Mary Wollstonecraft
Women share the same reason: educate them accordingly.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797, England) : enlightenment and feminist philosophy. Reason does not belong to one sex. If women seem weak and frivolous, it is because they are brought up to please, not to think. On AskPhilosophy: 4 reconstructed arguments, 4 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 4 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why she matters
Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is one of the founding texts of feminism. She does not claim privileges for women: she asks that they be treated as rational beings, capable of virtue and responsible for themselves. Her arguments return in John Stuart Mill, in the campaigners for the vote and in every debate on girls' education.
Her times
Self-taught and without money, she opened a school at Newington Green, became a governess in Ireland, then lived by her pen with the London publisher Joseph Johnson. She went to Paris at the end of 1792 and lived through the Terror. In 1797 she married the philosopher William Godwin and died eleven days after the birth of their daughter, the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. The Memoirs Godwin published in 1798 revealed her private life and tarnished her reputation for a century.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceA believer, close to London's rationalist "Dissenting" Christians. She grounds her faith on God's perfection and believes in Providence and the immortality of the soul. But she reads the Bible with her reason: Eve's fall is only a poetic story to her.
She starts from observation, but what really counts is the power to generalise, to draw comprehensive conclusions from particular cases. She also appeals to truths "as unequivocal as the axioms".
Some moral truths are as clear as a geometrical one: what raises man above the animals is reason, "as clear as that a half is less than the whole". Only prejudice clouds them.
She speaks of an immortal soul not bound by mechanical laws, struggling to free itself from matter. She builds no theory of mind, but her ethics presupposes this soul.
Whatever the influence of circumstances, everyone can become virtuous through the exercise of their own reason. Yet she knows that education and society deeply shape character.
Virtue has "only one eternal standard": it is the same for men and women, and does not depend on the manners of a country.
Reason judges even how the Bible is read: if an angel told her the story of the fall was literally true, she could not believe what her reason judges unworthy of God. But for her, reason leads to God.
The grand end of life is to unfold one's faculties and acquire the dignity of conscious virtue. This life cannot satisfy an immortal soul: it prepares for another.
Human reason is perfectible: it is even, she says, the "stamina of immortality". The vices of women, soldiers or kings come from their education and position, not from their nature.
Everyone's birthright is civil and religious liberty compatible with that of others. No inherited custom can abolish these natural rights. She attacks hereditary rank, monarchy and inherited wealth.
Her ethics speaks above all of virtue and character, acquired through reason and freedom. But she grounds this virtue on the character of God, wise, just and good: she is also close to an ethics of divine law known by reason.