Response to "The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed"

Ok, so I have to admit, I came very close to falling asleep several times while reading this. Don’t get me wrong, Mary Wollstonecraft was a great writer, and this was a great piece, but it seems to me it took her 22 pages to say what she could have said in about half as many. I suppose that might be a slight exaggeration, but not too much.

Even though she’s a little too long winded for my taste, I found myself getting lost in the language and style she used. Not many people write like that anymore. Words like epithet, propriety, and pernicious are scarcely ever used. I loved how smooth and sophisticated it sounded, but I had a mammoth list of words to look up by the end.

Speaking of words, I think Wollstonecraft had a powerful message about the oppression of women. She made many valid points about how women are treated. However, she wrote this 217 years ago and things have changed a lot since then. Women are no longer educated only to be docile housewives; we have the same education as men. That isn’t to say that women are always treated equally and with respect, but it’s not nearly as bad as it was in 1792.

Although it’s a lot different now, instead of writing it off as irrelevant to today’s society , I took it as an insight to life during Mary Wollstonecraft’s time. She says that,

“Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should be beautiful, everything else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.”

That, to me, sums up much of this whole piece and much of the lives women had then. Women didn’t need to be smart or do anything for themselves. All they needed was to be pretty and socially graceful so that they could get a man to protect them. They didn’t need anything else but a man, it was their ultimate and only goal.

All this talk about how life was for women in the 1700’s made me extremely grateful for how it is now. I don’t have to be perfect on the surface, nor do I have to agonize over gettin’ me a man. I can get a good education and know that I can survive on my own. If I want to be a superficial socialite I can do that, but I don’t have to. Mary talked a lot about how it would feel to be free, and I get to feel that way every day. I am so lucky, as are all women in our society.

I found it interesting that Wollstonecraft compared both women and men to children and different times. First she talks about husbands attempt to keep their wives in a state of childhood. Then she goes on to say that many man are overgrown children themselves. Being a girl, I tend to agree more with the second statement, but then I started thinking and realized that both can be true sometimes. Some wives are content to play Homemaker Barbie and live as if life is a fairy tale. On the other hand, a lot of men just never seem to grow up.

So while I had my various thoughts and my ups and downs with Mary Wollstonecraft, I did like her piece and her writing. She made a lot of good remarks that spurred thoughts of my own. It’s was little out of the ordinary for me, but that’s what makes it special.