A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman Analysis

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In A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft seems to view sensibility as a weakness, a form of crutch that women are succumbed to use in their daily lives. Throughout the first part of Vindication Wollstonecraft gives rise to all the misfortune women are dealt, to the lack of education provided them to them being seen raised solely to emanate their beauty and sexuality. Women being seen as such are stricken to only being able to think with their emotions. They have no sense or reason, only their sensibility. How Wollstonecraft came to view sensibility on such a level comes to question. During Wollstonecraft’s youth her father came into a great sum of money to which he whittled away at unsparingly, leaving the women in his family with nothing. With the inheritance gone the Wollstonecraft family not only lost…show more content…
xii). Women feel powerful when they can turn the head of a man and use their beauty as they were taught to rein the man in. Unfortunately, the man then uses her for his sole desire not hers. She becomes his “slave” and is to succumb to his every need, thereby disempowering her; becoming reduced to that which she was taught. The woman, yet again, begins worrying about her impression on others, about her household duties, and about the menial material things. Wollstonecraft can’t quite grasp how one’s mind can have such mindless cares. But, according to Rousseau, women solely exist for such things, to which Wollstonecraft argued against. Wollstonecraft believed that views such as this are “brutal and brutalizing in a literal sense”, stating that “it allows the animalistic senses to dictate to the mind and gives free reign to passion and raw emotion over the ‘power of reflecting’” (p. xvi); yet another reason why she argues against
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