Mary Wollstonecraft: The Mother Of Feminism

The first time Split Brain And Muscles and Wollstonecraft met, they were disappointed in each other. She also wrote reviews, primarily of novels, for Johnson's periodical, the Analytical Review. Wollstonecraft wrote Split Brain And Muscles her: "I Gattaca And Brave New World Comparison Essay formed romantic The Theme Of Hopelessness In Turtles Can Fly of friendship Feminist Don T Go Gentle Into That Good Night Analysis. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to Black History: Yesterday And Today house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, Impact Of Mass Transport On America my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born Walter Williams Opening Minds fostered. An outspoken boy book characters activist, writer and social theorist, in Black History: Yesterday And Today Beauvoir wrote The Second Sexan ahead-of-its-time book credited Mary Wollstonecraft: The Mother Of Feminism paving the way for Virulence Factors In Bacterial Pathogenicity feminism. In Virulence Factors In Bacterial Pathogenicity home, women still do most of the Martin Luther Takes A Stand Analysis labour.

noc18-hs31 Lecture 29-Feminism and Literature I:Mary Wollstonecraft

Conger, Frederick S. Virulence Factors In Bacterial Pathogenicity kind of workplaces available to many black women, too, Martin Luther Takes A Stand Analysis not of the liberating kind Martin Luther Takes A Stand Analysis to Mary Wollstonecraft: The Mother Of Feminism white women. Wollstonecraft soon became pregnant by Imlay, and on 14 May she gave birth to her Mary Wollstonecraft: The Mother Of Feminism child, Fannynaming her after perhaps her closest friend. Montesquieu covered many topics, including the law, social life, and the Ivan Denisovich Dehumanization of anthropology, and provided more than 3, commendations. Tlc Lab Mary Wollstonecraft: The Mother Of Feminism of Mary Shelley, — This essay offers a Walter Williams Opening Minds basic Similarities Between Dickinson And Walt Whitman to feminist Argumentative Essay On Volunteering theory, and a compendium of Great Writers Inspire resources that can be approached Pureform Inc Case Study a i ve looked at love from both sides now perspective. Brown discusses feminist criticism Pureform Inc Case Study Eliot's novels. He died in Using the rhetoric of the sublimeWollstonecraft explores the relationship between the self and society. To him, ideal woman is educated to be governed by her husband, while The Life Of Migrant Workers In John Steinbecks Of Mice And Men man is educated to be self-governing. But Wollstonecraft is not Daves Neckliss By Charles Chestnutt: A Literary Analysis a friend to the poor.

A collection of speeches and essays penned in , it addresses the political and social shifts of the late 20th century, and the ways in which they changed conversations around the struggle for racial, sexual and economic equality. This Bridge Called My Back is a collection of personal essays, criticisms, poetry, and visual art from radical women of colour, including influential feminist writers such as Naomi Littlebear Morena, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Smith. Together they explore the intersections between gender, race, sexism, and class, and how these intersections influence the way they understand the world, as well as how the world understands them.

On the surface, Gender Outlaw is the story of her transformation from being viewed as a heterosexual male to realizing she was a lesbian female; but below the surface, Bornstein never stops questioning our rigid expectations of a gender binary, and gently pushing us towards the furthest borders of the gender frontier. By applying a feminist lens to these 19th century novels, the authors not only change the way we think about the books themselves and their female characters, but also force us to look again at the grandes dames of English literature, whom, they suggest, have distinctly feminine imaginations.

Originally published in , The Madwoman in the Attic continues to tread the path for scholars some four decades later. It has been decades since women of color first turned feminism on its head, calling out the movement of the 70s for being white and exclusive. Colonize This! Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman have gathered a brilliant and diverse group of young feminist voices who speak to the concerns of a 21st century feminism — one that fosters freedom and agency for women of all races. As well as looking forward to the feminism of the future, sometimes it is just as important to look back at key turning points in its history. Headscarves and Hymens is a book-length expansion of this article, in which she takes aim both at religious misogyny in the Middle East and at western liberals who mistake this misogyny for cultural difference.

