Review; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
Description from Goodreads
Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity, and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. Mary Wollstonecraft's work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrage - Walpole called her 'a hyena in petticoats' - yet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.
My Thoughts On The Book
Even though it is a major piece within feminist literature, I honestly struggled reading it due to the late 1700's language. She also seems a bit obsessed with Rousseau. Luckily Mary Wollstonecraft gets her point across (at least occasionally) and she was a bit ahead of her time. No offense to Mary Wollstonecraft, but I do prefer her daughter's well known classic (yes, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, is her daughter).
I've read parts of this before and found it hard to read as well. I found her through her daughter, Mary Shelly. For the Back to the Classics challenge, I read Votes for Women: A Play in 3 Acts for the same category. It's written in the early 1900s, so it isn't such a hard read - and super quick. I also read The Mummy! by Jane Webb Loudon (19th century classic), which was written less than a decade after Frankenstein. It involves bringing a mummy back to life...
ReplyDeleteVotes for Women sounds a bit lighter than A Vindication to put it the nice way. The Mummy! sounds a bit interesting to read. :-)
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