Life and works of Mary Wollstonecraft:
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) belonged to a circle of intellectuals in London who were active supporters of revolutionary ideals and fervor. Under the leadership of Richard Price (1723-1791) they upheld the secession of the American colonies from British rule in 1775 and also supported the ideals of French Revolution of 1789. Mary Wollstonecraft is considered one of the most significant early feminist writers and thinkers. Her reputation suffered posthumously due to revelations about her personal life, but today she is viewed as one of the founders of feminist philosophy, and her work is essential reading for students and scholars.
She was born in London on April 27, 1759, to Edward John and Elizabeth Wollstonecraft. Edward inherited a sizable amount of money from his father, a master weaver, but mismanaged his finances as he moved the family from city to city trying to establish himself as a gentleman farmer. Mary's brother Edward was the only child of seven to receive a formal education, but Mary became very well read in the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, and some of the classical authors. grid no son wmb
In 1778 she became the companion to a Mrs. Dawson and lived in Bath for a short time until her mother's illness and subsequent death disrupted that arrangement. In Bath she developed scorn for the wealthy. She lived with another family in 1782, then joined her sister Eliza and Eliza's new baby. This domestic situation was emotional and disruptive, and Mary encouraged her sister to leave her unhappy marriage, which Eliza did in January 1784, but the infant was left behind and soon died.
It was Rousseau who had set out the following plan for the education of women, which is an indication of their position in society: 'For my part, I would have a young Englishwoman cultivate her agreeable talents in order to please her future husband with as much care and assiduity as a young Circassian cultivates hers, to fit her for the harem of a Circassain bashaw.' In other words middle and upper middle class women could aspire at the most to an education that would prepare them for a companionate marriage. This was a marriage in which the wife - as Rousseau suggests here - would be trained to be a pleasant companion for her husband just as in the Middle East women were trained to be a members of harem who would please the pasha or ruler.
Women writers in general and novelists in particular were yet to come. In other chapters of 'Vindication' it is clear that one of Wollstonecraft's problems is that she has hardly any women writers whom she can cite with respect. She dismisses Hester Piozzi and Madame de Stael as unthinking supporters of Samuel Johnson and Rousseau - clear victims of conditioning by patriarchy - and finds she has few role-models left to recommend. Catherine Macaulay and Mrs. Chapone are the only two precursors on the theme of women's education whom Wollstonecraft can feature with dignity. The depressed condition of women then was marked by an enfeebling education, no career, no economic independence and no sense of a support-network with women achievers.
The dual character of 'Vindication' is immediately apparent in its constituency. By definition - given the appalling contemporary position of women and their lack of education - it is largely men who comprise the circle to which 'Vindication' is designed to appeal. After all it is they - and here lies the bitter irony - who have to be rationally persuaded to grant women the rights which are their due. The text is dedicated to Bishop Talleyrand of France for whose work on education and on civil liberties Wollstonecraft has great respect. Wollstonecraft's text is addressed to women in the sense that it concerns their rights and education. She says, education is integral to the development of individual identity so that this dependence of the mind on associations and impressions needs the rigorous discipline of education if it is to be anything other than slavish. This need for education is even more compelling in the case of women than it is for men. d ba
Mary Wollstonecraft went further than her contemporaries in the eighteenth-century England by demanding that the twin values of reason and revolution which they cherished be applied to the cause of women's education. Given that the association of ideas shapes individual identity Wollstonecraft argues that education is essential to train the minds of women away from enslavement to early impressions. She highlights the inferiority of contemporary literature and life to show that defective education of women is the cause of social and personal ills. Wollstonecraft's work is typical of its age and culture. It illustrates the nexus between early socialism and feminism but ultimately seems to demand equality for women mainly as a means to an end - that of the companionate marriage – rather than as an end in itself.
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