Reflection on A Vindication of the Rights of Women

I've been doing some looking around on some other student's blogs to figure out just what to make of this essay. I've got to say, I just don't really know what to interpret from it. I mean, between Mary Wollstonecraft's extensive vocabulary and the sheer length of the text, I got lost.

I could, however, identify her 'main idea' ("...why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence?") and some of her deeper points, but the finer details that she more than likely utilized were hard to identify. One of the deeper points that Wollstonecraft was pressing was the haste for women's education. She states that, "By individual education...such an attention to a child as will slowly sharpen the senses..." Throughout the third page, she affirms that educating women at an earlier age, like men, would give women the power to "think and reason". I think that this is one of the solid points of the essay, and her overall goal has obviously been achieved through efforts of her and people with the same ideas.

I guess that it was also hard for me to understand the article because we have a different mindset nowadays as opposed to back then. We now live in a time where women have a lot more freedom then they did back then, so understanding the strife became a bit hard. In the end, the points that Wollstonecraft made were all agreeable, and the article had pressed some issues that are no longer a problem today. That's a good thing to see.