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"Reason" and "Sensiblity" in Mary Wollstonecraft's work [View all]
Thought this was an interesting article.
In 1791, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, stating that the first duty of women was to cultivate reason and urging them to avoid excessive sensibility. While declaring these sentiments, she knew full well that she was opposing a long-established tradition: that reason belonged to dominant men and sensibility to irrational and subordinate women.
snip:
In Wollstonecraft's view, women pursued sensibility because they had been taught to do so. Female education emphasized the nurturing of emotion, so that women would be distorted into sexual and passionate beings and grow subordinate to men (reason must control or "moderate" sensibility). In The Rights of Women, the term used for a woman successfully educated in this mode is "romantic."
snip:
The romantic woman lives for love of a man and to this end her thoughts and emotions are dedicated. Wollstonecraft scorns this derivative woman, inveighing against her ignorance of "every nobler passion" and her single ambition "to be fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect"; the "ignoble desire" for romantic love destroys all "strength of character." Romantic love is then a will-o-the-wisp for women, a trap made by men-with their victims' connivance-to enslave and debase an entire sex.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3346504?seq=1
My question to HOF: Was Wollstonecraft's view at all an accurate one of how women are conditioned to think and behave in society (as opposed to men)? Is this still relevant?
Furthermore, isn't it pretty convenient that historically and traditionally, it is men who have defined what is and isn't "rational" in the first place? (And how convenient for men that women have been thought to be "more emotionally-driven" and "less rational" than men for much of history!
)
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