e character, so prettily drawn by poets and novelists, demanding the sacrifice of truth and sincerity, virtue becomes a relative idea, having no other foundation than utility, and of that utility men pretend arbitrarily to judge, shaping it to their own convenience (Wollstonecraft 51).
The Romantic age was changing the way women were depicted in literature, and Mary Wollstonecraft was both reacting to and part of this change. Women had been treated harshly in literature prior to this period, but various factors at the time were causing a change.
Wollstonecraft's book on women's rights does not make reference to those who had gone before and is thus not an outgrowth of previous social or philosophical thought except to the degree that it arose within the wide movement for social change taking place in Europe and the United States. Her concern was not with the economic exploitation of women, though she would later recognize it, but she was concerned with middle-class women and the ladies of the "gentry" because she believed that these classes set the tone for society as a whole. Wollstonecraft's essential themes in Vindication of the Rights of Woman are directed toward removing the stigma from women and recognizing that women and men are not as different as they have been made out to be. The roles women are given in society are artificial and ignore the real values embodied in women:
I have already inveighed against the custom of confining girls to their needle, and shutting them out from all political and civil employments; for by thus narrowing their minds they are rendered unfit to fulfil the peculiar duties which nature has assigned them (Wollstonecraft 169).
Wollstonecraft pleads for the broader education of women in order to allow them to develop their faculties and abilities. Marriage is seen throughout this book as an institution which prevents women from developing in any other way than domestic, and this begin...