A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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The opening of the introduction
After considering the historic page, and viewing the living world with anxious solicitude, the most melancholy emotions of sorrowful indignation have depressed my spirits, and I have sighed when obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization, which has hitherto taken place in the world, has been very partial. I have turned over various books written on the subject of education, and patiently observed the conduct of parents and the management of schools; but what has been the result? a profound conviction, that the neglected education of my fellow creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore; and that women in particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes, originating from one hasty conclusion. The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove, that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers that are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity. One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.
In a treatise, therefore, on female rights and manners, the works which have been particularly written for their improvement must not be overlooked; especially when it is asserted, in direct terms, that the minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement; that the books of instruction, written by men of genius, have had the same tendency as more frivolous productions; and that, in the true style of Muhammadanism, they are only considered as females, and not as a part of the human species, when improvable reason is allowed to be the dignified distinction, which raises men above the brute creation, and puts a natural sceptre in a feeble hand.
Yet, because I am a woman, I would not lead my readers to suppose, that I mean violently to agitate the contested question respecting the equality and inferiority of the sex; but as the subject lies in my way, and I cannot pass it over without subjecting the main tendency of my reasoning to misconstruction, I shall stop a moment to deliver, in a few words, my opinion. In the government of the physical world, it is observable that the female, in general, is inferior to the male. The male pursues, the female yields—this is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman. This physical superiority cannot be denied—and it is a noble prerogative! But not content with this natural preeminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society.
It begins with the first three paragraphs, as Wollstonecraft names the source of the misery she is writing against:
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London and Paris in the first years of the French Revolution
A dedication, an introduction and thirteen chapters, grouped here into ten movements
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A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument, published in 1792, that women are rational creatures and must be educated as such. It opens with a dedication to Talleyrand, who had just proposed a scheme of national education for France that gave girls a small and separate share of it, and it goes on to attack the whole apparatus of female accomplishment: the delicacy, the innocence, the obedience, the managed ignorance. Her claim is simple and repeated in every chapter. Reason is the same in both sexes, virtue has one standard, and a woman kept from exercising her understanding cannot be virtuous, only convenient. From that she derives the demand for co-educational day schools, for independence within marriage, for a modesty founded on knowledge rather than shame, and for what she calls a revolution in female manners.
The book is also a document of its moment. It belongs to the years of the French Revolution, when the rights of man were being written into constitutions and the rights of woman were not, and it answers Rousseau’s Emile at length, the fifth chapter being a running commentary on his Sophie. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared in London in 1792 from Joseph Johnson, the radical publisher who had brought out her Vindication of the Rights of Men two years before. This page follows the Standard Ebooks text, and a transcription is held at Project Gutenberg as #3420. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #3420 and Standard Ebooks.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: Summary, Characters & Themes
This is a summary and analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792 and still the book most often named when the argument for women’s education is traced back to its beginning. It is not a novel and not a treatise on manners. It is a polemic with a structure: a dedication, an introduction and thirteen chapters, each of which takes up one part of the same case. The case is that women are human beings possessed of reason, that reason is improved only by exercise, and that every institution which keeps women from exercising it, the boarding school, the marriage market, the cult of delicacy, the double standard of chastity, makes them worse than they need be, and makes the men who live with them worse too.
The argument proceeds from first principles. Wollstonecraft begins with reason, virtue and knowledge, the three things that distinguish a human being from a brute, and asks whether any of them is sexed. Her answer is no: there is one virtue and one standard, and the notion of a separate female character is a fiction maintained for convenience. The second and third chapters take apart the prevailing opinion that women are made for pleasing, and the fourth traces the degradation that follows from it. The middle of the book is a long quarrel with the writers who had shaped that opinion, Rousseau above all, whose Sophie is educated to be agreeable and to submit. The last third turns to practice: parents and children, national education, the follies that ignorance produces, and the moral improvement a change in female manners might bring.
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London in 1759, the daughter of a silk weaver who moved his family about the country and drank away what he earned. She educated herself, ran a school at Newington Green with her sisters, worked as a governess in Ireland, and published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in 1787 and the novel Mary in 1788. The Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) answered Burke on the French Revolution and made her name; the Vindication of the Rights of Woman followed in 1792. She went to Paris to see the Revolution, had a daughter by Gilbert Imlay, attempted suicide twice when he abandoned her, married William Godwin in 1797, and died that September, eleven days after the birth of the daughter who would write Frankenstein.
