Yet perhaps there is an alternative to this cutting away at ourselves, this quest to always be the perfect Cinderella princess. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, considered by many to be the first feminist writer, gives us a very different look at what it means to be a woman. Wollstonecraft’s father was an alcoholic, and often beat his wife and daughters. Mary took over care of the family at a young age and was very well educate and self-educated. She decided to go to London and be a writer after leaving her family, a controversial role for women especially then. She was very radical, published a response to "Reflections on the Revolution in France," an attack of the French Revolution, published in 1789. She responded a month later called "Vindication of the Rights of Men" anonymously; appear to have been written by a man. In her texts and for her, "manly" is a synonym for virtuous and rational.
Yet in 1792 she published "Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” singular woman as opposed to plural men. Does woman refer to the individual or does woman generalize all women into one big category with no distinction? I think it's the individual. She isolates "woman" as a class of persons who have been treated the same; "men" is perhaps all human beings, or a number of individual classes; man means human because, for her, it means rational and virtuous.
She claims that the educational system trains women to be immoral and irrational, and thus not "manly" or "humanly," and says that sexism is rooted in that issue. By believing in the system, women are jeopardizing their cause. She furthered her argument into the political sphere as well. Wollstonecraft believes in meritocracy above aristocracy. She attacked royalty more or less, for their use of subordination, even though every profession has subordination. Men, she argues, become subordinate even in the most manly profession like the military because following orders is harmful to your morality because you're not thinking on your own.
She also compares women to soldiers in her work, a very controversial analogy even today if you ask me. She claims though, that women and soldiers both acquire manners before morals and blindly follow orders. Ch. 2 she argues that women are degraded because their education for behavior is given to make them sensually alluring. Women are also like soldiers because they are disciplined and educated to please, i.e. if you educate women in the same way that you educate men, they will behave the same way. This means that the difference between men and women is not natural but nurtured. It's a societal inferiority, not factual. Maybe women aggravate the situation; women boast of their weakness to try to get some kind of power over men, legitimate or illegitimate, as is the case with women who sleep their way to the top. The weakness of men is un-chastity, the desire for women to faint and need to be rescued. Wollstonecraft is angry at women for giving men more power over women than they might otherwise have for "using your powers for evil,” something women today are often still accused of. Mary believes in virtue, she believes that if her word doesn't hold the world is corrupt. So is there ever a way for us to win? If we include men in our lives as partners and helpers, we are faux-Cinderella’s and if we cut them out and use them (as they use us at times) we are irrational and immoral. An interesting double standard, or highly conveniently structured double standard in my opinion.
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