Responding to Wollstonecraft

Victoria Powell

Mary Wollstonecraft is an author that expresses her beliefs about society and their beliefs. Mary Wollstonecraft decides to write this letter to share her beliefs that men and women should have equal opportunities and equal rights. The vindication represents the mission to explain how completely equal Women are to men. One issue she identifies would be the fact that Women shouldn’t be as knowledgeable as men or in other words, they should “stay in a woman’s place”. According to the article it stated “ many ingenious arguments have been presented to prove that in the acquiring of virtue the two sexes ought to have very different aims; or, to put it bluntly, women aren’t thought to have enough

strength of mind to acquire virtue properly so-called”. She begins to go into detail about the unfair societal roles that women are forced to remain in ignorance to uphold their title of “innocence”. She begins to question why that role should only remain to them, she then proceeds to explain how the Men are just projecting their ignorance upon the women, and because some don’t know any better, they proceed to go along with it following the what their mothers teach them about maintaining “softness” and “little knowledge” only for those teachings to be passed down