Summary Of Vindications Of The Rights Of Woman By Mary Wollstonecraft

In The Vindications of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft argues that the cause of gender distinctions is the environment in which people have been raised in rather than the person’s genes. She looks at the inequalities between males and females and points out that these inequalities are socially created and are not the result of nature. Wollstonecraft argues that the family is a political institution, and that important political values, such as equality, should apply to love, romance, and family. She states that marriage should be a form of friendship, as it entails a free choice, equality, and mutual respect. However, all three of these elements have been deemed controversial in the realm of marriage. In this research paper, I will

However, this cannot be the case as the marriage contract invalidates the consent of a woman. This is the main point focused upon in “Women and Consent” by Carole Pateman. She mentions that refusal or withdrawal of consent is needed for the concept of consent to be taken seriously. Pateman first talks about hypothetical voluntarism, which is the idea that individuals are rational, and as a result are capable of giving their own commitment, or consent. She talks about how consent is just like what was argued in the social contract theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In Locke’s claim, there is the argument that consent is implied if nothing is going awry. She also points out in Hobbes’s account that consent has the same meaning, even if it comes from submission from fear of death or exposure. Both of these accounts are considerably unfair for women who are in a social contract, as contract theorists only really talked about men when they created these social theories. Men came into power through tacit consent of their kids and their wife, although it is an assumed presence of consent to said transformation. The consent is part of the marriage contract, according to Locke, who states that the will of the husband comes before all. This means that, owing to this assumed consent, women do not meet the requirements of being an individual in the eyes of the hypothetical voluntarism

In a marriage contract, women have to consent to the marriage whereas men do not. Therefore, consent in marriage is just formal recognition of nature. Women stay constantly in a state of dependence on men, even though it is not necessary. This is reinforced by noticing that even at weddings, the father gives his daughter away to the man, which continues the chain of dependence, rather than entering a “new status of maturity”. Pateman states that the convention of marriage may have the appearance of equality now in comparison to the past, but the marriage contract is still unequal. The consent of one individual to another in a contract is not really consent. Pateman also focuses her points around Rousseau and his social contract theory. Rousseau says that women are naturally subordinate to men, as there are “natural” characters of males and females. Rousseau talks about how hypothetical voluntarism shares characteristics similar to slavery, yet at the same time, he believes that it is fine as a basis for relationships between men and women. He states that women are either good or “dissolute”, meaning lax in morals, and women can only stay good if they stay in domestic life while men are out educating themselves and being active members of society. According to Rousseau, women distract men from their education, as women educate themselves in the characteristics that are deemed to be vices for men.