Mary Wollstonecraft writes a very challenging and hard to read essay regarding the rights of women and how poorly they are looked upon. Well...that's what I got out of it anyway. Heading into this article, I already had a bad attitude due to the length. I had a very hard time reading this because I often became distracted and quite frankly...the way things were worded was very hard for me to understand. Many of the words I had not heard of before and therefore I was left with many questions.
However, while reading this essay, I discovered that Wollstonecraft was a very opinionated woman and had much to say. She new what she was talking about and often questioned and disagreed with several other intelligent writers. She heavily argued the fact that woman need to be respected and they should not be looked down upon. Others wrote that woman were put on this earth to obey and please men while maintaing an innocent personality and in return women would get stability and protection. This was something that I did not agree with. Wollstonecraft had a numerous amount of great facts and reasons why this is entirely not true. She believed heavily that women were not put on this earth just to serve men and argued for the equality of women.
Wollstonecraft really emphasized the idea that women need to gain the respect and to just be given a chance. I agree with her when she writes, "But, Whether she be loved or neglected, her first wish should be to make herself respectable." I really liked this quote because it made complete sense to me. I think the world has this idea of the ideal "woman" and they look upon us in ways that I, myself, find disgusting.
I was often lost in this article and I found it to be kinda boring and very long, but I did learn some really good things that made me really think about myself and other women that I may know. I really liked the facts that she stated and how opinionated Wollstonecraft was, I just wish the read was easier to understand that way I could have learned a lot more on how to achieve equality in woman. Overall, I guess I would say this was not my favorite article that we have read.
Needless to say, this was NOT my favorite article either. I agree that Wollstonecraft did have several good points when considering her time period, but taken out of that time period, I found it all to be very outdated and therefore unnecessary. Whereas this article would have been highly controversial back then, almost no one now would seriously vouch that it's any woman's job to please a man (unless she's an entertainer or something). As a result, I found it hard to trudge through her jungle of ill-placed sentences and unnecessarily large words in order to relearn things that I already consider to be blatantly obvious.
ReplyDeleteI actually really liked this article, but I completely understand what you mean about the length and challenging word choice. At times, I felt like the word choice actually helped to prove some points (it really showed how intelligent women could actually be), but sometimes it was just unnecessary. I also agreed with Wollstonecraft on the idea that women weren't put on this earth to serve men, and I liked how she proved her points so well.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you completely that the article was extremely long and hard to read. It was hard to understand and I was lost for a lot of the time. Wollstonecraft did have some great points, and really made me understand what it was like to be a women back in the 1700's, but I got to say that I would rather read an article about women in 2011 with A LOT easier word choice !
ReplyDeleteI completely agree! I found this article to be long, painful, and horrible! It was probably the worst thing I have ever read. I know that is probably a little too much, but when it comes to extremely long readings that I can't even understand, I get a little frustrated. I think that Tim is right when he says that even back then I feel that a women wasn't necesarily just supposed to "please" a man. I mean to an extent I think that a lot was expected of a woman back then and that men could get away with a lot, but I mean even to this day you can still find men that feel they are superior to women, and can do whatever they want.
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