A Vindication of the Right of Women and Woman in the Nineteenth Century

In two centuries where women have very little or no rights at all, Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller appear as claiming voices, as two followers of feminism. Two women separated by a century but united by the same ideals. In these male- dominated societies, these two educated women tried to vindicate their rights through one of the few areas where they could show their intelligence: literature. So, in the 18th century we find Wollstonecraft´s A Vindication of the Right of Women and in the 19th her successor Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Two books written with the same purpose: to vindicate the rights of women and to try to create a better situation for women, yet through two differing points of view, the difference of one century.

As there are too many points about the rights of women dealt with by these books, I am going to concentrate in one of these vindictive points: the education of women.

Throughout this paper, I am going to show how these two women wrote about women education from two different kind of feminism, what they thought about it and how they dealt with this subject.

During the 18th century there was little argument for civil and educational rights for women. There was more concern about racial matters than about women status and rights. When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Right of Woman, she tried to fulfil this lack of civil and educational rights for women. This is a plea to give equality of opportunity to women. The education she promoted was a mixture of information and rational skills. She stresses the importance of educating both sexes together, somethi…

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…t, not only a light version of what was taught to boys. Romanticism did not define female nature only in contrast to men. Romanticism does not describe women as the negative counterpart of men. Fuller’s feminism is also romantic because she believed that women could be free by themselves only if they united together but never if united with men.

This difference of feminism is based on the different time both of them live on, while in the 18th century women had no rights at all, in the following one they begin to have access to education, so now the following step was to achieve the liberation that Fuller vindicate in her work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Right of Woman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Other Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.