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Wollstonecraft, Locke and Women

What is implied by Wollstonecraft's opening paragraph is that the social structures and assumptions governing relationships between men and women have fostered a false consciousness in women that renders them useless members of the human race and thereby does credit to neither them nor the men whose structures they must function in and whose assumptions they have absorbed. Further, it is implied that this is a condition that makes no sense--or that is fraught with paradox, irony, and contradiction--since it is the social and psychological reality of women at the very time that culture they inhabit is rife with the discourse and philosophy of the Enlightenment.

The implication is derived from the points covered in what is actually stated. Wollstonecraft uses figures of speech comparing women to flowers to make her point. Like flowers, women are admired for their beauty but for little else, a fact that Wollstonecraft attributes to a "false education"--consisting of books written by men that encourage the objectification of women as fair creatures. Accordingly, they wither on the "stalk," which can be compared to the solid base of support and nourishment for human development: the intellect and its "true" education. But women who do fade and wither in beauty develop no more in intellect. In the very midst of the "rich soil" of Enlightenment philosophy and discourse, their reason shrivels rather than develops. That is an unacceptable situation if, as Enlightenment elder statesman John Locke has it, the mind, or reason, arrives at consciousness based on how it has developed or what it has experienced: "To say a notion is imprinted on the mind, and yet at the same time to say that the mind is ignorant of it and never yet took notice of it, is to make this impression nothing" (13). Reason develops only via projection of the self into the world and the way the world--for example through education--projects itself into human consciousness. B...

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Wollstonecraft, Locke and Women. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:47, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1680807.html