The book’s temper is part of its argument. Wollstonecraft writes in the first person, addresses her reader as a friend or an opponent, and says plainly that she will be employed about things, not words; the passages on modesty and on the treatment of daughters have the force of someone who has watched the system at close range. Readers who want the political background can put it beside On Liberty, Mill’s later and cooler defence of much the same ground, or beside Emerson’s Essays, where the American argument about self-reliance and education takes up a related question in a different key. The novel her daughter wrote, Frankenstein, is the other book in the family that begins as an argument about what education and neglect can make of a creature.
The text here is complete and unabridged, with the dedication, the introduction and all thirteen chapters, and the spelling and punctuation of the 1792 volume are kept. It follows the Standard Ebooks edition, prepared from the Project Gutenberg transcription numbered 3420, which can also be read at Project Gutenberg in plain text and HTML. There is no modernised paraphrase, no abridgement and no editorial voice between Wollstonecraft and the reader.
Historical Context
In September 1791 Talleyrand, then bishop of Autun and a leading figure in the National Assembly, presented a report on public instruction that sketched a national system of schools and gave girls a separate and much smaller share of it. Wollstonecraft read it with pleasure, as her dedication says, and with impatience: the man who had helped to write the rights of man into a constitution had treated the education of women cursorily. The dedication is therefore a challenge, addressed to a legislator, and it sets the tone of the book, which is not a plea but an argument, made in the firm tone of humanity. She asks him to weigh what she has advanced, and she warns that if women are excluded from the rights of mankind, the new constitution will show that man must, in some shape, act like a tyrant.
The book belongs to the first years of the French Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had been adopted in 1789, Olympe de Gouges answered it with a declaration of the rights of woman in 1791, and in Britain the argument over the Revolution had produced Burke’s Reflections, Paine’s Rights of Man and Wollstonecraft’s own Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790. She wrote this book in the following year, and Joseph Johnson published it in London in 1792. She then went to Paris to watch the Revolution at close range, and the Terror cured her of expecting much from governments; the historical and moral view of the Revolution that she published in 1794 is a colder book than this one.
The immediate target is Rousseau. Emile, published in 1762, had given the eighteenth century its model of education and, in its fifth book, its model of the educated girl: Sophie is trained to please, to be modest, to submit, and to take her opinions from her husband. Beside Rousseau stood the conduct books that filled young women’s libraries, Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women and Gregory’s Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, both of which Wollstonecraft read as recipes for weakness. Her answer is that the difference between the sexes is a difference of education and situation rather than of nature, and that the remedy must be public rather than private: schools, laws and a change in manners. The book’s afterlife was long. Godwin’s memoir of 1798, candid about her private life, damaged her reputation for a century, and the argument was taken up again by Mill and by the suffrage campaign.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Mary Wollstonecraft: The author and the ‘I’ of the book. Thirty-two when it appeared, self-educated, a schoolkeeper, governess and reviewer, and already the author of a Vindication of the Rights of Men. She writes as a woman who has had to earn her own living, and the book’s impatience comes from what she has seen at close range: the boarding school, the marriage market, the clever woman wasted.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The philosopher she takes on at greatest length. His Emile gave the age its ideal of education, and its fifth book gave it Sophie, the girl made to please and obey. Wollstonecraft quotes him page by page and answers him: his eloquence, she says, is sensibility where reasoning was needed, and his system would make women alluring slaves.
- Talleyrand-Périgord: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, late bishop of Autun, author of the 1791 report on national education to which the book is dedicated. He had helped to frame a constitution founded on reason, and Wollstonecraft calls on him, as a legislator, to explain how half the human race can be excluded from it without inconsistency.
- The middle-class woman: The reader the book is written for. Wollstonecraft says she attends particularly to the middle class, because it appears to be in the most natural state, and because the education of the rich makes women vain and helpless. This reader keeps a house, has children, and is expected to be content with accomplishments that leave her mind unused.
- Reason: The book’s first principle and its test of every institution. Reason is what raises a human being above the brutes, it is one, and it is not sexed; from this it follows that virtue is one too, and that any scheme of education which trains a woman to please rather than to judge is a scheme for making her less than human.
