the question to allow women, the weak, frilly, and helpless beings they are, to do anything that held any importance.