A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft: Chapter IV
· “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”- agree with this, we are ultimately born, but it is institutions that dictate that we need a job and a salary, but ultimately we don’t need to do anything, it is the idea that we seek happiness for ourselves, we don’t need to breath, we don’t need a job, we don’t need food, but if we want to live we need to breath, if we want a roof over our heads we need money etc, it is our want to maximise pleasure and minimise pain that dictates our ‘needs’.
· Education “first step to form a being moving gradually towards perfection...but seen only as a preparation for life”- When people are more educated they can be enlightened. Just by participating in education your views are challenged, you are pushed to reach sensible conclusions and taught to consider different points of view to your own. These are all traits of an enlightened being. Without education I think people’s minds rot, as they fall into a day job where they are not challenged.
· I believed that we were born equal, that men are born equal; however there is deep rooted prejudice towards the sexes. As the reading suggest why do we put women on thrones? Why is it that a man has to pull the seat out for women to sit down at a table, why does a man have to hold the door for a woman? Furthermore we are not physical all born equal, some people are born disabled, and some people are born with conditions that make them prone to aggression and violence. Maybe principally we are should be considered born equal, such as every person should have the right to vote, every person should have the right to walk down the street regardless of their skin colour. But physically we are not born equal.
· “Man is naturally good, and only by institutions is he made bad”- What about people born with genes that are prone to aggressions and violence, nature Vs Nurture
· Pleasure is the business of woman’s life- disagree, no one can, and may never know, there purpose in life. Women are capable of deciding what their purpose in life is, just like men can.
· “Man was made to reason, woman to feel: and that together, flesh and spirit, they make the most perfect whole, by bleeding happily reason and sensibility into one character”
· But if we were to return to a state of nature, it is un-natural for animals to have one lover. The purpose of live, it is argued, is to reproduce, a lion in the wild does not get married he mates.
· The concept of love and happiness is a concept of the mind. During the process of a feeling chemical reactions take place in the body, synapses firing in the brain and the mind tries to make sense of this process usually resulting in love, happiness, jealousy etc.
· We then become slaves to these feelings as they dictate how we behave and act. Feelings also cloud reason and can blind us to truths that we do not want to see.
· Again maximising pleasure and minimising pain, if we enjoy a feeling we will want it to continue, say a bad relationship for example. If you are getting treated poorly but enjoy the feeling of love you will blind yourself to the negatives.
· “Educate women like men” Rousseau
· “And the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us”- interesting to consider who has the power between the sexes. “How eager men are to degrade the sex from whom they pretend to receive the chief pleasure of life”. In public it would appear men have the control and power to enslave women, but in privacy women could retain the pleasure that men seek so much, if they do not get what they want. On a side not surely men also enslave other men, in a professional capacity, if women were slaves surely they would do all the menially jobs in a work place, such as working at a desk typing, and men would be in management capacity, but more and more these days this is not the case.
· “Riches and honours prevent a man from enlarging his understanding” (expand)- Could we be getting blinded by riches and honours and success. We fall into the routines, working towards carers etc, that maybe understanding is hindered. We are surrounded by magazines of how we should look, how we should behave, rich and successful people moulding our understanding. We should distance ourselves from this and re-evaluate our understanding of what it really means to be rich. E.g. rich in friends.
· “Friendship...it is founded on principle, and cemented by time...The reverse may be said of love”. Is passion and love all it’s cracked up to be, is it not more reasonable to befriend someone first, learn their qualities and drawbacks, before committing an act of passion. When you rush into a relationship because it had raw passion, what is left after the passion sizzles out; you might not even like the person when this happens.
Women are apparently incomprehensible of reason and man acts as a buffer between reason and women, translating reason so women can understand. I don’t think this is the case physiologically there is no difference is the genetic makeup of the brain of a man and woman’s, except maybe size. There is not a special piece of the brain that men possess, that allows reason, so why would women be unable to use reason.
