Woman's rights
... “The civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.” (p.296). She adds: “I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex, and the secondary views should be brought to this simple touchstone”(p.297). In the early 19th century, the vast majority of married women throughout Europe still had no legal identity apart from their husbands. This legal status prohibited a married woman from being a party in a lawsuit, sitting on a jury, holding property in her own name, or writing a will. Wollstonecraft argued that equality in marriage would only come about with equality of education. In her book she indicates that women are the rational equals to men but have been brought up to be dependent on men and to be concerned only with domestic life and caring for children. She believed that these characteristics were not expressions of an essential feminine nature but were instead cultural inventions that men created to serve their own interests. Moreover, Wollstonecraft sees women as weak creatures that don’t have any major ambitions besides basic behavior that they learned from the environment: “My own sex, I hope , will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone” (p.297). She also points out: “I wish to persuade woman to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt. (p.297). Given equal schooling, Wollstonecraft argued, women would compete as equals with men in the arena of public achievements. She states that women should give a prove that, they too, are worthy of education and they are totally capable to learn as much as men do: ”Let the men become more chaste and modest, and if women do not grow wiser in the same ratio it will be clear that they have weaker understandings”. She argued that women could live happy; creative lives if they had better educational opportunities. At the same time Wollstonecraft gives a piece of advice the ones who belong to her sphere that they have to work continuously in order to gain respect and achieve a level of equality between themselves and the men surrounding them. The author states: “Women are, in fact, so much degraded by mistaken nation of female excellence, that I do not mean to add paradox when I assert that this artificial weakness produces a propensity to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of strength, which leads them to play off those contemptible infantine airs that undermine esteem even whilst they excite desire”(p.296) She also give a proof of it when she says: “The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state” (p.296). Wollstonecraft writing marked the significant expression of equality towards both sexes. In the French Revolution, women's republican clubs demanded that liberty, equality, and fraternity be applied regardless of sex, but the Code Napoléon extinguished this movement for the time. The women’s political clubs played a significant role in revolutionary political culture. Women formed them as a result of participation in political events in the early phases of the revolution. For the first time women began to feel and think differently about their “proper role in society”. They felt that they had to clarify the importance of their position in society. Women emancipation would be an important key leading to the freedom of ignorance by the men. This where a long process “of independence “ and separation of two spheres in society had its beginning. By the natural law, men physically and naturally have been chosen to be a visible head in the family and therefore in society. Throughout history men have occupied the public sphere and have been the center part of society. However The National Convention‘s decree abandoned the idea for women to take part in politics. There is a question stated: “Do women have the moral and physical strength which the exercise of one and the other of these rights calls for? Universal opinion rejects this idea” (210). The decree also states that women is the nucleus of the society that is why, “they would be obligated to sacrifice the more important cares to which nature calls them. The private functions for which women are destined by their very nature are related to the general order of society; this social order results from the differences between man and woman” (p.210). Further the decree states: “Each sex is called to the kind of occupation which is fitting for it; its action is circumscribed within this circle which it cannot break through, because nature, which has imposed these limits on man, commands imperiously and receives no law” (p.210). It is man who is “strong, robust, born with great energy”(p.210) that is why he should exercise politics, because he is naturally created for that the nature created for that function. The decree says that women have much more important role to play in a society, and that women should be taking care of a house, raising children and creating a peaceful environment for her husband because “they are made for softening the morals of man” (p.211). Their task is: “To begin educating men, to prepare children’s minds and hearts for public virtues, to direct them early in life towards the good, to elevate their souls, to educate them in the political cult of liberty: such are their functions, after households cares” (p.211). Man are civilized by woman therefore “a woman should not leave her family to meddle in affairs of government” (p.211). In the nineteenth century fundamental changes occurred in the economic and social roles of bourgeois women because of the more visible separation of domestic and public spheres. The middle class married women were no longer expected to work in a productive sphere but instead they started to work as a good example of a wife taking on domestic, religious and motherly duties. The book of Elizabeth Poole Sanford is an early example of how the sphere to which women belonged actually functioned. While men occupy public roles, in government, business, science, and so on, women are wor...