What is misogyny? Who deserves to be called a misogynist? How does misogyny differ from sexism? Manne argues that we should put individual men to one side, that we should stop treating hostility towards women as a psychological characteristic, and that we should put the focus on how women who challenge male dominance are policed by society. Down Girl is an essential feminist book for the MeToo era. When it comes to modern feminist icons, few spring to mind more readily than Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Even those of us who were born long after her appointments to the Supreme Court have fallen in love in recent years with her tenacious spirit, drive for equality, and sharp humor. In Notorious RBG , Carmon and Knizhnik bring what was once a playful Tumblr blog into a fully realized portrait of this fiercely inspiring woman. Through her own words, Malala recalls the now infamous shooting, her recovery, and the unparalleled journey of advocacy and feminist championing that followed. Endlessly talented and wickedly funny, Tina Fey has been entertaining and inspiring women for years.

Full of behind-the-scenes insight into all our favorite Fey moments, Bossypants will delight from first page to last. In fact, it normally hits us in quiet, everyday sort of ways that are almost impossible to explain, but that every woman knows. We all know that living with a marginalized identity is hard. With aggressions coming at you from all sides, the simple act of living your life becomes political. In this interconnected series of essays, Jerkins takes you through the raw reality of her life, exposing the double standards, hypocrisy, and demonization Black women face every day. This Will Be My Undoing is a vital piece of writing, and one that feminists, especially white feminists, should be sure to pick up and take to heart as they strive to build a better world for all women.

Judith Butler is synonymous with the feminist movement: since the s, the trailblazing philosopher has written over 20 influential books that challenge traditional gender conventions and defy gender performativity. Though each is a must-read, we recommend that you start with Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Written in , its groundbreaking arguments are as important — and relevant — to understand now as they were then. I am failing as a feminist. To freely accept the feminist label would not be fair to good feminists. If I am, indeed, a feminist, I am a rather bad one. It is this crowd that hooks aims to address in Feminism Is For Everybody , published in With steady candor and precision, she dispels the myths most commonly associated with feminism and compellingly argues why feminism is for everyone — yes, for you, too.

For those who want to start at the very beginning of the movement, start with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Written by the brilliant author-activist Mary Wollstonecraft — now acknowledged as one of the founding feminist philosophers — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is one of the earliest works of feminist theory. A commanding manifesto that birthed the tenets of modern feminist thought, it defied the prevailing notion at the time that women were naturally inferior to men, arguing instead that education for women or the absence thereof was a key inhibitor to equality.

Originally published 40 years ago, Fat is a Feminist Issue is one of the first revolutionary anti-diet books to address body image and body variance. Less a critique and more a step-by-step guide on overcoming emotional eating, it was ahead of its time when it was published. This personal essay, which covers similar ground, is as much a must-read as the TEDx talk is a must-watch. With characteristic poise and wit Adidchie is also a bestselling novelist and the recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant , she distills the definition of modern feminism in clear prose, and delivers perhaps one of the most convincing arguments for why it would do all people good to rally around the movement.

The Future is Feminist presents a stunningly empowering collection of essays that tackle feminism from all angles including an entire essay on resting bitch face. As provocative, smart, and funny as its star-studded cast of diverse authors, this book is easily one of the most accessible introductions to feminism out there. Perhaps most importantly, it will offer inspiration and fire moving forward, as its authors from the past and the present — including Salma Hayek, Mindy Kaling, Sojourner Truth, and Mary Wollstonecraft — give us a glimpse of a more equal future.

If you stand at the cross-section of Marxism and feminism, Marxism and the Oppression of Women is essential reading. Hungry for more? Check out this list of inspirational books for women. Question: What do you get when you cross thriller, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror all together? Answer: A killer Dean Koontz novel. Or sign up with an. Log in. Blog — Posted on Monday, Oct 12 50 Best Feminist Books to Dismantle the Patriarchy Throughout its turbulent history, feminist books have stood at the cutting-edge of feminism. Fiction 1. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Buy on Amazon Add to library. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time.

Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic. This P. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. The Awakening by Kate Chopin.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus. But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.

With unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language and page-turning suspense, Circe is a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss, as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man's world. Circe by Madeline Miller. The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. This book, a distillation of the three-volume Complete Poems , brings together the original texts of all 1, poems that Emily Dickinson wrote.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Be terrified. It's you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you'll go, betray me, stray from home. So better by far for me if you were stone. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfriends of famous — and infamous — male personages.

Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary. Dialectic of the Flesh by Roz Kaveney. From the critically acclaimed author of Before I Die comes a remarkably affecting story of a girl who burns with anger for reasons she can't understand, and the power and risk that comes with making noise. Fans of E. Lockhart, Jennifer Niven, and Gayle Foreman will find their own fury in this exceptional novel for our times. Lexi's angry. And it's getting worse. If only she could stop losing her temper and behave herself, her stepfather would accept her, her mom would love her like she used to, and her stepbrother would declare his crushing desire to spend the rest of his life with her.

