This study will apply the ideas from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to its fictional companion Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, showing how the ideas in Vindication are embedded in Maria. Essentially, Vindication argues that the inferior position of women in British society in the late 18th century is due not to any innate defect or weakness in women, but rather to the fact that men have the power to define and shape relationships, to make the laws, to own the property, and to decide the destiny of the genders socially, economically, and politically. The author does not absolve women of their responsibility for this situation. She first acknowledges the natural physical strength which men have over women, then adds:
But not content with this natural pre-eminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society (Wollstonecraft Vindication 7).
Vindication is a plea, then, to both men and women: to men to "let woman share the rights" (201), and to women to take part in a "REVOLUTION in female manners" (199). Wollstonecraft argues that most of what are seen as the weaknesses of the female gender are in fact direct results of the social, economic, political, and educational deprivation of women at the hands of men: "Asserting the rights which women in common with men ought to contend for, I have not attempted to extenuate their faults; but to prove them to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society" (200).
Women are raised to believe that their happiness, their very existence, are dependent on pleasing men, on being loved by men, on being alluring to men. This is the state into which women are educa...