sylvar

I read a bit of Mary Wollstonecraft to Jodi tonight, since I read faster aloud than she does at all, and man oh man. It's like getting a tattoo†: there *is* a good point involved, but it gets used over and over and over again until you become somewhat accustomed to the pain and just wait for it to be done with.

On the positive side, there's always a bit of hilarity involved whenever she says "In short, ..." or "But let me return to the subject at hand...", and you could make a drinking game‡ out of observing how often she says "private virtue" and "public virtue", or "duty", or "baneful", or alludes to Paradise Lost or Shakespeare.

She really does have some excellent points, but they can be made quite briefly (see the "Very Squashed version"). Mostly, she's saying that girls ought to be taught in the same classrooms with boys, because if you don't stimulate a young woman's intellect, you can't expect her to be anything but an airhead. She's also saying that parents and tyrants demand, rather than earn respect, and that they should instead teach their charges to follow the dictates of reason and not of those in authority, if the two conflict.

There: now you don't have to actually *read* her Vindication of the Rights of Women.

†I've never gotten a tattoo, mind you, so I could be wrong about what THAT experience is like.

‡Some people, in fact, HAVE made a drinking game out of this. It's more commonly known as grad school.