Wollstonecraft belongs to a tradition of Classical Republicanism. Broadly speaking, Republicanism aligned itself with a classical tradition of republican freedom as articulated in the writings of Roman authors such as Livy, Polybius, and Cicero. Their ideas were developed further by Italian, British, and eventually American thinkers.
Luckily for Nora, Torvald worships his wife and imposes no restrictions on her except for a ban on eating macarons, a minor imposition at best. Even though Nora is allowed by Torvald to act as she wishes in most areas of her life, the lingering power Torvald has over her subtly denies Nora true freedom. Republicans would say that Nora was not free because of the arbitrary power hanging over her head. Arbitrary power creates dependence and subordination, while freedom from arbitrary power cultivates independence and equality.
Wollstonecraft believed that the life of a slave would produce slavish behaviour. Slaves trick their masters and attempt to curry favour with them in order to live comfortably.
In her view, marriage was scarcely better than slavery. According to Wollstonecraft, there are two kinds of independence: independence of mind and civil independence. Independence of mind is the ability to think freely and unhindered by others. However, this lofty ideal of independence of mind would all be for nought if women did not have the means by which to act upon their convictions.
Our beliefs and thoughts are important, but virtue is achieved through action. At the time, women were forbidden to work most jobs, denied a proper education, excluded from politics and were wholly dependent on their husbands.
This made it impossible for them to live virtuous lives. Since we are all born as blank slates, there is nothing innate in us that entitles any person to authority over another, explained Wollstonecraft.
To submit to any authority other than reason is degrading to our character; thus all arbitrary power must be abolished. Women, Wollstonecraft said, must be given the same range of choices as men. Wollstonecraft also wished to see women play a role in government, both as representatives and voters. Histories of political philosophy tend to be composed mostly of men, with few women featuring prominently.
Wollstonecraft is one of the founding feminists. Her inspiring vision of a world in which women are treated as rational and autonomous beings inspired a wide variety of thinkers within the early feminist movement. A lack of freedom also implies a lack of virtue, as servility degrades and corrupts our character. To cultivate virtue, one must have independence of mind and civil independence.
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Her book 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' pressed for educational reforms. Olivia Rodrigo —. Megan Thee Stallion —. Bowen Yang —. Despite her own practice of the genre, her many reviews reveal the degree to which, she, like many other moralists in the eighteenth century, feared the moral consequences of reading novels.
She believed that even those of a relatively superior quality encouraged vanity and selfishness. She was to concede, however, that reading such works might nonetheless be better than not reading at all. Until the end of , her articles were mostly of a moral and aesthetic nature. This address to the Revolution Society in commemoration of the events of partly prompted Burke to compose his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event In September , Wollstonecraft began A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, which elaborated a number of points made in the previous Vindication , namely, that in most cases, marriage was nothing but a property relation, and that the education women received ensured that they could not meet the expectations society had of them and almost certainly guaranteed them an unhappy life.
Following the publication of her second Vindication , Wollstonecraft was introduced to the French statesman and diplomat, Charles Talleyrand, on his mission to London on the part of the Constituent Assembly in February She dedicated the second edition of the A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to him.
They never married. Most of all, her love of Imlay brought Wollstonecraft to the realisation that the passions are not so easily brought to heel by reason. Wollstonecraft had a girl by Imlay. She broke with Imlay finally in March In April of the same year, she renewed her acquaintance with William Godwin and they became lovers that summer.
They were married at St Pancras church in March It is important to note however that whilst Locke advocated home education to shield boys from the bad influences to which they might be subject at school, Wollstonecraft was mostly inclined to think the opposite on the grounds that children needed to be with persons of their own age. In an ideal world, boys and girls would be educated together in schools. It is stressed in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Self-mastery was thus the aim of education and it was the duty of parents to ensure that their children received it.
Ultimately, she wanted children and young people to educated in such a way as to have well balanced minds in strong and healthy bodies. That mind and body needed to be exercised and prepared to face the inevitable hardships of life is the fundamental point of her of her pedagogical works Tomaselli She endorsed his view of liberty of conscience as a sacred right and wrote sympathetically about his plea for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which imposed civil disabilities on Dissenters.
She also seemed to support his claim that the political Settlement of was wanting in that it did not make for full representation of the people and hence made only for partial liberty. Finally, Wollstonecraft reproduced the passage in which Price linked the American and French revolutions and clamoured for the end of despotism throughout Europe. Far from thinking that the events taking place in France gave grounds for rejoicing, Burke feared their consequences from the very start.
