ESPECIALLY INTERESTING RESPONSES FROM WEEK THREE: Posted Week 4

Stephanie Swick
This reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women is clearly an extremely important piece of writing in the way of beginning to change the stage for women in proper society. It is interesting to me to look back on history and trace the growth in this area following the writing of several prolific and free-thinking women. Much of what Wollstonecraft outlines in this essay was echoed in a speech given by Elizabeth Cady Stanton called The Solitude of Self. Though one hundred years apart, the two women discuss the same general theme: an improvement in the rights of women in society. It is clear when reading Stanton’s speech that she is certainly using the building blocks which Wollstonecraft (and many others) had set before her. Wollstonecraft’s independent thinking began to carve out a new way to look at women in society as vessels for new thought and useful occupation. By the time that Stanton gave her speech, this idea was more widely accepted. She still calls for an improvement in the situation of education for women to become more independent. Reading both works has allowed me to gain understanding about the work women have had to do to make the female life easier today; and comparing these two works and recognizing their importance is an encouragement to continue fighting for what they believed.

Professor's Reply: Stephanie, you move in your response from making broad connections to a transatlantic lineage, to more specific phrases (in bold), to the even more specific principle of usefulness. This tightening focus is great! I'd love you to nail even more tightly what it was that made Wollstonecraft's argument so irresistible to republican thinkers who were committed to principles of liberty, equal justice, and solidarity. What rights was she after for women?

Chelsea Nacker
This week I was most intrigued by the passage in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in which Mary Wollstonecraft draws the reader’s attention to the disparaging effect of promoting ignorance in women in order to have them be seen as innocent and pure. This principal seemed to resonate with the theme of Edith Wharton’s novel Age of Innocence in which the main character Archer falls in love with May, a young, beautiful, and innocent girl. However, he soon realizes, as Wollstonecraft, that it is truly “ignorance under the specious name of innocence” (174), and that that is incapable of arousing more than a fleeting fascination. This book gives further corroboration to Wollstonecraft’s ideas as Archer then becomes unwaveringly intoxicated by Ellen who although socially unacceptable possesses great cultivation of mind and culture.   By comparing the logical arguments of Wollstonecraft along with fiction that shows the misery brought by such closed mindedness one is able to truly see the power that comes with the enlightenment of women.
This focus on the elevating of women’s pursuits, minds, and character is still very much needed today as women are constantly persuaded by society and ease to lower themselves to being creatures of mere aesthetics and flirtation. It is now important to alter the status quo and re-focus on the lasting benefits of a strong minded woman capable of creating, expressing, and standing by convictions. In this way women will merit a lasting impression on the opposite sex and moreover “acquire what really deserves the name of virtue” (174).

Professor's Reply: Two moments interest me specially in your response, Chelsea, and I've marked them by bold type. First, Wollstonecraft's thinking does seem more invested in Enlightenment than Romantic principles, doesn't it? Her emphasis on the moral education of women seems very different from Keats's investment in cultivating the senses to respond to beauty, but how do you think Keats's fans would respond to your phrase "mere aesthetics"? Perhaps it's not the beauty itself that's the problem, but the perspective? Perhaps the focus should be on women's agency: Women, who may well admire Keats, should cultivate their own active responsiveness to beauty rather than cultivating their potential to be objects of others' (like Sir Walter Elliot's?) aesthetic responsiveness?

Stephanie LaFaire
Mary Wollstonecraft’s work The Vindication of the Rights of Woman encourages women to educate their moral character and without such education, women become a type of play thing in the unfortunate patriarchic society. Wollstonecraft also argues that ignorance belongs to children, and that women are adults, therefore, they should be educated in economic policies and procedure and political affairs (Greenblatt174). Many of the overlaying themes in The Vindication of the Rights of Woman seem to be extensions of Mary Astell’s avocation for the equality of education of men and women. Mary Astell wrote a piece entitled A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest in 1694, which argued that women need to become educated in order to seek professions beyond the church and home. Wollstonecraft appears to have extended upon Astell’s work, moving a few steps beyond education, and actually suggesting that the women of the 18th century become complete equals with men. It appears that Wollstonecraft receives much credit for being a revolutionary feminist; however, more credit needs to be awarded to Astell, for without her, I believe Wollstonecraft would not have a basis for her work The Vindication of the Rights of Women.

