Comparing Wollstonecraft's Views On Marriage And Relationships

Wollstonecraft proposes a simple solution to the lack of equality in many marriages and relationships. She claims that husband and wife should be friends as well as lovers. This friendship in marriage advocates human love rather than romantic love. Human love betters the world as a whole according to Wollstonecraft. She writes that “personal attachment is a very happy foundation for friendship” (Wollstonecraft 94). She points out that in romantic love, there is no check for passion, implying that an overdeveloped sense of passion can ruin marriages. In a case in which the marriage is based off of a friendship, marriages will “look beyond the present moment, and try to render the whole of life respectable, by forming a plan to regulate a friendship which only death ought to dissolve” (94). Other philosophers championed the idea of

Wollstonecraft quoting Rousseau, claims to “educate women like men” although Wollstonecraft does not think that women have any power over men, unlike Rousseau (81). She explicitly claims that she does not wish women to have power over men, but for women to have autonomous power over themselves. (81). She compares the reasoning to not grant education to women as aristocratic men do to not grant education to the poor since it will, according to the affluent, “take them out of the station assigned to them by nature” (81). Here, Wollstonecraft acknowledges two different types of discrimination present in the education system. The discrimination against the women and the poor harmonize here. Many of the women in Wollstonecraft’s time were poor, doubling the discrimination they faced. Women were unable to control their own finances and possess their own land. This would make it twice as difficult for a woman to obtain any sort of education at