A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Glossary
A
- Accomplishments
- The ornamental skills — music, drawing, dancing, a smattering of polite conversation — that made up a fashionable woman's education in Wollstonecraft's time, pursued instead of solid knowledge. She argues that a girl raised to acquire only 'personal accomplishments' is trained for marriage-market display rather than for reasoning, and that this deliberately stunted education is the root cause of women's condition.
- Related: Neglected Education, Sexual Character, Sentimental Novels
B
- Bodily Weakness
- The physical frailty widely assumed to be women's natural condition, which Wollstonecraft argues is actually produced by neglecting girls' physical education and confining their movement and dress from childhood. She insists that trained weakness has been mistaken for natural weakness, with real consequences for women's health and independence.
- Related: False Delicacy, Neglected Education
C
- Catharine Macaulay
- The historian and political writer Wollstonecraft singles out as living proof that a woman can reason with the same force as any man, calling her 'the woman of the greatest abilities... that this country has ever produced.' She is one of the few contemporary women Wollstonecraft holds up approvingly, in contrast to the many she criticizes for embracing weakness.
- Related: Reason, The Rational Creature
- Chastity
- The single virtue on which a woman's entire reputation was made to depend in Wollstonecraft's era, regardless of her actual character or intelligence. She argues that this narrow, one-virtue standard both degrades women — reducing their whole moral worth to one bodily fact — and will never be genuinely respected until women are also treated as rational, independent beings.
- Related: Reputation, Virtue, Modesty
- Coquetry
- The practiced art of exciting male desire and admiration through calculated charm rather than genuine feeling. Wollstonecraft treats it as a learned survival skill in a system where women have no power except the power to attract, and argues that a mother absorbed in coquetry will neglect the children who depend on her.
- Related: Cunning, Accomplishments, Sensibility
- Cunning
- The indirect, manipulative strategy Wollstonecraft says women develop as 'the natural opponent of strength' when they are denied open power — using charm and stratagem to get what direct assertion cannot win them. She presents it not as an innate female trait but as the predictable result of 'artificial weakness,' which breeds both a propensity to tyrannize in small ways and skill at working around larger constraints.
- Related: Coquetry, Slavish Dependence
D
- Docility
- The 'sweet docility of manners' prized as a feminine virtue alongside sensibility — a trained pliancy and eagerness to defer to others' judgment rather than exercise one's own. Wollstonecraft treats it as another symptom of an education designed to produce pleasing companions rather than independent, reasoning adults.
- Related: Sensibility, Sexual Character
- Dr. Fordyce's Sermons
- James Fordyce's popular Sermons to Young Women, a conduct book that Wollstonecraft names and quotes disapprovingly as standard reading for girls even at school. She objects to its 'affected style' and to the way it flatters women's weakness rather than cultivating their reason, and says she would remove it from any pupil's library.
- Related: Dr. Gregory's Legacy to His Daughters, Sentimental Novels
- Dr. Gregory's Legacy to His Daughters
- A widely read conduct book by Dr. John Gregory advising his daughters to cultivate a taste for dress and to conceal their intelligence and appetite in order to please men. Wollstonecraft says she respects the author's affectionate intent but 'entirely disapprove[s]' of the book, treating it as a case study in how well-meaning men still teach women to be artificial.
- Related: Dr. Fordyce's Sermons, Accomplishments
E
- Emilius
- The English-translation title (from the French Émile) of Rousseau's treatise on education, which this text cites directly, including his observations of children's play and confinement. Wollstonecraft engages Rousseau at length precisely because his influence on ideas about female education was so pervasive, even as she rejects his conclusions about women's nature.
- Related: Rousseau's Sophia, The Rational Creature
F
- False Delicacy
- The cultivated squeamishness and prudishness that passed for feminine refinement in Wollstonecraft's time, which she argues is not innate sensitivity but a social contrivance that leaves women ignorant and easily deceived. She contrasts it with the honest, plain instruction she believes girls actually need about their own bodies and the world.
- Related: Modesty, Bodily Weakness
- Filial Duty
- The obedience children, and daughters especially, were expected to owe their parents regardless of whether that obedience was earned. Wollstonecraft argues this duty should rest on reason and genuine respect rather than on parents' assumed 'divine right' to command, since unearned authority breeds resentment rather than real affection.
