If women have, in this brief span, accomplished so much, what, it is
asked, will they not yet accomplish? - Aline Gorren. Scribner's
Magazine 15 May 1894
A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf are two
enduring masterpieces of feminist literature. Although
Wollstonecraft and Woolf both advocate the education of women in
their essays, their arguments have several significant points of
contrast: what a woman’s education should consist of, how a
women’s education should effect her character and identity, and
why women were denied the right to education for much of history.
Essentially, these two essays build upon each other in encouraging
the liberation of women. Writing as a visionary and a woman willing
to face social ridicule, in 1792 Wollstonecraft argued not only for
the education of females, but also for basic rights to be granted to
her gender. By the time Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own
in 1929, many of the basic concerns of Wollstonecraft had been
corrected in society (i.e. women had been granted suffrage, were
permitted to own land, and were not considered property). One may
wonder whether Woolf would have been given the opportunities to write
her essay without the influence of Wollstonecraft’s writings.
Woolf’s essay did have an impact on society when it was written
and later, when it was used as propaganda for the women’s
liberation movement of the 1960’s. This latter use of the essay
helped bring women into the workplace and elevated them to nearly the
level of their male counterparts. As we can see, the differences in
the arguments of Wollstonecraft and Woolf in no way weaken their
argument for the education of women; in fact, it is these differences
that have enabled the essays to withstand time, giving other
activists footholds, without becoming outdated.
While both authors agreed beyond a doubt that women should be
educated, Wollstonecraft and Woolf varied in their opinion on what
that education should consist of. Wollstonecraft believed that
the education of women could create women of virtue and would
eliminate unintelligent trickery and cunning. She defined the perfect
education as “an exercise of the understanding as is best
calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart. Or, in other
words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as
will render it independent.” In this statement, she introduces
the reader to the idea that education, in its purest form, serves
only the purpose of freeing someone from dogmatically following the
thought of others. Wollstonecraft believed that most women blindly
followed their fathers, husbands, or other authoritative males in
their life and she wished to free them from these men she saw as
tyrants. Wollstonecraft clearly communicated this statement when she
said “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there
will be an end to blind obedience; but… blind obedience is
ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists… [who]
endeavor to keep women in the dark”. Wollstonecraft believed
the education of the day was a “false education” because
it taught “manners before morals”. Woolf, on the other
hand, did not see women as creatures void of morals; she viewed her
gender not as having poor morality, but as invisible to men except as
an ideal of beauty or frailty. Woolf firmly supported women gaining a
full education, not just rudimentary grammar level classes limited to
reason, virtue, and knowledge as encouraged by Wollstonecraft. Woolf
demanded an education equal to that of men, so that female writers
could also be equal to men in their literary achievements. Woolf
believed that a full education was necessary in order to understand
and respond to the legacy that has been bequeathed to women. She
believed that a well-educated woman would put her anger at the
dominant sex behind her and sacrifice her it in exchange for
literature that transcended.
There is little dissent among these two authors that education of
women would enhance the characters of woman, but Wollstonecraft and
Woolf point out very different ways in which the minds and behaviors
of women could be affected. Both Wollstonecraft and Woolf gave
excellent examples and illustrations as to how education would
benefit women and society, but they differed in that Wollstonecraft
wished to use education to free women to be moral, whereas Woolf
sought to use education to free a gender of literary giants.
Wollstonecraft accused her sex of resorting to cunning because they
lacked intellectual reasoning skills and basic rights. Women who can
think independently and have a right to control their own life,
Wollstonecraft would say, would not need to resort to cunning or
trickery to achieve their ends. Wollstonecraft viewed education as
all important because women would finally be educated in virtues and,
recognizing that low cunning was not logical and was unneeded in
their new life, they would naturally begin making decisions and
leading their life with reason. While Wollstonecraft focuses on the
benefit of women’s education to society, Woolf seems to focus
on the value of an intellectual outlet for the individual woman and,
in a secondary fashion, for the literary community. Woolf proposed
that inherently intelligent women already had the ability to think
independently, and the refusal on behalf of society to accept this
gift drove many to despair. She proposed that without an education
and without a platform on which to express herself, an intelligent
woman would find herself lost. Wollstonecraft wished that women,
particularly women authors, were able to concern themselves with more
serious subjects of study than clothes washing, as was the subject of
Barbauld’ poem: “washing day”. Though we like to
think of genius as transcendent, Woolf believes that the mind of the
artist is more sensitive to the world than most. To Woolf, the
purpose of a woman’s education was to release the intelligence
within her and give her permission and a platform on which to express
her gifts. In this respect, we can again see Woolf laying bricks of
thought upon the wall that Wollstonecraft began to build. It would
have been preposterous for Wollstonecraft to argue for the acceptance
of literary greatness among women, but it would have been a fruitless
argument on behalf of Woolf without the groundwork laid by
Wollstonecraft a century earlier.
Wollstonecraft wrote vindication from a perspective that seemed to
be a very direct attack on men for purloining women of their rights,
but Woolf approaches the subject from a much more objective approach
and, although she accuses men of holding women back, she avoids
placing excessive blame on either sex. Although Woolf cannot help
but recognize that the condition of her sex is largely in part to
men, she also acknowledges that “Life for both sexes…Is
arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle.” In this quote, she
admits that the life of men has not been by any means easy, and in
some ways, she seems to contribute their dominance over women to
inevitable human follies. However, Woolf also believes that education
can correct this mistake. Woolf points out the position of women in
literature and then juxtaposes it on top of real conditions when she
says “some of the most inspired words, some of the most
profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she
could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her
husband.” Wolf’s focus always remained on the literary
aspect and her argument was that if women were not given an
education, they would not be able to obtain the things that a woman
needs to write literature: financial stability, privacy, and leisure
time. If a woman was bound to her husband and raising children, how
would she meet any of these requirements? Wollstonecraft’s
perspective on the dominance of men was likely due to the fact she
encountered it more often in her life. While Woolf encountered sexism
trying to enter a library or in the meagerness of a female college’s
budget, Wollstonecraft encountered the dominance of men every day-
within her home as well as without. Wollstonecraft’s essay is
written with a tone of fervency and accusation, as she demands to be
freed from the bondage of a seventeenth century woman. Virginia Woolf
is allowed to approach her subject objectively because Wollstonecraft
cleared a path for her to speak.
Despite the contrasts pointed out between the two works, it
cannot be denied that these essays both advocate essentially the same
thing: a society in which women are treated as equal, contributing
members to society. The differences are, essentially, that
Wollstonecraft believes this can be done simply by giving women basic
rights and educating them as to logic and reason. Woolf believes,
however, that to be considered equals, women must be given the best
of everything in equal proportion to men. Despite these minor
dissentions, the arguments of both essays culminate in the single,
strong conclusion that women should be given the right to an
education that would place them on the same level as men and give
them the opportunity to affect culture, society, and literature as
freely as their male counterparts.
