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How Does Wollstonecraft Address The Degradation Of Women

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Recommended: Mary Wollstonecraft: “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”

In this passage, Wollstonecraft addresses the degradation of women and argues that they have been treated with the same mentality as slaves, preventing them from achieving their virtue. In order to prove her point, she contrasts her opinion with that of men that are seen as “sensible” and uses indicative words and religious references to clearly demonstrate their demeaning attitude toward slaves. She then compares these feelings to attitudes towards women, bringing new meanings to words she has already written. With these techniques, she ultimately comes back to the idea that women have been “degraded by a concurrence of circumstances” and uses this idea to further her explanations of equality throughout the text. Through allusive words and phrases, the author shines light on the debasing treatment of slaves, and ultimately …show more content…

It is important to note that she adds in “aristocracy”, as she herself disagrees with this idea. This gives the audience an idea of how Wollstonecraft feels about this opinion before it is even stated. That being said, these men revolve their opinion around the idea that mankind cannot be any one thing since “obsequious slaves…allow themselves to be driven forward” and that if they were to “feel their own consequence” they would “spurn their chains”. Through this quote it is implied that aristocratic men view these slaves as having a weaker state of mind, that limits their consciousness of the world around them keeping them and thus keeps them from fighting for their freedom. To these men, slaves are just obedient and mindless. Similarly, Wollstonecraft argues that an analogy can be made here, as women are also seen as obedient to men in this society, as they are raised to aspire to marriage. With this comparison in mind, the idea of slaves not taking the initiative to change things when they would “only” have to “life their heads to throw off the yoke”, implies that like slaves, women are weaker by

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Wollstonecraft’s on the other hand centers around how personal happiness is better over social obligation because the social obligation of woman is what will cause their downfall into being nothing more than lessee beings than their male counterparts. These opposing forces leave major conflicts, conundrums and despair in their place when left with a choice between the two. What is personal happiness? Personal happiness is when you can lay down on the grass in white jeans, feeling the sun while not worrying about stains. Personal happiness is when you find the most alluring and profound beauty in all the negative spaces of your life and mentality; it’s beating your own record in a game, getting the person of your dreams, the bonus and promotion from your job.

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Many minority groups were vulnerable to enslavement placed upon them by white Americans throughout the 19th century. In the episodic autobiographies Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, An American Slave written by Fredrick Douglass and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl written by Harriet Jacobs, both authors present the physiological manipulations associated with slavery. Douglass's and Jacob’s experiences suggest that slaves endured a continuous treatment of brutality, loneliness, and sexual abuse. Slave-owners deprived slaves of positive human qualities because they (slave-owners) became divested from their sense of identity. The dehumanizing institution of slavery caused slave-owners to conform to social roles instituted by society and forced slaves to suffer from learned hopelessness.

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She understands that women feel weak and are bullied by men, so she targets the female audience’s delicate emotions toward male oppression to enhance her argument for gender equality. In her introduction, the author employs pathos to engage women’s feelings into her argument, and she uses these emotions to call for women to gain ambition and strength to fight for civil rights. Wollstonecraft tells women that “men endeavor to sink us lower, merely rendering us as alluring objects for a moment” (307). She claims men treat women as “alluring objects,” which expresses her point that men treat women as inferior creatures (307). Also, she directly relates to the female audience when she uses the first person pronoun “us” (307), for she “acknowledges that she too is a victim of oppression” (Smith 559).

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