The Prevailing Opinion Of A Sexual Character Discussed...

The first thing I have to say about The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed is that it is quite intimidating, but I think Mary Wollstonecraft would have liked it that way.

Wollstonecraft was not writing as the average housewife of her time. She was writing as one of the highly educated philosophers with radical and new feminist ideas of her time. She was bold, she was insulting, and for the most part she was right. I am not going to say I didn't hate this essay because I did. I hated the length. I hated the vocabulary. I hated her repetitiveness. I hated her late 1700s English, but at the same time that was what made me love it.

So many men of Wollstonecraft's time wouldn't expect a piece of such length from a woman, it made me feel like just because she had the dedication to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she was, in a way, sticking it to those that thought so little of her sex. Not only did the challenging vocabulary help to complete my requirements for this class, but it was the sort of vocabulary that wasn't everywhere, or for that matter really anywhere, that I usually pooled my reading material from. While reading her essay, I kept wondering "why oh why" did she keep repeating the same things? After the first few pages, I could for the most part guess her views on female rights. Wollstonecraft's repetitious themes on women's education, where they should be in society, and how detrimental the way society viewed their sex only showed how passionately she viewed these issues. As for the late 18th century English, I really did just dislike that quite a bit.

Now I'm sure other AP Comp bloggers will touch on the obvious key points of Wollstonecraft's essay. They will mention the brilliance of her comparing female education to the education of military men, how she feels about a woman's main focus being to please her husband, and what has changed since this was written. These are all important, but there was however a paradox in this essay that still confuses me( and by any means if you can explain it to me, go right ahead), and I found that I couldn't enjoy the rest of the essay because of it.

Around page 14, I pieced together two things Wollstonecraft had said. She stated that marriages would be better, if women were their husbands companion and were on a closer intellectual level. Later she stated that women would be better mothers, and could spend more time educating their children, if they had bad marriages. So in my mind and using Wollstonecraft's logic, however you spin it, these women couldn't win. You would have to be an educated woman with an unhappy marriage to teach your children, especially daughters, that an education was important. Somehow going against the social norm, just to be unhappy doesn't seem like the best way to convince women that education is what they need.

Although the rest of her essay was brilliant and it made me appreciate where the start of the feminist movement came from, this one part completely threw me off to the point that it almost tainted the rest of this beautifully crafted piece.