Females According to Christina Rossetti and Mary Wollstonecraft Essay

Females According to Christina Rossetti and Mary WollstonecraftWhat is it that separates and elevates hu serviceman beings from the rest of the animal world? It is the ability to logically explain an action, decision, or reliance it is the capacity to reason. As Rousseau states, Only reason teaches us good from evil (Wollstonecraft 238). According to him, as well as countless other intellectuals of the eighteenth and ordinal centuries, through the exercise of reason men become moral and political agents. Of course, this Enlightenment theory does not include women. Rousseau declares his opinion of the female, O how lovely is her ignorance (253) The fair sex is the mans fantasy, the mans student, the mans play social function. Controlled, contained, and defined by the man, the woman is inferior to him and thus, not human. Eighteenth century writer and mother of female liberalism, Mary Wollstonecraft refutes this supposedly natural state of man being superior to woman in he r treatise, A Vindication of The Rights of Woman It is farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not endpoint from the exercise of reason... This was Rousseaus opinion respecting men I extend it to women....till the manners of the time are changed...it may be impossible to convince womenthat the illegitimate power, which they obtain, by degrade themselves, is a curse, and that they must return to nature and equality ...(239) She proclaims the female to be equally capable of reason as the male. In order for the female to severalise and utilize this capability, societys males and females must alter their prejudicial definition of the feminine. Wollstonecraft addresses the fema... ...cquire virtues which they may call their own, for how can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions? (254) Indeed, it is only when the woman may call her skill, her experience, or her truth, all derived from reas on, her own that she shall be independent. As Rossetti states, Only my secrets mine... (6). And, only when the social norms change, shall the keeping of such a secret be by choice and not necessity. Works CitedWollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Women. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Vol 2A. Ed. David Damrosch. 2nd ed. London Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 2003. 227-255. Rossetti, Christina. winter My Secret. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Vol. 2B. Ed. David Damrosch. 2nd ed. London Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 2003. 1617.