Of the disagreements between Price and Wollstonecraft, on the one hand, and Burke, on the other, one of the deepest was over their respective view of the nature of civil society and of political power in general.
The two friends believed that government, the rule of law, and all human relations could be simplified, explicated, and rendered transparent, and both were convinced that this was the task ahead for all lovers of liberty. For Burke, on the contrary, civil society consisted of countless ineffable links between individuals. To sweep away established practices and institutions and think of politics as a mere matter of administrating in accordance with a set of abstract rules or rights uninformed by the customs and culture, and hence the national character, of a people was, in his view, to demonstrate a crass disregard for the most obvious facts of human nature and history Conniff It consists mostly of a sustained attack on Burke rather than a defence of the rights of man.
This is partly because Wollstonecraft took for granted a Lockean conception of God-given rights discoverable by reason, except when the latter was warped by self-love.
Wollstonecraft further believed that God made all things right and that the cause of all evil was man. As she was to do in her next and more famous Vindication , Wollstonecraft did not simply clamour for rights, but emphasised that these entail duties; but she also insisted that none could be expected to perform duties whose natural rights were not respected.
There was no question of blanket reverence for the past and its juridical legacy. As for civilization, she thought its progress very uneven and dismissed the culture of politeness and polish as nothing but a screen behind which hypocrisy, egotism and greed festered unchecked.
Finally, opposing nature and reason to artifice and politeness, she made herself the true patriot and Burke the fickle Francophile. She was the clear-headed independent thinker, he the emotive creature of a system of patronage. In the midst of her tirade she turned, rather unexpectedly, to the subject of family life and the limits of parental authority, especially in relation to arranged marriages Tomaselli She condemned marriages of convenience together with late marriages: both fostered immorality in her view.
Indeed, from her perspective, nearly every aspect of the prevailing culture had that consequence, for, in bringing girls up to be nothing but empty headed playthings, parents made for a morally bankrupt society.
Such beings could never make dutiful mothers, as they took the horizon to be the eyes of the men they flirted with.
The moral depravity of a society devoted to the acquisition of property and its conspicuous display rather than to the pursuit of reason and the protection of natural rights found the means of its reproduction in the family, she contended.
Here her dispute was not just with Burke, but implicitly also with Price Jones, In his sermon, he had deplored the sexual depravity of the times that he saw embodied even in those he considered patriots. But to seek only to vindicate the rights of men, as Price had done, was insufficient and misconceived, according to Wollstonecraft. If one sought a truly moral society, the family had to change, and this, in turn, required a complete transformation in the nature of the relationship between men and women before, and within, marriage Botting Only a sound upbringing of both the sexes could secure that.
This was the nub of her attack on political theorists and educationalists alike. When Wollstonecraft came to write The Vindication of the Rights of Woman , which she did within a matter of months following the publication of her first overtly political work, the moral rejuvenation of society and the happiness of individual women were woven together.
Women were ill-prepared for their duties as social beings and imprisoned in a web of false expectations that would inevitably make them miserable. She wanted women to become rational and independent beings whose sense of worth came, not from their appearance, but from their inner perception of self-command and knowledge.
Women had to be educated; their minds and bodies had to be trained. This would make them good companions, wives, mothers and citizens Brace Above all it would make them fully human, that is, beings ruled by reason and characterised by self-command.
It argues that women should be taught skills so as to be able to support themselves and their children in widowhood, and never have to marry or remarry out of financial necessity. It seeks to reclaim midwifery for women, against the encroachment of men into this profession, and contends that women could be physicians just as well as nurses.
It urges women to extend their interests to encompass politics and the concerns of the whole of humanity. It also contains advice on how to make marriages last. Husbands and wives ought not, moreover, to be overly intimate and should maintain a degree of reserve towards each other.
This said, she thought sex should be based on genuine mutual physical desire. Wollstonecraft wanted women to aspire to full citizenship, to be worthy of it, and this necessitated the development of reason. Rational women would perceive their real duties. That she embraced the social and economic consequences of her vision of happy marriages, based on friendship and producing the next moral generation was spelled out further in her subsequent work, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe In that work, she endeavoured, amongst other things, to assess the merits and demerits of the progress of humanity and establish the causes of French despotism.
Borrowing from Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments and Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations she had drawn on previously, she sketched a possible future society in which the division of labour would be kept to a minimum and the sexes would be not only educated together but encouraged to work in family units.
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