Colorful and incisive phrases from a review in the New York Times:
In late 1790 Wollstonecraft’s ”Vindication of the Rights of Men” the first counter to Edmund Burke’s treatise on the dangers of the French Revolution, was published anonymously; ”all the best journals of the day discussed it.”
But when she produced
”The Vindication of the Rights of Woman”
all hell broke loose.
It was the most immodest emergence of a woman’s voice in memory and the 32-year-old Wollstonecraft became famous. While the American statesman Aaron Burr declared ”your sex has in her an able advocate . . . a work of genius” (and John Adams teased his wife, Abigail, for being a ”Disciple of Wollstonecraft!”) Horace Walpole’s reaction was more typical.
He called her “a hyena in petticoats.”
In her masterwork, Wollstonecraft expounded in dense and literate prose — Gordon might have quoted more extensively here — on the necessity of women becoming less trivial and more rational and educated creatures. She suggests that women ”labor by reforming themselves to reform the world.” A hyena, definitely.
“The minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement,”
She wrote, continuing: “Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind . . . and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show . . . that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being.”
She wrote,
“Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind . . . and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show . . . that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being.”