WMST 2000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, Mary Astell

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Women's Studies
• Course: WMST 2000
• Professor: Martina Meyer

Document Summary

I do not wish for women to have power over men: but over themselves mary. Historically, women were property when they got married. Fierce defense of the women she loved when they suffered at the hands of men. Wrote the vindication of the rights of man" in response to edmund burkes critique of the french revolution. Wrote the rights of woman in response to rousseau"s dismissal of women in his work. Her works made it possible for women writers to compose pieces of literature. Debate on women"s nature co-existed with the hardening of gender destruction. Taught form their infancy that beauty is woman"s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison mary. Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to play the sex, when in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority mary wollstonecraft.