- Related: Parental Affection, Reason
G
- Gothic Manners
- Wollstonecraft's term for outdated codes of exaggerated deference to women — elaborate gallantry and flattery in place of real respect and equal treatment — inherited from the age of chivalry. She calls this 'vestige of gothic manners' a hollow substitute for genuine equality that will persist until society is organized more reasonably.
- Related: Sexual Character
H
- Hereditary Rank
- Inherited social and economic privilege that Wollstonecraft treats as structurally identical to the subjection of women: both corrupt those who hold unearned power and both are defended by custom rather than reason. She draws the parallel explicitly, arguing that just as rank degrades a society organized around birth rather than merit, sexual hierarchy degrades a society organized around sex rather than reason.
- Related: Reason, Slavish Dependence
I
- Independence
- The self-sufficiency Wollstonecraft names in her opening dedication as the true basis of virtue for anyone, man or woman — the capacity to think, judge, and act for oneself rather than through another. It underlies her later, more concrete proposals (education, the ability to earn a living) and stands opposed throughout the book to 'slavish dependence.'
- Related: Reason, Slavish Dependence
L
- Libertine Notions of Beauty
- The idea, which Wollstonecraft says girls absorb through their education, that a woman's highest purpose is to be beautiful and please men rather than to develop her mind or usefulness. She argues that sacrificing 'strength of body and mind' to this standard is what makes marriage, rather than merit, the only avenue by which women can 'rise in the world.'
- Related: Accomplishments, Marriage as Legalized Prostitution
M
- Marriage as Legalized Prostitution
- Wollstonecraft's charge that a woman raised with no path to independence but marriage effectively has her person 'legally prostituted' — trading beauty and compliance for financial support, just as a mistress or courtesan does, but under legal and social sanction. The comparison underlies her larger argument that women should be educated for self-support rather than raised solely to attract a husband.
- Related: Accomplishments, Sexual Character
- Milton's Eve
- Wollstonecraft's critique of how John Milton, in Paradise Lost, describes the first woman as formed for 'softness and sweet attractive grace' and existing to please Adam rather than to reason independently. She singles out this portrait as an influential literary example of treating women as ornamental rather than rational beings.
- Related: Sexual Character, The Rational Creature
- Modesty
- A quality Wollstonecraft insists is wrongly treated as an exclusively feminine virtue tied to sexual reticence, when it is properly 'the fairest garb of virtue' common to both sexes and grounded in self-respect rather than performance. She distinguishes true modesty from the artificial, coy modesty girls are trained to perform for male approval.
- Related: Chastity, False Delicacy
N
- National Education
- Wollstonecraft's concluding proposal for co-educational, state-run day schools where boys and girls of all ranks would be taught reason and citizenship together, replacing private, sex-segregated instruction. It is the practical policy answer to the book's argument: if bad education produced weak women, a redesigned education can produce rational ones.
- Related: Talleyrand-Périgord, Accomplishments
- Neglected Education
- The deliberately shallow schooling given to girls of Wollstonecraft's class and era — years spent acquiring 'accomplishments' rather than knowledge — which she identifies in her Introduction as the root cause of everything else the book diagnoses. Fix the education, her argument goes, and most of what looks like women's natural weakness disappears.
- Related: Accomplishments, Bodily Weakness
P
- Parental Affection
- The love parents are assumed to feel automatically for their children, which Wollstonecraft distinguishes sharply from mere parental vanity — pride in a child as a possession or a reflection of oneself. She argues genuine affection, like every other virtue in her scheme, must be grounded in reason and duty rather than blind instinct.
- Related: Filial Duty
- Perpetual Childhood
- Wollstonecraft's description of the condition imposed on adult women who are denied education, legal standing, and serious responsibility, kept instead in a state of dependent innocence indefinitely. She traces the phrase to Rousseau's own reasoning — that men keep women childlike to secure their 'good conduct' — and treats it as an insult to women's rational nature.
