Wollstonecraft writes: “The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty.” This “barren blooming” can be attributed, in part, to “a false system of education,” due to which “the civilized women of the present century … are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.” In other words, women are taught to care only about finding husbands, so it’s no surprise that they don’t earn any other kind of respect.īecause girls tend to “learn … by snatches,” and learning is secondary to external beauty in their upbringings, “they do not pursue any one branch with that persevering ardor necessary to give vigor to the faculties, and clearness to the judgment.” That is, girls’ education is never sufficiently deep to allow for mastery of subjects, or even the maturation of natural intellectual abilities.īecause of this inadequate education, women tend to stagnate, both intellectually and morally, early in life. These superficial goals have harmful consequences for women’s minds they are not trained to provide for themselves or to be resourceful. Wollstonecraft demonstrates that insofar as women are educated at all, they are mostly taught to value maintaining beauty and securing a man’s love above all else. Wollstonecraft argues that women are typically only taught to attract husbands, with the result that their mental and moral faculties are never fully developed-an injustice that will only be rectified if girls are educated according to the same system and toward the same goals as boys.
However, she determines that this deficit is not due to some inherent weakness in women, but rather to the inadequate system of education that most middle-class English girls are subjected to.
In the late eighteenth-century treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft agrees with some of her contemporaries that women do not seem to attain the same level of virtue as their male counterparts.
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