Professor's Reply: Ah! the old question of influence and who got there first! Stephanie, if you still have time in your future schedule, I'd strongly recommend you take a course with Professor Tony Pollock who's our resident expert in this field and would be able to help you figure out the fine points of similarity and difference between these two women writers. What you're showing, though, is that the lineage of women writers Virginia Woolf looks for in A Room of One's Own (1929) is actually much richer than she thought, though still inaccessible at the time of her writing.

Nicole Etheridge
In class, we discussed Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and I was intrigued with some of the language used to convey the message of virtue to the reader. Although she states many times that women are inferior to men and that obtaining the victory of granting moral virtue to women is most important to her, I cannot help but read into some of the smaller details and feel as if this may not be her final goal. When she introduces the topic of female inferiority, she mentions that the law of physical superiority “does not appear to be suspended…in favor or women” (171). The word “appear” in this case seems to divert my attention a bit from her earlier argument of male superiority and question how this appearance may be a skewed, superficial viewpoint. Later on, when she compares women to military men, she states “education gives this appearance of weakness to females” which uses the word appearance once again, this time to clearly show that women are not what they appear (179). Mary Wollstonecraft also uses words like “observable” to explain the physical dominance of men. I do not think that what is observable is of significance to Wollstonecraft, however. This can be clearly seen in her goals for moral virtue and all the character merits she believes a woman should have. I believe she is trying to curry favor of the “rational men” at this point in the text by giving men superiority only in the observable realm.

Professor's Reply: I like your reading, Nicole! You cast Wollstonecraft as politically shrewd as well as philosophically wise, ready to make conciliatory gestures in the interests of her far more weighty moral stakes. Good thinking!  

Jaclyn Marta
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft mocks the archaic idea that women need to be beautiful and any other virtue they have is “needless”. This sentence is ripe with sarcasm. Wollstonecraft’s whole essay states that women are deserving of rights and education. They are whole people, not just husbands' objects. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a common motif is that of outward appearance. As Persuasion progresses, I am interested in seeing how this motif relates to Wollstonecraft’s ideas.

Most of the characters that Austen portrays as outwardly pleasing are thought of as ridiculous by the protagonist of the novel. Elizabeth, the protagonist’s sister, is described as being “very handsome.” Even though this is true about her, the narrator has shown that she, like her father, does not have much more apart from these looks. She befriends the least respected woman in town and seems to be more concerned with what people think of her, than what type of person she is. She is the antithesis of everything Wollstonecraft believes. The protagonist of the novel, Anne Elliot, is not described as extremely beautiful. Instead she has an “elegance of mind.” Anne is not always intelligent though. She still allows people to make decisions for her and is persuaded too easily. She seems to be on the cusp of being a Wollstonecraft educated woman, but is still not seeking to be a woman separate from men. Austen seems to be agreeing with Wollstonecraft in that education is of higher value than beauty, but we have not progressed far enough in the novel to see if Austen’s protagonist will continue to follow Wollstonecraft’s model.

Professor's Reply: Jaclyn, that phrase "a woman separate from men" interests me because it strikes at the socio-economic conundrum for women: the question of how to prove themselves capable of moral and intellectual independence even as they are forced to be economically dependent on men. Once they can earn the right to the formal education that will make them economically self-sufficient, it becomes more possible for them to choose freely what their relation to men will be. I wonder, now that you've finished Austen's novel, whether you feel that Anne earned her wings as an autonomous thinker (I imagine to myself her conversation with Captain Harville at Bath, about constancy in men and women respectively)?