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| Brand | Mary Wollstonecraft |
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| Product Id | 686211 |
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| User Reviews and Ratings | 3 (1 ratings) 3 out of 5 stars |
| UPC | 800759290369 |
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Dover Thrift Editions: Literary Collections: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Paperback)
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I think everyone should read this book. Everyone. Sometimes I reread it just to remind myself how fiercely this battle was being fought in the eighteenth century, and how hard we still have to fight. A little righteous fury goes a long way.
This book changed everything, and opened my eyes to a whole world
This is a valuable tool for understanding late 18th century thought, and how a real live woman ahead of her time framed her opinions on the rights and education of women long before modern feminism.
Apart from Class ridden snobbery condemming working classes to manual work and paying attention to current social mores, Wollestonecraft makes a reasoned case for women to shove off the fripperies of womanhood and get into some solid educational DIY. Her thesis is a woman is a better wife etc if she is educated rather than an uneducated bimbo who is more concerned with the latest fashion than by the state of her brain. I think this holds true. Well worth reading, well written and an easy read in comparison to other philosophy texts.
I had been wanting to read this for a long time, so when I saw it narrated by Fiona Shaw last year, I snapped it up. The narration is brilliantly done - perfectly delivered, and I loved that they used a male narrator (Jonathan Keeble) to narrate the parts where Wollstonecraft quotes from Fordyce's Sermons and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This is basically one long essay that is divided into chapters, each addressing or responding to a different theme. While it is dated, as one would expect anything from 1792 to be, it is also still relevant. Definitely recommended - not sure I would have made it through the print version, but the audio is fabulous.
Might seem like an odd combination, but there's method. Mary Wollstonecraft is the author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman (although she may be more famous for being the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who eventually became Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly). At any rate, Ms. Wollstonecraft may have been the first radical feminist; she was nicknamed “The Hyena in Petticoats” by contemporaries. It's true that the lot of women was pretty miserable for 18th century Englishwomen; women could not own property, and the only grounds for divorce for women was desertion. (A man could get a divorce for adultery, but a woman couldn't; as long as her husband kept supporting her he was free to consort with all and sundry, and many did). Alas, despite its importance, this book is pretty tedious. Ms. Wollstonecraft is not a talented writer, and it took a lot of patience to get through this. To her credit, her main point is that woman should get the same education as men; but she gets sidetracked so often on questions of feminine beauty, details of educational methods (she sometimes sounds annoyingly like a NEA representative) and various other diversions that her main point gets lost. (I was once a member of NOW, until I read an editorial in the NOW newsletter stating NOWs position on land claims of the Hopi. I was a little puzzled as to what NOW was doing getting involved in Native American rights; a friend explained that “Native American Rights are a women's issue”. Well, perhaps, but I decided that self defense was a women's issue too, noted that there are more women in the NRA than the NOW, and transferred all my donations there). This is the same problem Wollstonecraft has, if you make everything “a women's issue”, then nothing is a women's issue. Wollstonecraft's personal life was interesting given her political views. Her first husband (they never actually married) was Gilbert Imlay, an American. Mr. Imlay lost interest after the birth of their child, and took up with an actress, whereupon Wollstonecraft jumped off a bridge into the Thames. She was dragged out by a passer-by. She then took up with an old friend, William Godwin, who was of the opinion that marriage was an artificial institution unnecessary to virtuous individuals while Wollstonecraft had argued that cohabitation was evil. They did marry after Wollstonecraft's second pregnancy, but never lived together; Wollstonecraft died in childbirth. So what does this have to do with Georgette Heyer, who is more or less the inventor of the Regency romance novel? Ms. Heyer was prolific with I think around 50 works to her credit; they all have more or less the same plot (unlikely girl attracts the attention of rich but accomplished English gentleman who falls in love with her virtues rather than her beauty). There are a number of fairly pedestrian mystery novels, and she sometimes leaves her time period for the medieval, Elizabethan, Restoration or Georgian settings. All that said, she's pretty enjoyable. Her historical research is meticulous to the extent that it's sometimes difficult to figure out character's dialect without recourse to the dictionary. The plotting, despite its basic predictability, has enough surprises to be entertaining, and her characters manage to be individuals despite being all essentially the same. Oddly, she seems to spend more time on her male's character development than her females, and she has a disturbing tendency to let her heroes get shot in the arm so the heroine can prove her worth by nursing them back to health, possibly showing that while her history is otherwise immaculate she had a poor idea of what happens when you get hit by a 0.79” lead ball (to be fair, Charlotte Bronte gets away with this in Shirley, so I suppose it's alright). Now then, I mentioned above that Vindication is slow reading, and I often pick a lighter book as sort of a “palate cleaner” to take a break better the heavy chapters. Thus, I was reading Heyer's The Quiet Gentleman at the same time as Vindication, and lo and behold heroine Drusilla Morville is acquainted with Mary Wollstonecraft and even recounts her suicide attempt with a mix of amusement and disapproval. Must be something to coincidences after all.
I read this during my last quarter as an undergraduate English major. The class was on revolutionary women writers and it was AWESOME. I was more interested and involved in that class than most of my other classes--I kept up a double-entry journal for all of the reading so that I was constantly analyzing and writing down my thoughts. I had a great relationship with the professor and other girls in my class. It was during this class that the big protest in Seattle was going on, and we were all motivated to take a bus up there together because of the women about whom we were reading. This class motivated me to be an activist.As for this particular book, it was great in the beginning. Wollstonecraft is difficult, dense reading. She had some great ideas that spurred deep intellectual discussion, but after a while you want to stop reading. She makes her point early on and the rest is too much. Also, it's hard to be motivated to trudge through it when her dream is somewhat old news to us now.
Sometimes it's difficult to know how to rate such a classic. This work blazed trails for women, so one doesn't want to be too harsh on it, but it is difficult to read and turgid by today's standards of writing. The author focuses way too much on keeping women moral as the reason for educating them, though one suspects that is more to sell the idea to the men of the time, since she herself had a life that did not fit with what she described as a proper role for a woman in this book. The book appeared about the time of the French Revolution, and the idea of equality was being shouted both in France and across the pond in the former colonies; this author references both countries frequently in her desire to spread the idea of equality a bit further, and include women in the boundaries. Overall, worthwhile more for the history than the ideas, since most of us have moved on much beyond her modest (by today's standards) proposals. One real downside is that the book focused relentlessly on the idle classes; one who has read any history at all can hardly imagine her descriptions of the follies of poorly educated women applying to the rank-and-file of the hard-working women who didn't have time for the frivolous pursuits she decried. Such things may seem petty or picky as critiques, but these are the critiques that are always being leveled at feminists, whether they are true or not, and it would be nice to be able to point to a founding document and say, "see? we were always concerned about all women, not just rich women", so it's quite disappointing when such an important author gives fodder to the naysayers.
This book is way too hard to read. It is reputed to be one of the most important books ever written, but I simply could not get through it. The language is extremely convoluted and reads as though it has been written for the chardonnay set. It would be difficult for the average layperson to read. I have been reading this book for months and I am not even half-way through. I think now is the time to give up!