tion of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft argues that women are training from birth to be dependent on men and are raised in the ways of artifice to appease men, “It is acknowledge that they spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of accomplishments: meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves,--the only way women can rise in the world,--by marriage” (Wollstonecraft, Intro., 3).
Because of conditions imposed on them by men, Wollstonecraft argues that women live in a virtual state of enslavement because of such constrictions, forming a self conflict that inevitable reflects their socially inferior status. Wollstonecraft argued that in the society in which she lived, women were degraded and demeaned. This kind of treatment at the hands of men, Church and state caused women to develop negative and self-deprecating behaviors. Wollstonecraft was making the argument that the self is shaped and informed to a large degree by external influences which impose upon the individual necessary behaviors, traits, and attitudes. Not all of these imposed attributes and characteristics are desirable. In fact, women often act in worse ways than they normally would, according to Wollstonecraft, in order to circumvent such false impositions, “Women are, in fact, so much degraded by mistaken notions of female excellence, that I do not mean to add a 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 infantile airs that undermine esteem even whilst they excite desire” (Wollstonecraft, Intro., 3).
Women in the Romantic era were typically confined to roles of mother and wife, with anything more or less generally viewed as unac
...