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Mary Wollstonecraft - Coggle Diagram

- - - - W: 'children, he truly observes, from a much more permanent connexion between married people than love', as beauty does not last- 'why then does he say that a girl should be educated for her husband with the same case as for an eastern haram?
    - - W: 'in order to fulfil the duties of life, and to be able to pursue with vigour the various employments which form the moral character, a master and mistress of a family ought not to continue to love each other with passion'
      - W: 'an unhappy marriage is often very advantageous to a family, and that the neglected wife is, in general, the best mother'
      - W: 'it frequently happens that women who have fostered an unnatural delicacy of feeling, waste their lives in imagining how happy they should have been with a husband who could love them with a fervid increasing affection every day, and all day'
      - W: 'the married woman... breaks a most sacred engagement, and becomes a cruel mother when she is a false and faithless wife'
  - - - 'men are certainly more under the indulgence of their appetites that women; and their appetites are more depraved by unbridled indulgence and fastidious contrivances of satiety'
  - - - 'only lisped out a pretty mixture of French and English nonsense, to please the men who flocked round her. The wife, mother, and human creature, were all swallowed up by the factitious character which an improper education and the selfish vanity of beauty had produced'
  - - - 'the duty expected from them, is like all duties arbitrarily imposed on women, more from a sense of propriety, more out of respect for decorum, than reason'
      - 'when they are obliged to dubmit to authority blidly, thier faculties are weakened'
- - - - 'almost everything upon which she reflected was set aginast a shared enlightenment undersanding of the development of civilization from a primitive condition to the present commercial age'
      - one of her 'predominant concerns' was 'the proper balance between the natural, the humanly created, and the divine'
      - 'thought of herself as a philosopher and a moralist'
    - - 'while she does not come across consistently as a leveler of all social distinctions, she came close to that position if only by implication, on occasion'
      - perceived benevolence 'as a natural trait'
        
        'the assertion of power by one group over another might seem inevitable to an author who thought human beings inherently selfish or vainglorious, but Wollstonecraft believed them to be naturally benevolent'
      - 'mankind as a whole was perfectible, as were individuals'
      - did not think humanity in inevitable decline (opposed to Rousseau's theory)
      - 'she did to some degree think nature had made a great difference between mana dn man taken as individuals and believed unqualifiedly that civilization had been a very partial phenomenon', progress enjoyed only by men
      - 'females were treated as creatures whose sole aspiration was to inspire love rather than as atuonomous rational human beings', to inspire love not even to love
      - 'what distinguished man from the rest of animal creation was reason, Wollstonecraft maintained' and women part of mankind
        
        'reason had been and was being used against itself, to deprive men (or women) of their natural rights'
        
        'by preferring the state of nature to civilization, Rousseau was also misusing reason'
        
        'that man had been created to remain in a state in which he could not blossom as a moral and rational being was a position wholly incompatible with God's nature'
        
        'she maintained htat the arts and sciences were required for moral emancipation of humanity'
      - 'the creation of society was the product of the need to cooperate and the dependency to which it gave rise was... the only form of dependence she found objectionable'
        
        'the dependence that Wollstonecraft did think natural, unavoidable, and indeed desirable was the interdependence that arose and engendered genuine cooperation' that 'did not entail either inferiority or superiority in those engaged in it'
      - had to learn to control the passions e.g. 'the passion for 'wealth or power' and the concomitant domination over others this entailed'
      - 'explciti belief in the emancipatory power of the science of politics' & women's participation in it
      - 'Wp;;stonecraft did not envy the socially and economically privileged. In fact, seh did not seem to think they were genuinely privileged at all' and 'on occasion she did idealize rural life'
        
        of poor, ''all those gross vices which the example of rich, rudely copied, could produce. Envy built a wall of separation, that made the poor hate, whilst they bent to thei superiors; who, on their part, stepped aside to avoid the loathsome sight of human misery'
        
        appalled by 'what she took to eb aristocrats' values, their attitudes toward matrimony, to themselves, each other, and above all to their children'
      - 'vanity and self-love constituted humanity's Achilles' heel. They were part of human nature, but not essentially so'
      - 'treating people as a means was profoundly wrong. Treating people as property or the conduit to its acquisition or accumulation shocked her', and also put women at fault
      - of man (response to Reflections) 'broke down any barrier one might have assumed existed between the public and the domestic, the political and the moral'
        