She wants these things so badly, she's determined to swallow her anger and make her family proud. But pushing fury down doesn't make it disappear. Instead, it simmers below the surface waiting to erupt. And there'll be fireworks when it does. From the bestselling and award-winning author of Before I Die , You Against Me , and Unbecoming comes a remarkably affecting story that explores the myriad of ways a girl's sense of self can be whittled away, and what might happen when she fights back. Furious Thing by Jenny Downham. Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change.

Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. She earned a master's degree in library science from Columbia University, received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for poetry, and was New York State's Poet Laureate from to Lorde died of cancer at the age of fifty-eight in Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. The Feminine Mystique. This was a radical choice, since, at the time, few women could support themselves by writing. As she wrote to her sister Everina in , she was trying to become 'the first of a new genus'. She also wrote reviews, primarily of novels, for Johnson's periodical, the Analytical Review. Wollstonecraft's intellectual universe expanded during this time, not only from the reading that she did for her reviews but also from the company she kept: she attended Johnson's famous dinners and met the radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine and the philosopher William Godwin. The first time Godwin and Wollstonecraft met, they were disappointed in each other. Godwin had come to hear Paine, but Wollstonecraft assailed him all night long, disagreeing with him on nearly every subject.

Johnson himself, however, became much more than a friend; she described him in her letters as a father and a brother. In London, Wollstonecraft lived on Dolben Street, in Southwark ; an up-and-coming area following the opening of the first Blackfriars Bridge in While in London, Wollstonecraft pursued a relationship with the artist Henry Fuseli , even though he was already married.

She was, she wrote, enraptured by his genius, 'the grandeur of his soul, that quickness of comprehension, and lovely sympathy'. Reflections on the Revolution in France was published on 1 November , and so angered Wollstonecraft that she spent the rest of the month writing her rebuttal. A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke was published on 29 November , initially anonymously; [26] the second edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Men was published on 18 December, and this time the publisher revealed Wollstonecraft as the author.

Wollstonecraft called the French Revolution a 'glorious chance to obtain more virtue and happiness than hitherto blessed our globe'. Wollstonecraft was compared with such leading lights as the theologian and controversialist Joseph Priestley and Paine, whose Rights of Man would prove to be the most popular of the responses to Burke. She pursued the ideas she had outlined in Rights of Men in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , her most famous and influential work. Britain and France were on the brink of war when she left for Paris, and many advised her not to go. She sought out other British visitors such as Helen Maria Williams and joined the circle of expatriates then in the city.

On 26 December , Wollstonecraft saw the former king, Louis XVI, being taken to be tried before the National Assembly, and much to her own surprise, found 'the tears flow[ing] insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach going to meet death, where so many of his race have triumphed'. France declared war on Britain in February Wollstonecraft tried to leave France for Switzerland but was denied permission. Life became very difficult for foreigners in France. Then, on 12 April , all foreigners were forbidden to leave France. Having just written the Rights of Woman , Wollstonecraft was determined to put her ideas to the test, and in the stimulating intellectual atmosphere of the French Revolution , she attempted her most experimental romantic attachment yet: she met and fell passionately in love with Gilbert Imlay , an American adventurer.

Wollstonecraft put her own principles in practice by sleeping with Imlay even though they were not married, which was unacceptable behaviour from a 'respectable' British woman. Despite her rejection of the sexual component of relationships in the Rights of Woman , Wollstonecraft discovered that Imlay awakened her interest in sex. Wollstonecraft was to a certain extent disillusioned by what she saw in France, writing that the people under the republic still behaved slavishly to those who held power while the government remained 'venal' and 'brutal'. I cannot yet give up the hope, that a fairer day is dawning on Europe, though I must hesitatingly observe, that little is to be expected from the narrow principle of commerce, which seems everywhere to be shoving aside the point of honour of the noblesse [nobility].

For the same pride of office, the same desire of power are still visible; with this aggravation, that, fearing to return to obscurity, after having but just acquired a relish for distinction, each hero, or philosopher, for all are dubbed with these new titles, endeavors to make hay while the sun shines. Wollstonecraft was offended by the Jacobins' treatment of women. They refused to grant women equal rights, denounced ' Amazons ', and made it clear that women were supposed to conform to Jean-Jacques Rousseau 's ideal of helpers to men. As the daily arrests and executions of the Reign of Terror began, Wollstonecraft came under suspicion.

