Mary Wollstonecraft: Day 2

"I am afraid that morality is very insidiously undermined in the female world, by the attention being turned to the shew instead of the substance. A simple thing is thus made strangely complicated; nay, sometimes virtue and its shadow are set at variance" (139).

Points of Reflection

1. to what enigmatic subject might Wollstonecraft be referring in the following passage? "So voluptuous, indeed, often grows the lustful prowler, that he refines on female softness. Something more soft than woman is then sought for; till, in Italy and Portugal, men attend the levees of equivocal beings, to sigh for more than female languor" (142, my emphasis).

2. "The two sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other. This I believe to be an indisputable truth, extending it to every virtue . . . all the noble train of virtues, on which social virtue and happiness are built, should be understood and cultivate]d by all mankind, or they will be cultivated to little effect" (143). Do you agree with both assertions of the author in this passage?

3. Wollstonecraft maintains that virtue requires independence and equality (chp 9). Do you concur?

4. as in the reading for last class, Wollstonecraft again, repeatedly suggests that love within marriage is a temporary quality (157, etc.). Is her perspective pessimistic or practical?

5. what is Wollstonecraft's central argument in chp 11, concerning children's respect for their parents?

6. why does Wollstonecraft want the sexes to be educated together instead of separated, and even after the age of 9 to remain in a shared educational environment at least in the mornings?

7. why does Wollstonecraft support early marriages (175)?

"The Crown of Love" (1875)
John Everett Millais

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu