A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is primarily concerned with the inequalities between men and women and is seeking, very consciously, to eradicate these. As the title suggests, this text is about claiming the “rights” of woman, which Wollstonecraft interprets primarily as the right to education. At the time in which Wollstonecraft was writing, there was a vast disparity in the type of education given to men and women. While boys followed a curriculum more closely related to what we consider “education” today, girls were given only minimal academic learning—literacy, mathematics, basic history and geography, some languages—while the majority of their education was directed instead towards acquiring more “feminine” attributes, such as sewing, dancing, and drawing. In essence, most men—and women—believed that “the whole tendency of female education ought to be directed to one point: to render [women] pleasing” (27).

However, it is not simply the disparity in formal education Wollstonecraft hopes to address with her work. In addition, it is the educating influence of society and how women “are treated as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species” (6), which means that women remain inferior to men. Wollstonecraft argues that one reason why men are able to continue subordinating women is because of perceived sexual differences.