Thursday, January 24, 2008

A Vindication of the Rights of Women

If you were absent Thursday, your homework is to read an excerpt from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft. You can find the excerpt at:


http://womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/bl_vindication000.htm (You may have to cut and paste this link into your url if it doesn't link to it).

You should start with the paragraph, "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" (Wollstonecraft).

You should end with the paragraph, "Discussing the advantages which a public and private education combined, as I have sketched, might rationally be expected to produce, I have dwelt most on such as are particularly to the female world, because I think the female world oppressed; yet the gangrene, which the vices engendered by oppression have produced, is not confined to the morbid part, but pervades society at large: so ht when I wish to see my sex become more like moral agents, my heart bounds with the anticipation of the general diffusion of that subline contentment which only morality can diffuse" (Wollstonecraft).

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