Upon finishing "The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed", I found it to be one of those essays that took a few pages to get into, but once I got going, I got through the essay fairly effortlessly. Seeing as her 18th century style of writing was a bit unfamiliar to me, some of the essay was a bit confusing. However, I did understand the gist of it.
She discussed the way men and society viewed women. Basically, that education was wasted on women and all they were good for was to be some sort of trophy wife for the men to have. From the begining, women were taught how to behave best to get a husband, as if this were the ultimate goal in life. They didn't have any worthy role in society. Women weren't respected or allowed to follow their own dreams.
Clearly, times have changed since then. Women are now respected as active participants in their community. We have been grated the right to vote, we go to school, and have jobs; things that would have been unheard of in the eighteenth century, when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this piece.
It was obvious from the introduction that this piece would have something to do with women's rights. I admire Wollstonecraft for being one of the few women of her time to stand up for women and not give in to men and allow them to treat women the way they did. I really liked this essay and the overall theme it portrayed.
Monday, August 31, 2009
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