II. Philosophy
Wollstonecraft’s lasting place in the history of philosophy rests upon her work entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. This work constitutes a classical feminist text. In the work she appealed to egalitarian social philosophy as the basis for the creation and preservation of equal rights and opportunities for women. The foundation of morality in all human beings, according to Wollstonecraft, whether male or female, is their common possession of the faculty of reason and rationality. Wollstonecraft argued that women must claim their equality by accepting its unemotional dictates. Excessive concerns for thing such as romantic love and physical desirability are not the natural conditions of female existence, according to Wollstonecraft. These are the socially imposed means by which male domination enslaves women. Further, the work entitled Maria or the Wrongs of Woman develops similar themes but in a fictional setting. The work shows that the plight of working women differs from imprisonment.
Wollstonecraft wrote extensively on the degradation of women. She contends that if reason is an “emanation of divinity,” then it must be the same in men and women. And if we women live by “wit and cunning” it must be because these have been substituted for an understanding (VRW, 53). Knowledge consists in “the power of generalizing ideas of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations.” (VRW, 54) And without the cultivation of knowledge and understanding, women are closed off from the foundations of virtue.
“The men who pride themselves upon paying arbitrary insolent respect to the sex, with the most scrupulous exactness, are most inclined to tyrannize over and despise the very weakness they cherish.” (VRW, 55) Women are given food and clothes without working for them but have to surrender in exchange their health, liberty and the acquisition of virtue (VRW, 56). By showing trivial attentions toward women, men insultingly support their own superiority (VRW, 57).
While abilities and virtues are cultivated in men and they can improve themselves through effort, this is not the case with women (VRW, 57) Consequently, women take on the follies and vices of civilization without the useful fruit (VRW, 61). The rich are in a similar situation. Women are plunged into “meannesses, cares and sorrows” due to the “prevailing opinion that they were created to feel rather than to reason” (VRW, 62) “Without knowledge, there can be no morality” (VRW, 63 and reason is necessary for women to perform their duties properly (VRW, 64) “Most of the evils of life arise from a desire of present enjoyment that outruns itself: (VRW, 73) and this is why when women lose their husband’s attentions after the initial excitement of marriage wears off, there are problems. The present education of women, at best, leaves them romantic and inconstant and at worst, vain and mean. (VRW, 75)
“Humanity to animals should be particularly cultivated as part of national education . . . The habitual cruelty is first caught at school, where it is one of the rare sports of boys to torment the miserable brutes that fall in their way. The transition, as they grow up, from barbarity to brutes to domestic tyranny over wives, children, and servants is very easy. Justice, or even benevolence, will not be a powerful spring of action unless it extends to the whole creation; nay, I believe that it may be delivered as an axiom, that those who can see pain, unmoved will soon learn to inflict it.” (VRW, 178)