- Education: The subject of the book and the remedy it proposes. Wollstonecraft means by education not accomplishments but the exercise of the faculties, and she wants it public, national and shared: day schools where boys and girls learn together, under the same discipline and in the same subjects. Everything else in the book follows from what education is allowed to do.
Core Literary Themes
- Reason and the one standard of virtue: The argument stands or falls with a single claim, that reason is the same in both sexes and that virtue has one standard. Wollstonecraft refuses the compliment of a separate female excellence because it is a way of demanding less. If women are rational creatures they can be virtuous; if they cannot reason they cannot be virtuous either, and the praise of their softness is praise of a defect. Every chapter returns to this test.
- Education and the making of a sexual character: The sexual character, in her account, is made and not born. Girls are taught cunning, softness and the management of appearance because they are expected to rise by marriage; the result is then cited as proof of nature. She answers with the example of the rich and of the enslaved, whose vices are produced by their situation, and with a plan of education that would give girls the same subjects, the same exercise and the same discipline as boys.
- Modesty, reputation and the double standard: Modesty is redefined against the conduct books. It is not a sexual virtue, not a downcast eye, and not the fear of being thought ill of; it is soberness of mind, the child of reason, and it grows with knowledge rather than with ignorance. A reputation preserved by concealment is not chastity, and the double standard that exacts chastity of women while excusing men corrupts both sexes. The two sexes, she says, mutually corrupt and improve each other.
- Independence and friendship in marriage: Marriage is the institution the argument is finally about. A woman who must please in order to live will please rather than judge, and a wife kept in dependence cannot be a friend to her husband or a teacher to her children. Wollstonecraft wants affection founded on esteem, friendship succeeding love, and a household in which the mother’s mind is not wasted on trifles. The alternative she describes is a seraglio with better manners.
- A revolution in female manners: The book’s largest claim is political. If women are made weak by their situation, then changing the situation changes the women, and the improvement of one half of the species is the improvement of the whole. She asks for a revolution in female manners, for national education, and for civil and political rights, and she rests the case on consequence: virtue cannot be nursed by slavery, and a free woman will be a better citizen, wife and mother.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman?
Because it is one of the founding documents of the argument it is still quoted in, and it is far more readable than that sounds. Wollstonecraft writes in the first person, argues with named opponents, and keeps her temper for the places where it is needed; the dedication to Talleyrand, the attack on Rousseau’s Sophie and the closing pages on a revolution in female manners are as direct now as they were in 1792. The complete text is here, from the dedication to the last sentence, and a transcription is also held at Project Gutenberg for comparison.
The files are built for reading rather than for archiving: clean text, working navigation, no page images and no scanning errors. The book’s structure is kept as it was printed, with the dedication and the introduction before the thirteen chapters, so the argument runs in the order she gave it. The same file opens on a phone, a Kindle, a Kobo or an old e-ink reader, the type can be enlarged, and there is no account, no sample chapter and no conversion step between you and the first page.
Read it beside this page rather than instead of it. The groups, the notes on the people she argues with and the context are here for before and after, not as a substitute for the prose; the summaries stop short of the last pages. If you know the book, the second reading is the better one, because the shape of the case is easier to see when you are watching for it, and the repetitions, reason, virtue, independence, come back with more force. If you do not know it, begin with the dedication and let the argument unfold.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text is prepared from the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1792 printing, with the dedication, the introduction and all thirteen chapters complete.
- Complete text, 1792 spelling No abridgement, no modernised spelling and no silent rewriting: the argument as the 1792 volume gives it, with the long sentences, the quotations from Rousseau and the italics intact.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB One download per format, so the book opens on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and other readers without conversion, with a table of contents that works on older devices as well as new ones.
- Free and DRM-free Public domain in the United States, with no account, no sample chapter and no lock on the file; download it once and it is yours to keep, to move between devices and to read again.
- On Liberty — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Essays: First and Second Series — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Frankenstein — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The book has a dedication, an introduction and thirteen chapters. The ten groups below follow the order of the text, though a few short chapters are taken together where they make one argument; the labels are the editor’s, and the argument is Wollstonecraft’s. Read them in order, or use them to find your place.
