What is a vindication of the rights of woman?

Mary Wollstonecraft, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Mary Wollstonecraft answers

It is an argument that women are rational creatures, and that the weakness and folly laid to their charge are the effect of how they are brought up and placed, not the mark of a lesser nature. I looked over the history of the world and the living world around me, and found that either nature had made a great difference between man and man, or that civilization had been very partial.

Then I turned over the books on education and watched parents and schools, and came away convinced that the neglected education of my fellow creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore, women most of all.1 They are like flowers planted in too rich a soil: strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty, and the leaves fade on the stalk long before they ought to have ripened.1

The cause I name is a false system of education, drawn from books written by men who consider females rather as women than as human creatures, and who have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives.1 Women have been so bubbled by this specious homage that they are anxious only to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.1

What distinguishes the human creature from the brute is improvable reason, and I deny that it belongs to one sex.2 I have not extenuated women's faults. I have shown them to be the natural consequence of education and station, and so it is reasonable to suppose that women will correct their vices and follies when they are allowed to be free in a physical, moral, and civil sense.3

This artificial weakness breeds cunning, the natural opponent of strength, and a propensity to tyrannize through those infantile airs that undermine esteem even as they excite desire.4 Cease to foster the prejudice that gives a sex to virtue, and women will fall into their subordinate yet respectable station.4 The challenge is then put to men.

Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man; she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains so weak a being to her duty.3 If men will not grant the trial, let them say plainly that they alone have reason, and then women have no inherent rights to claim, and by the same rule their duties vanish, for rights and duties are inseparable.3

I will not have virtue expected where understanding has been denied. Be just, then, and allow her the rights of reason, or be worse than Egyptian task-masters.3

Sources

  1. the neglected education of my fellow creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore; and that women in particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes, originating from one hasty conclusion.
    A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
  2. improvable reason is allowed to be the dignified distinction, which raises men above the brute creation, and puts a natural sceptre in a feeble hand.
    A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
  3. Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty.
    A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
  4. this artificial weakness produces a propensity to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of strength
    A Vindication of the Rights of Woman