234 Ruth Abbey
extend rights to women is that their current education (in both senses) pro-
hibits them from cooperating with “the Supreme Being’s” design for them
(107; see also 117). The current form of social organization stands in direct
violation of the way creation was originally conceived by “the Author of all
good” (138). As well as being an offense to God and in fl agrant violation
of his intention for his human creatures, the deprivations women suffer by
being unable to realize their potential for rationality, virtue, and indepen-
dence spreads “corruption through the whole mass of society” (31). Chap-
ter nine closes with the warning that “the two sexes mutually corrupt and
improve each other... Chastity, modesty, public spirit, and all the noble
train of virtues, on which social virtue and happiness are built, should be
understood and cultivated by all mankind, or they will be cultivated to little
effect” (168; see also 207).
To illustrate the high social costs of women’s defective, unnatural con-
dition, Wollstonecraft points out how poorly equipped they are for their
key social roles as wives and mothers (32, 60, 94 – 95, 117, 181– 82, 208,
221–223).^15 Raised to see marriage as the grand ambition of their lives
(32, 87), they set out to attract the wealthiest suitor possible. Taught that
the surest way to win such a husband is by pleasing him, women conform
to the ideal that men are supposed to desire: innocent (a euphemism for
ignorant, according to Wollstonecraft), weak, dependent, obliging, obedi-
ent. But as she warns, the art of pleasing is also an art of deception, and
women trained therein will not long be satisfi ed with the attention of one
man. They will, instead, go on trying to attract and please men other than
their husbands. In this way, women’s socialization produces faithless wives,
even if it is only by desirous eyes and imaginations that roam (53 –54,
92, 100, 111–112, 147). Women’s socialization also produces incompetent
mothers. Physically weak and morally disabled, they are ill suited to the
important task of rearing children (69, 168). One of their earliest maternal
duties —breastfeeding — is abandoned in the interests of fashion and el-
egance (100). Without the ability to guide their emotions with reason, they
either neglect or indulge their children (181, 222). Empty-headed women
have nothing to teach their children and, lacking any general principles to
inform their own conduct, they can do no other than impart to their off-
spring an inadequate moral education. Women also see their husbands as
rivals for their children’s affections, and as daughters mature, their mothers
come to resent them as competitors for male attention.
Wollstonecraft contends that the massive and multifaceted power that
men exercise over women rests on as shaky a foundation as the supposed
divine right of kings that the French Revolution was in the process of de-