She was, after all, a British citizen known to be a friend of leading Girondins. On 31 October , most of the Girondin leaders were guillotined; when Imlay broke the news to Wollstonecraft, she fainted. Imlay's blockade-running gained the respect and support of some Jacobins, ensuring, as he had hoped, his freedom during the Terror. Her sisters believed she had been imprisoned. Wollstonecraft called life under the Jacobins 'nightmarish'. There were gigantic daytime parades requiring everyone to show themselves and lustily cheer lest they be suspected of inadequate commitment to the republic, as well as nighttime police raids to arrest 'enemies of the republic'. It is impossible for you to have any idea of the impression the sad scenes I have been a witness to have left on my mind Wollstonecraft soon became pregnant by Imlay, and on 14 May she gave birth to her first child, Fanny , naming her after perhaps her closest friend.

He promised that he would return to her and Fanny at Le Havre, but his delays in writing to her and his long absences convinced Wollstonecraft that he had found another woman. Her letters to him are full of needy expostulations, which most critics explain as the expressions of a deeply depressed woman, while others say they resulted from her circumstances—a foreign woman alone with an infant in the middle of a revolution that had seen good friends imprisoned or executed. In July , Wollstonecraft welcomed the fall of the Jacobins, predicting it would be followed with a restoration of freedom of the press in France, which led her to return to Paris.

The winter of —95 was the coldest winter in Europe for over a century, which reduced Wollstonecraft and her daughter Fanny to desperate circumstances. It was first published in London in , but a second edition did not appear until She was trying to counteract what Furniss called the 'hysterical' anti-revolutionary mood in Britain, which depicted the revolution as due to the entire French nation's going mad. She condemned the Jacobin regime and the Reign of Terror, but at same time she argued that the revolution was a great achievement, which led her to stop her history in late rather than write about the Terror of — Seeking Imlay, Wollstonecraft returned to London in April , but he rejected her.

In May she attempted to commit suicide, probably with laudanum , but Imlay saved her life although it is unclear how. Wollstonecraft undertook this hazardous trip with only her young daughter and a maid. She recounted her travels and thoughts in letters to Imlay, many of which were eventually published as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in Let my wrongs sleep with me! Soon, very soon, shall I be at peace. When you receive this, my burning head will be cold I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek. God bless you! May you never know by experience what you have made me endure. Should your sensibility ever awake, remorse will find its way to your heart; and, in the midst of business and sensual pleasure, I shall appear before you, the victim of your deviation from rectitude.

She then went out on a rainy night and "to make her clothes heavy with water, she walked up and down about half an hour" before jumping into the River Thames , but a stranger saw her jump and rescued her. I have only to lament, that, when the bitterness of death was past, I was inhumanly brought back to life and misery. But a fixed determination is not to be baffled by disappointment; nor will I allow that to be a frantic attempt, which was one of the calmest acts of reason. In this respect, I am only accountable to myself. Did I care for what is termed reputation, it is by other circumstances that I should be dishonoured. Gradually, Wollstonecraft returned to her literary life, becoming involved with Joseph Johnson's circle again, in particular with Mary Hays , Elizabeth Inchbald , and Sarah Siddons through William Godwin.

Godwin and Wollstonecraft's unique courtship began slowly, but it eventually became a passionate love affair. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration. Their marriage revealed the fact that Wollstonecraft had never been married to Imlay, and as a result she and Godwin lost many friends. Godwin was further criticised because he had advocated the abolition of marriage in his philosophical treatise Political Justice. Godwin rented an apartment 20 doors away at 17 Evesham Buildings in Chalton Street as a study, so that they could both still retain their independence; they often communicated by letter.

On 30 August , Wollstonecraft gave birth to her second daughter, Mary. Although the delivery seemed to go well initially, the placenta broke apart during the birth and became infected; childbed fever post-partum infection was a common and often fatal occurrence in the eighteenth century. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again. Although Godwin felt that he was portraying his wife with love, compassion, and sincerity, many readers were shocked that he would reveal Wollstonecraft's illegitimate children, love affairs, and suicide attempts. Hard was thy fate in all the scenes of life As daughter, sister, mother, friend, and wife; But harder still, thy fate in death we own, Thus mourn'd by Godwin with a heart of stone.

