Chapter 2 - Invigorating Women

Summary

Mary Wollstonecraft challenges the social disablement of women by promoting a vigorous and curative feminism that establishes women’s qualifications for equality by virtue of their capacities. She associates female weakness with inutility and social degradation and promotes bodily and physical independence as ideals. Misogynistic cultures weaken the bodies and minds of women, Wollstonecraft asserts, and she petitions for women to develop (and be permitted to develop) their physical and intellectual abilities rather than to perpetuate a culture that is focused on the aesthetics of women’s bodies. Significantly, she suggests that it is absurd that weakness is treated as something aesthetically desirable in women. She concludes that society cannot maintain women’s social inutility as an aesthetic, as it is detrimental to social progress. Wollstonecraft’s implied theory of deformity (which links it to moral degradation) is articulated through its acknowledged opposite, beauty. These views are, however, incompatible with the compassion, sympathy, and sensibility Wollstonecraft expresses when considering deformity more directly.