        'spoke in some detail of interpersonal relationships and the way they were distorted by power and property ownership. It related the personal to the political. It treated the two as one'
      - 'the adultery such a marriage market engendered made wives neglectful mothers'
      - 'property seemed to have a lot to answer for. It was to blame for the web of appearance that Wollstonecraft so decried' though pp/ ownership was 'authorized by nature, a term that Wollstonecraft often used interchangeably with 'God'
      - 'a world in which property was more evenly divided would be one in which virtue could prevail. Inequality stood in the way of virtue as it did the possibility of friendship'
      - 'Wollstonecraft did turn to governments for the changes that were needed', instead 'her address was to individual men and women or society more generally'
    - - 'what was needed for those rights to be proclaimed and protected was a conceptual shift in the general understanding of what a woman was'
        
        'what she wished for was an entirely new way of thinking about women and men as wholesome beings, and this necessitated an entirely new way of thinking about everything else'
      - 'arguing that it was the present condition that was morally bankrupt, and that it was largely so because women were misconceived as bodies for men's pleasure and reproduction'
      - 'most of Wollstonecraft's argument rested on exposing the contradictions in the world as it was'
        
        'these expectations could be not met given the conflicting norms prevalent in contemporary society, which treated marriage as a conduit to the acquisition and consolidation of peroperty and therefore as a market in which men and women were traded by their families'
      - duty & fulfilment: 'duty made the woman as well as the man. That was independence. That was freedom. For both the sexes it wsa the performance of familial duties that made the citizen; it laid the ground for true citizenship. Their fulfilment as individual human creatures depended to a great extent on the realization of their duties as social beings'
        
        FR: 'the revolution would ultimately fail, if women were not granted freedom to develop their reason in order to understand wherein their duty lay'
      - marriage market: 'in a world in which people were defined and defined themselves by what they owned and the status this accorded them, marriages were used instrumentally', commodification of women and self-treatment as 'objects of desire'
      - 'men were not at all exempt from the consequences of the materialism of society, but they did not labor under an imposed ideal of fragility and weakness'
      - 'thought it unnatural to hasten development, and far better for hte young to come intot eh adult world full of ideals rather than with none'
      - 'enlightenment called for the breakdown of oppositions' and whilst Wollstonecraft made polemical use of then' 'particularly nefarious, in her view, were those oppositions clustered arounf the idea of femininity and masculinity, such as that of weakness and strength'
      - Letters Written in Sweden, Norqay, and Denmark: ''commerce also, overstocking a country with people, obligd the majority to become manufacturers rather than husbandmen', ''the division of labour, solely to enrich the proprietor, renders the mind entirely inactive''
      - 'the enlightened society of tomorrow would not be differntiated by rank or driven by the desire for luxury'
      - 'the trickle-down effect, Wollstonecraft described, was not one of wealth or comfort, but of economic, moral, and pyschological degradation'
      - effiminacy attached to luxury and 'in the ideal world, men and women would not be effeminate, but manly'
      - 'Wollstonecraft contrasted modesty with chastity , though the two were ultimately mutually reinforcing. The effect of the latter was a 'ourity of mind' wheras the former was a 'simplicity of character that leads us to form a just opinion of ourselves, equally distant fom vanity or presumptions, though by no means incompatible with a lofty consciousness of our own dignity'
      - 'the wantonness of men was far more consequential in her view than it would be of women' though sexuality not abhorrent to her
      - 'to be disposed to undertake any social and political redress on whatever scale, minor or large, one needed to be compassionate and sensitive to the conditions of others'
      - 'fortitude was necessary to the pursuit of happiness. It presupposed strength of mind and that could only be acquired by a rational education that developed the faculties gradually in the order appropriate to the age, thereby fostering independent judgement'
      - a little utopian? 'in a possible future, humanity would be at one with itself, with individuals understanding their dependence on the rest and thereby their true self-interest. For that future to be realized, individuals needed to be made virtuous'
      - 'women had to be free not to marry and they should never have to marry out of financial need,. They therefore had to be able to earn a living'
      - stages in a marriage and 'a fixation on one single object, in this case one person, was mentally and morally enfeebling'- 'the most sublime of all affections, friendship, unlike love, strengthened with time' but 'could not exist between unequals'
      - 'it would be a decentralized society in order to avoid risking the kind of vanity and display that could be seen in courts and capitals such as Paris'
      - !quote, ''the world require[d[', she thoguht, 'the hand of man to perfect it; and as this task naturally unfolds the faculties he exercises, it is physically impossible that he should have remained in Rousseau's golden age of stupidity'
      - 'virtue would be pursued for its own sake and never in fear of Divine retribution, as she thought the idea of retributive punishment incompatible with God's nature'