Devoney Looser

Focusing on the lives of women, they were not allowed such freedoms like we have in modern times. Education is something that these women were not granted a lot of access to. This is pointed out in the very beginning of the novel. One of the characters mentions, “You cannot read, Anna.” (Brooks, 1). Women were expected to be housewives, they would not need that much education to do that. It seems, though, that women in the book were able to learn a lot through experiences. They had no need of a proper education to be able to survive day to day. Going off the information I have learned and the information presented in this book, I believe that the author was able to properly portray the life of women in the seventeenth century.

In addition to education, Wollstonecraft brings the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the reader’s attention because he claims that women should not feel independent, and they should be a man’s companion. “…In 1792 the British writer Mary Wollstonecraft directly confronts Rousseau’s views of women and their education…” This “initiated a debate that echoed throughout the centuries followed.” Even today, this debate is still prevalent among both young and old people.

states, “I may be accused of arrogance; still I must declare firmly what I believe that all the writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners from Rousseau to Dr.Gregory have contributed to render women more artificial, weak characters than they would have other wise been; and consequently more useless members of society” (22). Wollstonecraft believed that men who advocated for the trivial education that women received, if they received any education at all, did not even adequately prepare them for the one role that they were allowed, that of a wife.

Judith Sargent Murray’s On the Equality of the Sexes reveals the struggles women had in the 17th-18th centuries when it came to equal education opportunities. Women were expected to become people of domestication while men had many opportunities to expand their minds and be ambitious, and be leaders. Women were expected to focus on taking care of their family, not to have minds of their own. They wanted change.

Education among women began to spread in the first half of the XIX century when it became their responsibility to raise future citizens and support themselves. Women entered public schools and became teachers, doctors, ministers and journalists. Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, popularized the image of women as spiritual supporters of their husbands, rather that financial. Women were said to belong at home, not outside, which was a dirty and dangerous place.

Articles written during a specific period gives the future population an idea of the issues present during that time. Before the United States became independent, woman education was limited to the skill needed to be a good wife and proper mother. Particularly, upper-class woman were the only ones that had the resources to gain an education. Most middle and lower class focus primarily on the education of their males. European education influence Colonial America’s educational system. Since there weren’t any establish convents schools in the colonies, tutors were primarily hired and later on schools were incorporated. During the first years of schooling, new England girls went to a coed school called “dame school”. In the dame school, girls were thought to knit and sew. Many girls got the chance to go to the town school. However, some town school in new England prohibited girls from attending. In the south, girls got the

Dian Fossey to me was a very mysterious, somewhat helpful and kind of troublemaking person. She seemed very adventurous and fun but she was also very serious. When it came to her job she was always serious. Dian Fossey studied gorillas. To me it is amazing how seriously she took that job. She did everything she could to protect those gorillas. I think the gorillas brought her happiness but also sadness, and other emotional problems. Dian Fossey lived up on a mountain by her self for a number of years. That begins to have an effect on you as well. It was very lonely up there on the mountain. She got a nickname rom her lifestyle, she was called "Nyirmachabelli", which means the woman who lives alone on the

In the early nineteenth century, women were expected to be, “‘angels in the house,’ loving, self-sacrificing, and chaste wives, mothers and daughters or they are… ultimately doomed” (King et al. 23). Women of this time were supposed to be domestic creatures and not tap so far into their intellectual abilities (King et al.). The role of women in the nineteenth century is described:

The Victorian period further divided men and women by establishing a sharper, stronger line between the duties of the two sexes and what was appropriate for them. Women were further oppressed by the lack of education offered to them that didn’t only involve becoming a proper wife and mother. One sphere of education that was pervasively thought of as masculine and therefore, reserved for men, was classical education. In America, it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that women were taught Latin and Greek, and only half of the schools offered to them also offered this type of education. Antigone was, therefore, first introduced to men. However, “It was not Thebes, the subject of the play, but Athens, the home playwright, that

According to Paul Grendler, the conservative, clerical pedagogical theorist Silvio Antoniano (1540-1603) reflected on women’s educational status in Renaissance Italy in one of his written works, claiming that “…a girl (should not) learn ‘pleading and writing poetry’; the vain sex must not reach too high…A girl should attend to sewing, cooking, and other female activities, leaving to men what was theirs”. Apparently, this was the common-held view concerning women’s education during that time. Although women were actually encouraged to literacy, their subservient social role as wives and mothers could not allow them to learn as much as men did (Grendler, 1989).

Education was not equal between the sexes and neither between the classes. Gentlemen were educated at home until they were old enough to attend well-known or lesser schools. A lady’s schooling was

A woman in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century depending upon her status in life was expected to run the household and to be involved in certain social settings. Some of the things that women would do in their daily lives would be to manage a household budget, make sure that the staff kept up the house and to educate herself in “womanly” pursuits. According to Sullivan, she was expected to learn languages such as French and Italian but

Although the Romantic Era's general perspective regarding a woman's "sensibility" may seem distasteful to most contemporary readers, the viewpoint was commonplace during the period. To be clear, this was mainly the assumption that women were dominated by their ‘specially configured’ and ‘delicate’ senses, rather than reason and intellect. Authors like Edmund Burke passively promoted these fragilities in his verbosely titled piece A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. While this point of view retained popularity, there were thankfully those who sought to tear it to shreds. The author Mary Wollstonecraft, widely lauded as "the first Feminist", actively addressed sensibility and more in her political and polemic treatise “Vindication of the Rights of Woman”. She cites deprivation of quality education for women, as well as their condescending treatment in society as reasons for this sort of behavior. But to better understand why women were seen this way in the first place, it will help to briefly to define what "Romanticism" really is, in a cultural and literary context. And while it is no longer as potent as it once was, the spell which tricks society into believing women are a secondary and frail sex, is one that still has power today, and it is a spell which should be permanently broken.

It is unfair that literature teaches women to be such things, it teaches women “To become women nurses rather than doctor, secretaries rather than attorneys or corporate executives, sex symbols rather than thinkers, elementary school teachers rather than university professors.” (Feminist Criticism 1132)

In introduction, Mary Wollstonecraft wastes no time to illustrate and sadness and disappointment with their education system and their educators. Wollstonecraft believes that men see women as wives and mistresses and not “human creatures” and that the government observes the female as inferior to male. To Wollstonecraft, the instruction of women to be beautiful and yielding to men in search for marriage leaves their minds and usefulness sacrificed. Wollstonecraft’s writings are a clear and direct cry to women to have and explore their desires as well as curiosity, and in that regards, intelligence and human character. Wollstonecraft contends that a more educated woman would bring about a happier husband, child, and society. A quote that summarizes