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Women During The Enlightenment Essay

754 Words4 Pages

Female authors, philosophers, and gender equality advocates played a significant role in advancing rights and opportunities for women from the 18th century to the present. Although men were not superior to women, men had more power than women. Most men during the Enlightenment portrayed and viewed women as insignificant and as if they did not help with important matters. In the minds of many people in society, not a single woman has ever done anything truly significant, nor has she made an important discovery in the sciences. During the Enlightenment, men had many rights that women did not have, like the right to a good education. Mary Wollstonecraft argued that in the 1800s, women should have proper education. Education is essential for everyone, including …show more content…

Week after week, Mary Wollstonecraft’s publisher, Joseph Johnson, welcomed women and men to his home to discuss their new world philosophy. Wollstonecraft and her radical associates loved to talk and argue about these pursuits. For Wollstonecraft, the development of the political state depended on women's education for the care of the family, including the care of the female self. Wollstonecraft states that besides teaching women natural science, “it was likewise proper” to make “women acquainted with the anatomy of the mind.” In a time that saw philosophers scrupling with a moral hesitation about "the knowledge most useful to man" and, implicitly, the knowledge most useful to women, she sought to promote the viability of women as thinking people, based on ideas from the material body and mind that she gathered from her medical experience and reading in the natural sciences. Wollstonecraft argues for a co-education model which could be accomplished “by allowing the sexes to associate together in every

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