Reason and Sensibility in Mary Wollstonecraft's "The Wrongs of Woman"

Abstract

In 1791 Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of Rights of Woman, stating that first duty of women was to cultivate and urging them to avoid excessive sensibility. While declaring these sentiments, she knew full well she was opposing a long-established tradition: that belonged to dominant men and sensibility to irrational and subordinate women. As Wollstonecraft uses it in The Rights of Woman, sensibility can be defined as cultivated emotion or capacity for it; it includes spontaneous sympathy and exquisitely polished instinct. Reason is the simple power of improvement; or, more properly speaking, of discerning truth; it is associated with self-restraint and judiciousness.1 In The Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft argued that whole person requires strengthening of both and sensibility, so that sensibility might be moderated by reason and be sustained by sensibility; an excess of either relaxes other powers of mind.2 In terms of psychology of day, then, her idea was androgynous, a judicious mingling of male and female sensibility. In Wollstonecraft's view, women pursued sensibility because they had been taught to do so. Female education emphasized nurturing of emotion, so that women would be distorted into sexual and passionate beings and grow subordinate to men (reason must control or moderate sensibility). In The Rights of Woman, term used for a woman successfully educated in this mode is romantic.