A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral SubjectsWollstonecraft, Mary
Philosophy
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Feminism; Women -- Education -- Great Britain; Women -- History -- 19th century; Women's rights -- Great Britain
In the same strain have I heard men argue against instructing the
poor; for many are the forms that aristocracy assumes. "Teach them
to read and write," say they, "and you take them out of the station
assigned them by nature." An eloquent Frenchman, has answered
them; I will borrow his sentiments. But they know not, when they
make man a brute, that they may expect every instant to see him
transformed into a ferocious beast. Without knowledge there can be
no morality!
Ignorance is a frail base for virtue! Yet, that it is the
condition for which woman was organized, has been insisted upon by
the writers who have most vehemently argued in favour of the
superiority of man; a superiority not in degree, but essence;
though, to soften the argument, they have laboured to prove, with
chivalrous generosity, that the sexes ought not to be compared; man
was made to reason, woman to feel: and that together, flesh and
spirit, they make the most perfect whole, by blending happily
reason and sensibility into one character.
And what is sensibility? "Quickness of sensation; quickness of
perception; delicacy." Thus is it defined by Dr. Johnson; and the
definition gives me no other idea than of the most exquisitely
polished instinct. I discern not a trace of the image of God in
either sensation or matter. Refined seventy times seven, they are
still material; intellect dwells not there; nor will fire ever make
lead gold!
I come round to my old argument; if woman be allowed to have an
immortal soul, she must have as the employment of life, an
understanding to improve. And when, to render the present state
more complete, though every thing proves it to be but a fraction of
a mighty sum, she is incited by present gratification to forget her
grand destination. Nature is counteracted, or she was born only to
procreate and rot. Or, granting brutes, of every description, a
soul, though not a reasonable one, the exercise of instinct and
sensibility may be the step, which they are to take, in this life,
towards the attainment of reason in the next; so that through all
eternity they will lag behind man, who, why we cannot tell, had the
power given him of attaining reason in his first mode of existence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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