A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects

Wollstonecraft states that the class system, and the system of hereditary property that prevents wealth and property from being fairly distributed, procures “the respect due only to talents and virtue” (149)—that is, it is property and wealth that command respect in society, rather than “talents and virtue” (149). As a result, those who receive hereditary wealth become merely products of “habitual idleness” (149) and those who are not recipients are instead “cajoled out of his humanity by the flattery of sycophants” (149) in a bid to rise in station. Just as the majority of society is subject to a very few, women are subject to all men, which means, according to Wollstonecraft, that woman “will be cunning, mean, and selfish” (149) so long as they don’t have their own independence.

Women are the most “debased” (152) by the organization of society as it is. For, while “riches and inherited honours” (152) are “destructive” to the character, men, at least, are still capable of “becoming soldiers and statesmen” (152), while women are not. Similarly, while other men do have the ability to “creep” (153) out of “some loop-holes” (153), “for women it is an herculean task, because she has difficulties peculiar to her sex to overcome, which require almost superhuman powers” (153).