At The Time Mary Wollstonecraft Was Writing, Women’s Education Tended To Focus Mainly On
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AMBIGUITIES : REASON, SENSIBILITY AND ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS
IN MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT'S VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN
The title of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) proclaims an intention to uphold the rights of woman; but the book is rather concerned with setting forth the current plight of women, deploring their supineness, and making some suggestions for a better education of girls, which could lead to a fairer treatment of women within the family and in society at large. The Vindication has been given a lot of attention in the last twenty years, most studies focusing on the rhetorical dynamic of the pamphlet and on the nature and limitations of Wollstonecraft's feminism. Analysis of Wollstonecraft's argument in the Vindication has assumed that the opposition between reason and sensibility underpinned her argument and explained some of the aporias and shortcomings in her submission for an improvement of women's lot in late eighteenth-century England. This essay will argue that no such opposition structures Wollstonecraft's thinking, though the two notions undeniably often - and to some extent in the Vindication too - constitute more or less antagonistic entities, and will focus on the implicit epistemo- logical bedrock of her argument and its ambiguities. This epistemological reading will historicise Wollstonecraft's essay, it should clarify the meaning of the idea of sensibility, and the significance of the way in which it is used, and bring out how essential it is to take into account time and the association of ideas to get an accurate understanding of Wollstonecraft's informal theory of the mind, which has important implications for her political views.
Students of Wollstonecraft have emphasised the centrality of the attack on sensibility in the Vindication, and the correlative promotion of reason as the cardinal mental faculty. Thus in a recent essay Wendy Gunther-Canada argues that Wollstonecraft underwrote the standard dualism that bolstered the existing state of social relations: "the binary
At The Time Mary Wollstonecraft Was Writing, Women's Education Tended To Focus Mainly On
Source: https://www.persee.fr/doc/xvii_0291-3798_1999_num_49_1_2110
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