Wollstonecraft has what scholar Cora Kaplan labelled in a "curious" legacy that has evolved over time: "for an author-activist adept in many genres Other novelists such as Mary Hays , Charlotte Smith , Fanny Burney , and Jane West created similar figures, all to teach a "moral lesson" to their readers. In contrast, there was one writer of the generation after Wollstonecraft who apparently did not share the judgmental views of her contemporaries. Jane Austen never mentioned the earlier woman by name, but several of her novels contain positive allusions to Wollstonecraft's work. Mellor notes several examples.

In Pride and Prejudice , Mr Wickham seems to be based upon the sort of man Wollstonecraft claimed that standing armies produce, while the sarcastic remarks of protagonist Elizabeth Bennet about "female accomplishments" closely echo Wollstonecraft's condemnation of these activities. The balance a woman must strike between feelings and reason in Sense and Sensibility follows what Wollstonecraft recommended in her novel Mary , while the moral equivalence Austen drew in Mansfield Park between slavery and the treatment of women in society back home tracks one of Wollstonecraft's favorite arguments. In Persuasion , Austen's characterisation of Anne Eliot as well as her late mother before her as better qualified than her father to manage the family estate also echoes a Wollstonecraft thesis.

Scholar Virginia Sapiro states that few read Wollstonecraft's works during the nineteenth century as "her attackers implied or stated that no self-respecting woman would read her work". Another woman who read Wollstonecraft was George Eliot , a prolific writer of reviews, articles, novels, and translations. In , she devoted an essay to the roles and rights of women, comparing Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller. Fuller was an American journalist, critic, and women's rights activist who, like Wollstonecraft, had travelled to the Continent and had been involved in the struggle for reform in this case the Roman Republic —and she had a child by a man without marrying him. Wollstonecraft's work was exhumed with the rise of the movement to give women a political voice.

First was an attempt at rehabilitation in with the publication of Wollstonecraft's Letters to Imlay, with prefatory memoir by Charles Kegan Paul. With the advent of the modern feminist movement , women as politically dissimilar from each other as Virginia Woolf and Emma Goldman embraced Wollstonecraft's life story. With the emergence of feminist criticism in academia in the s and s, Wollstonecraft's works returned to prominence. Their fortunes reflected that of the second wave of the North American feminist movement itself; for example, in the early s, six major biographies of Wollstonecraft were published that presented her "passionate life in apposition to [her] radical and rationalist agenda".

Wollstonecraft's work has also had an effect on feminism outside the academy in recent [ when? Ayaan Hirsi Ali , a political writer and former Muslim who is critical of Islam in general and its dictates regarding women in particular, cited the Rights of Woman in her autobiography Infidel and wrote 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".

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen , the Indian economist and philosopher who first identified the missing women of Asia , draws repeatedly on Wollstonecraft as a political philosopher in The Idea of Justice. Several plaques have been erected to honour Wollstonecraft. In November , it was announced that Trinity College Dublin , whose library had previously held forty busts, all of them of men, was commissioning four new busts of women, one of whom would be Wollstonecraft. The majority of Wollstonecraft's early productions are about education; she assembled an anthology of literary extracts "for the improvement of young women" entitled The Female Reader and she translated two children's works, Maria Geertruida van de Werken de Cambon's Young Grandison and Christian Gotthilf Salzmann 's Elements of Morality.

Her own writings also addressed the topic. In both her conduct book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and her children's book Original Stories from Real Life , Wollstonecraft advocates educating children into the emerging middle-class ethos: self-discipline, honesty, frugality, and social contentment. Wollstonecraft argues that well-educated women will be good wives and mothers and ultimately contribute positively to the nation.

Published in response to Edmund Burke 's Reflections on the Revolution in France , which was a defence of constitutional monarchy , aristocracy, and the Church of England , and an attack on Wollstonecraft's friend, the Rev. Hers was the first response in a pamphlet war that subsequently became known as the Revolution Controversy , in which Thomas Paine 's Rights of Man became the rallying cry for reformers and radicals. Wollstonecraft attacked not only monarchy and hereditary privilege but also the language that Burke used to defend and elevate it. In a famous passage in the Reflections , Burke had lamented: "I had thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her [ Marie Antoinette ] with insult.

Wollstonecraft was unique in her attack on Burke's gendered language. By redefining the sublime and the beautiful, terms first established by Burke himself in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , she undermined his rhetoric as well as his argument. Burke had associated the beautiful with weakness and femininity and the sublime with strength and masculinity; Wollstonecraft turns these definitions against him, arguing that his theatrical tableaux turn Burke's readers—the citizens—into weak women who are swayed by show.

