A List of Five Things Mary Wollstonecraft Is Advocating for Women

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A. Rose Miller 12/6/12 A List of Five Things Mary Wollstonecraft is Advocating for Women 1 Mary advocates that women should develop strength, both mentally and physically. “I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body”(593) 2 She advises women to act other than that of a delicate, perfect being of inhuman beauty, for these things only demonstrate weakness and fragility. “soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are most synonymous with epithets of weakness”(593) 3 Women, men, developing children and so on need exercise to grow correctly and to become healthy. “Throughout the whole animal kingdom every young creature requires almost continual exercise,”(594) 4 To believe that women naturally want to be made lesser, become vain and spend all their time dressing up, merely to satisfy men, is insane. “The absurdity, in short, of supposing that a girl is naturally a coquette, and that a desire connected with an impulse to propagate the species, should appear even before an improper education has, by heating the imagination, called it forth prematurely,”(595) 5 Because of the way women have been taught to be (shallow, mindless, soulless, and vain) they are of no use to society. If they want to be anything more, they cannot be brought up with that goal as their only education. “all the writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory, have contributed to render women more artificial, weak characters, than they would have otherwise been; and, consequently, more useless members of

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