I found Mary Wollstonecraft’s essay on the rights of women
very difficult to get through due to the massive amounts of difficult
vocabulary and the different style of writing that she uses. I found myself
having to stop multiple times either to re-read paragraphs of the essay or to
look up definitions of unfamiliar words she was using.
Wollstonecraft clearly feels very strongly about education
not only helping to gain knowledge, but also forming the person as a whole. I
had never really thought about that point, but I fully agree with her.
I also learned through reading this essay that Dr. Gregory
and Rousseau share very similar beliefs on women’s rights. They both think that
women should be inferior to men. Thoughts such as these anger me when I read them
now, but back when this essay was composed in the 1700s, these thoughts were
very common. It is hard to think about living as a woman back in those days.
One quote I found is “they are never to exercise their own
reason, never to be independent, never to rise above opinion, or to feel the
dignity of a rational will that only bows to God…” I felt that this was her way
of saying that women weren’t thought to be able to reason and think for
themselves.
Although I cannot say that I enjoyed reading this essay
because of the difficulty of reading a piece from the 1700s, it did show me
just how much opinions have really changed of women in society. It also made me
very glad to be living in 2012 as a woman instead of in the 1700s!
I agree with you Zoe: reading this essay was very difficult! I liked how Wollstonecraft was so gung ho about women's education. Reading an essay from the 1700's was a struggle, and I felt that if Wollstonecraft had shortened the essay it would have been more powerful. I appreciated the quote you liked as well it inspired me to stick up for what I believe in, because without feminists like her we wouldn't have gotten anywhere with equal rights.
ReplyDeleteHi Zoe,
ReplyDeleteI could not agree more with your blog post! This paper was very hard to get through, that might be why this paper is the one I marked up the most with annotations. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to live back in those days where the guys expected you to please them every hour of the day. I personally think I would've gone insane before I would've listened to their rules. I am so happy that the women since then have taken a stand against all of that! Makes me really realize that the rights women have today can not be taken for granted. They've made a lot of great progress over these 2,000 years and I only hope to see more.