Well, after I read Thomas Payne’s Rights of Man I figured I ought to read an equally famous book called Rights of Women. I enjoyed both books very much, though they are in fact very different.
I was very surprised at how religious and moralising in tone this book is. I think I had been expecting a near-atheist freethinking, or at least an outright deist. I don’t have enough context to pin down her beliefs, but the book is full of religious language and makes its strongest arguments (well, they’re all strong, but the arguments that are impressed with the most force and intent) on a religious basis of “God made all people (men and women) with equal capacity for virtue and it is required that we are able to exercise our Reason to acquire that virtue”.
She’s a big fan of Reason. Loves thinking. Virtue and wisdom are achieved by reason and experience (and practice). Women are denied the education to exercise adequate reason, and prevented from having the experiences necessary to achieve wisdom.
She is extremely critical of women of her time, she thinks they have little virtue, do all sorts of terrible things, think about the wrong stuff, waste their time, are weak and so on. She attributes basically all this to their education and subjugation; the fact their education prepares them only to be subject to a husband, and not to exercise their Reason to become good and virtuous members of a free society (and also living in a Christian way &c.). Like, she’s so critical of women it’s crazy!!
She’s also very critical, and more understandably so, of writers who subjugate women in their philosophy (Roussaeu gets, ahem, destroyed with facts and logic) and of the educational practices of her time (for all genders). She worked as a teacher so I’m not surprised.
Similarities between this and Rights of Man are being written in reaction to Edmund Burke’s The Revolution in France, and being part of a broader radical liberal tradition in Europe at the time. They both basically assume that the revolution will happen once the moral character of people is improved. Payne addresses the ways in which the moral character of people is suppressed by the structure of society at the time (and spends a lot of time refuting Burke’s criticisms), whereas Wollstonecraft addressess the ways in which the moral character of women in particular is suppressed by their subjugation, and argues that we cannot have revolution/liberation until this is addressed.
I enjoy the tone of radical literature whatever era it was written, and find it invigorating. This book in particular has had a strong effect on me, not via the proto-feminism it’s espousing which I already got thank you, but the religious and theological arguments made a strong impression on me. Particularly her faith/emphasis on reason has convinced me that I can [just] think more/strongly/deeply about the things in front of me and figure them out more than I do and that that will have a good outcome. I’m grateful for that.
The night of the day I finished this book I had insomnia, so I sat up in bed and figured out how to knit based on fuzzy memories of being shown and thinking a lot about it. It was very fun, and I’m glad I did! Worked out contintental style, and casting on, and could remember the English style I’d be shown earlier that week.