- Dedication and introduction: The book opens with a letter to Talleyrand, late bishop of Autun, who had just published a pamphlet on national education. Wollstonecraft asks him to weigh her arguments, says that she pleads for her sex and not for herself, and calls independence the basis of every virtue. The introduction then names the cause of the misery she deplores: the neglected education of women, who are made alluring mistresses rather than rational wives. She promises to treat her sex as rational creatures, to write for the middle class, and to persuade women to acquire strength of mind and body.
- On the rights and involved duties of mankind: Wollstonecraft goes back to first principles. The pre-eminence of man over the brutes is reason, the quality that exalts one being above another is virtue, and the passions were implanted so that knowledge might be won by struggling with them. From this she argues that rights and duties are inseparable, that prescription is no argument, and that a constitution which excludes half the human race from its own principles is inconsistent. The chapter ends by turning on Rousseau, who took, she says, a ferocious flight back into the night of sensual ignorance.
- On the prevailing opinion of a sexual character: The longest attack in the book’s first half is on the notion of a sexual character. Women are told from infancy that cunning, softness and outward obedience will win them protection, and that beauty makes everything else needless. Wollstonecraft answers that a mind resting on prejudice must be unstable, that Milton’s Eve is a poor model for a rational creature, that the faults men complain of are the effect of ignorance, and that the same virtue must be required of both sexes. Sound politics, she adds, will diffuse liberty, and women will become wiser and more virtuous.
- On the same subject continued: This chapter continues the argument against the excuse of bodily weakness. Strength of mind, she says, has usually been accompanied by a sound constitution, and the delicacy prescribed to women is not a proof of refinement but a cause of disease. Women are made beautiful flaws in nature by being kept from exercise and from serious business; they are slaves, and slavery degrades the character. Liberty is the mother of virtue, and until women are more rationally educated the progress of human virtue and knowledge must receive continual checks.
- On the degradation of women: Here she traces the degradation of women to its causes: false notions of beauty, a false system of education, and the idleness of wealth. Reason, she says, is the stamina of immortality, the power whose improvement makes a human being what it is, and women are denied the exercise of it. She compares women to the rich and to the enslaved, argues that they tyrannise because they are weak, and calls for a revolution in female manners, for the restoration of a dignity they have lost, and for morals to be separated from local manners.
- On the writers who made women objects of pity: The centre of the book is a long examination of the writers who had shaped opinion, and Rousseau comes first. She quotes Emile at length, with Sophie as the girl educated to please and to submit, and answers him paragraph by paragraph: if a woman is made for a man, she must be trained to please him, and then neither of them can be virtuous. Gregory’s Legacy to his Daughters and Fordyce’s sermons get the same treatment, and she throws down her gauntlet and denies the existence of sexual virtues, modesty not excepted.
- On modesty, and the reputation set in its place: Three short chapters turn from writers to the formation of the mind. Early association fixes the character before reason can examine it, so that a girl taught to think of her person thinks of little else. Modesty is then distinguished from chastity and from humility: it is soberness of mind, the child of reason, and it is not a sexual virtue. The third chapter argues that a reputation preserved by concealment is not chastity, that the double standard corrupts both sexes, and that the two sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other.
- On rank, and on parents and children: Wollstonecraft turns to rank and to the family. Respect paid to property, she says, produces most of the vices of polished society, and hereditary wealth produces idleness; there must be more equality, or morality will never gain ground. Two chapters on parents follow: parental affection is often a pretext to tyrannise, unconditional obedience is the catchword of tyrants, and the duty of children is reciprocal, owed to care and reason rather than to mere authority. Parental affection, she concludes, produces filial duty, and not the other way round.
- On national education: The longest chapter of the last third sets out a plan of national education. Private education is confined and cannot open a child’s faculties, so she proposes day schools where boys and girls are taught together, dressed alike and held to the same discipline. The day would hold reading, writing, arithmetic, natural history, botany, mechanics and astronomy, with gymnastics in the open air and religion taught by conversation. Such schools, she says, would promote early marriages, and they would make women rational creatures and free citizens.
- On reading, fashion and the revolution: The last chapter gathers the follies that ignorance produces: women consulting fortune-tellers, reading novels, spending the morning at the toilet and the evening at cards, treating servants as servants and children as idols. All of it, she argues, flows from want of understanding and from the tyranny of man, and none of it is cured by ridicule. The book closes with her largest claim, that a revolution in female manners would improve morals at large: let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man.
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Part of: Philosophy Classics · Classic Fiction
