Discard the title.
excuse my word vomit:
Reading “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, I found myself very confused to where I stood with Wollstone on her arguments.
One thing that I feel really strongly about with Wollstone was her argument that went along the lines of rationality and how women should stop using their feelings for reasoning and instead think rationally and fundamentally. Although I agree with that argument, I don’t believe that women are the only ones who think with their feelings…and also that thinking with feelings is necessarily a bad thing.
i. It’s not only women who think with their feelings. Men think with their feelings a lot too. Their anger and pride, especially in the earlier years, drove their decisions.
ii. Thinking with your feelings isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’m the kind of girl who “thinks with her heart”, and although I probably sound all flowery and not sensible at all (especially to wollstone maybe), I think that it is so important to consider your feelings when making decisions. Feelings aren’t irrational. What is irrational is making a decision that you don’t feel right about. She talks about rationality and how women should practice it and think with their brains and be sensible and all this “masculine” things, and although I believe that women and men should have equal rights (which makes me a feminist I guess), doesn’t mean that the things we do should be the same. Being equal doesn’t mean being identical. It doesn’t mean that girls need to be more masculine or have to prove ourselves. Can’t we be equal and have rights by just being ourselves? By doing what we want? If I want to be a girly girl, I will be a girly girl. But that doesn’t mean that I am not as important as a very masculine man.
People come in different shapes. Sizes. Thoughts. and Opinions.
but what I feel from this is that we shouldn’t base our equalness on how we act. We’re all human. No matter what you think or feel or relay yourself and your feelings.
Sorry for vomitting words. I broke my contacts so reading this page is really blurry and makes my head hurt so bye.
Not word vomit at all–very thought-provoking! I, too, noticed that Wollstonecraft spends a good deal of time emphasizing reason over feelings; indeed, she says that reason is what makes us really human, what separates us from animals (p. 117), and so to be fully human one needs to use one’s reason. That’s fine, but then there are numerous places in which she suggests that reason is significantly better than feelings, emotions, appetites, that reason is even divine, connecting us to God (while feelings and appetites are not).
This is not a terribly unusual view of the hierarchy of reason over emotions, in this time period in philosophy, but it’s certainly something we might want to question. I want to talk about this in seminar on Friday!
On another note, could you re-active the plugin that allows those who comment to check a box to say they want to get an email if there are replies? Go to “plugins,” then activate “subscribe to comments.” Thanks!