Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ is a book on overcoming the ways in which the women in her times were oppressed and denied their potential in society, with consequent problems in their households and society as a whole. The dedication is to Charles M. Talleyrand-Périgord, the late bishop of Autun whose views on female education were distasteful to Wollstonecraft. The introduction sets out her view that neglect of girls’ education is largely to blame for the condition of adult women. They are treated as subordinate beings who care only about being attractive, elegant, and meek, they buy into this oppression, and they do not have the tools to vindicate their fundamental rights or the awareness that they are in such a condition. Wollstonecraft says that the greatest gift of humanity is the ability to reason. Since men and women are born with the same ability, women must also enjoy those same powers, education and influence …show more content…
This was Rousseau’s opinion respecting men. I extend it to women” Many of the writers on female education, such as Rousseau and Dr. Gregory, tend to paint women as more artificial and weak than they would be under better conditions. Wollstonecraft blames the men of her time (especially Jean Jacques Rousseau) for promoting a type of education that makes women completely useless as members of society. Rousseau thinks that men are so perfectly rational that women should follow their guidance. But she argues that many (if not most) men are just overgrown children. “I may be accused of arrogance; still I must declare, what I firmly believe, that all the writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners, from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory, have contributed to render women more artificial, weak characters, than they would otherwise have been; and, consequently, more useless members of