Vindicación de los derechos de la mujer (Serie Great Ideas 19) (Spanish Edition)

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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Wikipedia

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A Fiction is the only complete novel by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the tragic story of a heroine's successive "romantic friendships" with a woman and a man. Composed while Wollstonecraft was a governess in Ireland, the novel was published in shortly after her summary dismissal and her momentous decision to embark on a writing career, a precarious and disreputable profession for women in 18th-century Britain.

Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea that geniuses are self-taught, Wollstonecraft chose a rational, self-taught heroine, Mary, as the central character of her novel. Helping to redefine genius a word which at the end of the 18th century was only beginning to take on its modern meaning of exceptional or brilliant , Wollstonecraft describes Mary as independent and capable of defining femininity and marriage for herself.

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It is Mary's "strong, original opinions" and her resistance to "conventional wisdom" that mark her as a genius. She also briefly suggests that all men and women should be represented in government. But the bulk of her "political criticism," as Chris Jones, a Wollstonecraft scholar, explains, "is couched predominantly in terms of morality".

Because rights ultimately proceed from God, Wollstonecraft maintains that there are duties, tied to those rights, incumbent upon each and every person. For Wollstonecraft, the individual is taught republicanism and benevolence within the family; domestic relations and familial ties are crucial to her understanding of social cohesion and patriotism. In many ways the Rights of Woman is inflected by a bourgeois view of the world, as is its direct predecessor the Rights of Men.

Wollstonecraft addresses her text to the middle class, which she calls the "most natural state". She also frequently praises modesty and industry, virtues which, at the time, were associated with the middle class.

She points out the "false-refinement, immorality, and vanity" of the rich, calling them "weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner [who] undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society". But Wollstonecraft's criticisms of the wealthy do not necessarily reflect a concomitant sympathy for the poor. For her, the poor are fortunate because they will never be trapped by the snares of wealth: In her national plan for education, she retains class distinctions with an exception for the intelligent , suggesting that: The young people of superior abilities, or fortune, might now be taught, in another school, the dead and living languages, the elements of science, and continue the study of history and politics, on a more extensive scale, which would not exclude polite literature.

In attempting to navigate the cultural expectations of female writers and the generic conventions of political and philosophical discourse, Wollstonecraft, as she does throughout her oeuvre , constructs a unique blend of masculine and feminine styles in the Rights of Woman. Although Wollstonecraft argues against excessive sensibility , the rhetoric of the Rights of Woman is at times heated and attempts to provoke the reader. Many of the most emotional comments in the book are directed at Rousseau.

For example, after excerpting a long passage from Emile , Wollstonecraft pithily states, "I shall make no other comments on this ingenious passage, than just to observe, that it is the philosophy of lasciviousness. While she claims to write in a plain style so that her ideas will reach the broadest possible audience, [65] she actually combines the plain, rational language of the political treatise with the poetic, passionate language of sensibility to demonstrate that one can combine rationality and sensibility in the same self.

In her efforts to vividly describe the condition of women within society, Wollstonecraft employs several different analogies. But at the same time, she also compares them to "capricious tyrants" who use cunning and deceit to manipulate the men around them. At one point, she reasons that a woman can become either a slave or tyrant, which she describes as two sides of the same coin.

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And like the rich, women's "softness" has "debased mankind". Wollstonecraft was forced to write the Rights of Woman hurriedly to respond to Talleyrand and ongoing events. Upon completing the work, she wrote to her friend William Roscoe: I intend to finish the next volume before I begin to print, for it is not pleasant to have the Devil coming for the conclusion of a sheet fore it is written.

Wollstonecraft never wrote the second part to the Rights of Woman, although William Godwin published her "Hints", which were "chiefly designed to have been incorporated in the second part of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman ", in the posthumous collection of her works.

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It was unfinished at her death and also included in the Posthumous Works published by Godwin. When it was first published in , the Rights of Woman was reviewed favourably by the Analytical Review , the General Magazine , the Literary Magazine , New York Magazine , and the Monthly Review , although the assumption persists even today that Rights of Woman received hostile reviews. Taylor writes that "it was an immediate success".

Hays cited the Rights of Woman in her novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney and modelled her female characters after Wollstonecraft's ideal woman. Although female conservatives such as Hannah More excoriated Wollstonecraft personally, they actually shared many of the same values. As the scholar Anne Mellor has shown, both More and Wollstonecraft wanted a society founded on "Christian virtues of rational benevolence, honesty, personal virtue, the fulfillment of social duty, thrift, sobriety, and hard work". For example, the respected poet and essayist Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Wollstonecraft sparred back and forth; Barbauld published several poems responding to Wollstonecraft's work and Wollstonecraft commented on them in footnotes to the Rights of Woman.

The bluestocking Elizabeth Carter was unimpressed with the work. He revealed much about her private life that had previously not been known to the public: While Godwin believed he was portraying his wife with love, sincerity, and compassion, contemporary readers were shocked by Wollstonecraft's unorthodox lifestyle and she became a reviled figure. Richard Polwhele targeted her in particular in his anonymous long poem The Unsex'd Females , a defensive reaction to women's literary self-assertion: Hannah More is Christ to Wollstonecraft's Satan. His poem was "well known" among the responses A Vindication.

Wollstonecraft's ideas became associated with her life story and women writers felt that it was dangerous to mention her in their texts. Hays, who had previously been a close friend [84] and an outspoken advocate for Wollstonecraft and her Rights of Woman , for example, did not include her in the collection of Illustrious and Celebrated Women she published in Both Edgeworth and Austen argue that women are crucial to the development of the nation; moreover, they portray women as rational beings who should choose companionate marriage.

The negative views towards Wollstonecraft persisted for over a century. The Rights of Woman was not reprinted until the middle of the 19th century and it still retained an aura of ill-repute.

George Eliot wrote "there is in some quarters a vague prejudice against the Rights of Woman as in some way or other a reprehensible book, but readers who go to it with this impression will be surprised to find it eminently serious, severely moral, and withal rather heavy". Ayaan Hirsi Ali , a feminist who is critical of Islam's dictates regarding women , cites the Rights of Woman in her autobiography Infidel , writing that she was "inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist thinker who told women they had the same ability to reason as men did and deserved the same rights".

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Feminism analytical epistemology ethics existentialism metaphysics Gender equality Gender performativity Social construction of gender Care Ethics Intersectionality Standpoint Theory. Retrieved 14 May A More Comprehensive Introduction 3 ed. Westview Press Perseus Books. Retrieved 13 February