Mary Wollstonecraft · Politics
Wollstonecraft’s deepest claim was that women’s apparent weakness was no fact of nature but the manufactured product of a corrupt education designed to make them charming, dependent, and unfit to reason.
The deepest and most original argument in Wollstonecraft’s work is her claim that the character of women - the weakness, frivolity, vanity, cunning, and incapacity for sustained reason that her age took as proof of women’s natural inferiority - was not natural at all, but made. It was the predictable, even inevitable, product of the way women were raised, educated, and treated from infancy. Give any human being an education designed to develop only their capacity to charm and please, deny them serious knowledge, train them to depend entirely on others, reward them only for beauty and submission, and forbid them any path to dignity except through the approval of a more powerful group - and you will produce exactly the degraded character that women were then said to possess by nature. The inferiority was real, but it was an effect of oppression, not a justification for it.
This was a revolutionary move, because it broke the circular logic that had imprisoned women for millennia. The traditional argument ran: women are naturally inferior, therefore they should be denied education and kept dependent. Wollstonecraft reversed the causation: women are denied education and kept dependent, therefore they appear inferior. The apparent confirmation of women’s incapacity was in fact the consequence of the very treatment it was used to justify. Once this was seen, the whole edifice of justification collapsed, and the supposed natural order stood revealed as a system of artificial degradation. The task was not to accept women as they had been made, but to change the conditions that made them - above all, to give them a real education.
Wollstonecraft’s argument rested on a foundation laid by John Locke, whose theory of the mind had revolutionized Enlightenment thought. Locke had argued that the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, with no innate ideas - that all our knowledge, character, and understanding are built up from experience, from the impressions we receive and the way we are educated and treated. This was a profoundly democratic and hopeful doctrine: it meant that differences between people were largely the product of their different experiences and educations, not of fixed innate natures, and therefore that people could be improved, even transformed, by improving their circumstances and education.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Wollstonecraft traced women’s degradation to their education. In your own words, how did she argue that a system can manufacture the very inferiority it then uses to justify itself?
Leads to John Locke.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.