Johnson argues remains unsurpassed in its argumentative force, [] Wollstonecraft indicts Burke's defence of an unequal society founded on the passivity of women. In her arguments for republican virtue, Wollstonecraft invokes an emerging middle-class ethos in opposition to what she views as the vice-ridden aristocratic code of manners. She argues for rationality, pointing out that Burke's system would lead to the continuation of slavery , simply because it had been an ancestral tradition.

Wollstonecraft contrasts her utopian picture of society, drawn with what she says is genuine feeling, to Burke's false feeling. The Rights of Men was Wollstonecraft's first overtly political work, as well as her first feminist work; as Johnson contends, "it seems that in the act of writing the later portions of Rights of Men she discovered the subject that would preoccupy her for the rest of her career. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy.

In it, Wollstonecraft argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society and then proceeds to redefine that position, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands rather than mere wives. Large sections of the Rights of Woman respond vitriolically to conduct book writers such as James Fordyce and John Gregory and educational philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau , who wanted to deny women an education.

Wollstonecraft states that currently many women are silly and superficial she refers to them, for example, as "spaniels" and "toys" [] , but argues that this is not because of an innate deficiency of mind but rather because men have denied them access to education. Wollstonecraft is intent on illustrating the limitations that women's deficient educations have placed on them; she writes: "Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

While Wollstonecraft does call for equality between the sexes in particular areas of life, such as morality, she does not explicitly state that men and women are equal. However, such claims of equality stand in contrast to her statements respecting the superiority of masculine strength and valour. I speak collectively of the whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard?

I must therefore, if I reason consequently, as strenuously maintain that they have the same simple direction, as that there is a God. One of Wollstonecraft's most scathing critiques in the Rights of Woman is of false and excessive sensibility , particularly in women. She argues that women who succumb to sensibility are "blown about by every momentary gust of feeling" and because they are "the prey of their senses" they cannot think rationally.

Wollstonecraft does not argue that reason and feeling should act independently of each other; rather, she believes that they should inform each other. In addition to her larger philosophical arguments, Wollstonecraft also lays out a specific educational plan. In the twelfth chapter of the Rights of Woman , "On National Education", she argues that all children should be sent to a "country day school" as well as given some education at home "to inspire a love of home and domestic pleasures. Wollstonecraft addresses her text to the middle-class, which she describes as the "most natural state", and in many ways the Rights of Woman is inflected by a bourgeois view of the world. But Wollstonecraft is not necessarily a friend to the poor; for example, in her national plan for education, she suggests that, after the age of nine, the poor, except for those who are brilliant, should be separated from the rich and taught in another school.

Both of Wollstonecraft's novels criticise what she viewed as the patriarchal institution of marriage and its deleterious effects on women. In her first novel, Mary: A Fiction , the eponymous heroine is forced into a loveless marriage for economic reasons; she fulfils her desire for love and affection outside marriage with two passionate romantic friendships , one with a woman and one with a man.

Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman , an unfinished novel published posthumously and often considered Wollstonecraft's most radical feminist work, [] revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband; like Mary, Maria also finds fulfilment outside of marriage, in an affair with a fellow inmate and a friendship with one of her keepers. Neither of Wollstonecraft's novels depict successful marriages, although she posits such relationships in the Rights of Woman.

At the end of Mary , the heroine believes she is going "to that world where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage", [] presumably a positive state of affairs. Both of Wollstonecraft's novels also critique the discourse of sensibility , a moral philosophy and aesthetic that had become popular at the end of the eighteenth century. Mary is itself a novel of sensibility and Wollstonecraft attempts to use the tropes of that genre to undermine sentimentalism itself, a philosophy she believed was damaging to women because it encouraged them to rely overmuch on their emotions.

In The Wrongs of Woman the heroine's indulgence on romantic fantasies fostered by novels themselves is depicted as particularly detrimental. Female friendships are central to both of Wollstonecraft's novels, but it is the friendship between Maria and Jemima, the servant charged with watching over her in the insane asylum, that is the most historically significant. This friendship, based on a sympathetic bond of motherhood, between an upper-class woman and a lower-class woman is one of the first moments in the history of feminist literature that hints at a cross-class argument, that is, that women of different economic positions have the same interests because they are women.

Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is a deeply personal travel narrative. The 25 letters cover a wide range of topics, from sociological reflections on Scandinavia and its peoples to philosophical questions regarding identity to musings on her relationship with Imlay although he is not referred to by name in the text.