A Vindication of the Rights of Women

Raven Kennedy

Wes Borton

Critique Essay 1

10/6/15

A Vindication of the Rights of Women

A vindication of the rights of women is written by Mary Wollstonecraft.  Her essay is the rights of women she feels that women should be looked at as equal to a man and not a piece of property. She wants women to feel empowered, she also doesn’t want marriage to be no better than prostitution and live in similar conditions of slavery.  In today society this situation is still relevant to women today.  Mary Wollstonecraft was trying to prove throughout her essay that women should be awarded the same opportunity as man has.  She says that “Men and women must be educated, in a great degree by the opinion and manners of the society they live in.” (Wollstonecraft, 160) I believe she meant not to be educated in books but be educated in the way society wants us to be.  Society wants us to be dumbed down. They want their methods to continue working on us and it won’t work if were educated.

Mary Wollstonecraft comes across as a confident woman, a woman of strong will and dedication.  She had very strong points in her essay.  One of her key points was education.  She felt as though this was the most important virtue.  Education was most important because you can’t take that away from someone. Either you don’t want women and men to be equal, but you can’t say that they were dumb.  Wollstonecraft felt very strongly and was very sincere on her views.  “We must wait; wait perhaps till kings and noble enlightened by reason and preferring the real dignity of man to childish state.” (Wollstonecraft, 161) She was tired of waiting for the time that women were seen as equal. It’s not that she was going to give up on the cause; she just wanted to know when change was going to come.  Today ,women are still waiting on change to come.  Back then it was the fact of women not being able to vote and the men wanted them to stay at home and tend to the house and cook, clean and care for the children and keep reproducing babies.  That’s all women were good for.  Now women have finally gotten the right to vote and purchase property, but we still aren’t seen totally equal to man.  Yes we can get an education and marry who we choose; yes we also had to fight for the right to terminate life if we chose to.  

However we still aren’t hired for jobs that we are qualified for because were women, we still aren’t paid the same wage as a man in the same field same schooling as were paid because once again were women.  I don’t know what’s the problem is with society do we have incompetent written on our foreheads? Or is it that they don’t trust us because they will feel like we can’t handle the pressure. Or is it that they know we can beat them at their own game and anything they can do we can do it better times ten.

...