- Related: The Rational Creature, Slavish Dependence
R
- Reason
- Wollstonecraft's central standard for judging conduct and worth: the faculty that distinguishes humans from brutes and that both sexes possess equally. Her whole argument rests on the claim that if women are denied the exercise of reason, they are denied the one thing that makes them fit for virtue and rights at all.
- Related: Virtue, The Rational Creature, Sexual Character
- Reputation
- What other people believe about a woman's virtue, as opposed to her actual character — a distinction Wollstonecraft insists society has collapsed for women specifically. She argues that women are taught to protect their reputation above all else, even above genuine virtue, because reputation, not conscience, is what public opinion actually rewards and punishes.
- Related: Chastity, Virtue
- Rights and Duties
- The foundational claim of the book's early argument: that rights and duties are inseparable, so any being capable of duty — which requires reason — must also be entitled to rights. Wollstonecraft uses this logic as her lever throughout: since women plainly exercise reason and moral duty, denying them rights is philosophically incoherent, not just unkind.
- Related: Reason, Virtue
- Rousseau's Sophia
- The ideal woman Jean-Jacques Rousseau designs in Émile (spelled 'Emilius' in this text's English translation) as the fitting companion for his ideal man. Rousseau argues Sophia should be trained to be weak, passive, and pleasing because nature made her so; Wollstonecraft devotes an entire chapter to dismantling this portrait as a rationalization for keeping women ignorant and dependent.
- Related: Emilius, Sexual Character, Reason
S
- Sensibility
- The cultivated delicacy of feeling — 'weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners' — that eighteenth-century writers praised as the ideal feminine trait. Wollstonecraft treats it as a fashionable substitute for genuine virtue, a quality bred by flattery and idleness that leaves women governed by their nerves instead of their judgment.
- Related: Sexual Character, Docility, Coquetry
- Sentimental Novels
- The popular romantic fiction of the day, which Wollstonecraft blames for feeding women's imaginations on idle, exaggerated emotion instead of cultivating judgment. In her closing chapter, she catalogs novel-reading alongside idle 'accomplishments' as one of the follies bred by ignorance that keep women trivial.
- Related: Accomplishments, Sensibility
- Sexual Character
- The prevailing eighteenth-century notion that women possess an innate, distinct moral and intellectual nature suited to pleasing and serving men — weak, delicate, and emotional rather than rational. Wollstonecraft opens the book by declaring this 'prevailing opinion' subversive of morality, since it excuses women from the demands of reason that apply to everyone else.
- Related: Reason, Virtue, Sensibility
- Slavish Dependence
- Wollstonecraft's blunt description of women's legal and economic position relative to men, softened in polite conversation by 'pretty feminine phrases' she refuses to use. The phrase captures her central claim that dependence, not nature, produces most of what passes for typical female character.
- Related: Hereditary Rank, Cunning
T
- Talleyrand-Périgord
- Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the former Bishop of Autun and French statesman to whom Wollstonecraft dedicates the entire book, prompted by his 1791 report on national education that trained girls only to please men. She addresses him directly as a legislator building a new constitution on reason, and challenges him to extend that same reason to women.
- Related: National Education, Reason
- The Rational Creature
- Wollstonecraft's preferred description of what a woman actually is, as opposed to the 'fascinating' ornamental figure conduct-book writers wanted her to be. She states her purpose plainly: to treat women 'like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces,' and to argue that being kept in a state of perpetual childhood insults that rational nature.
- Related: Reason, Perpetual Childhood, Sexual Character
- The Seraglio
- Wollstonecraft's recurring comparison between the fashionable European woman's condition and that of a harem favorite — kept, decorated, and valued only for her power to please. She uses the image sarcastically ('surely these weak beings are only fit for the seraglio!') to argue that a woman raised for nothing but ornament is fit for nothing but captivity.
- Related: Accomplishments, Sexual Character
V
- Virtue
- For Wollstonecraft, virtue is a single standard that applies identically to men and women, grounded in reason rather than in obedience or reputation. She rejects the idea of a separate, softer 'female virtue' built around chastity and pleasing manners, insisting instead that women be held to the same rational, active standard of conduct as men.
- Related: Reason, Sexual Character, Reputation