Romantic Period Female Literature Mary Wollstonecraft Mary Wollstonecrafts’s life was plagued by poverty and cruelty. Wollstonecraft was a passionate woman who fought for many causes, such as the education of girls, feminism, and political equality. Her work “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” was a plea to women encouraging them to realize their worth, stand up to those who oppressed them, and not accept the social expectations of submissiveness and feeble-mindedness that society placed on them. The language of the work reads like a well-crafted letter. It is a persuasive essay that provides Wollstonecraft’s perceptions of oppression and ideas to quell those problems. Despite the obvious reasoning for the work, her language is complex, such as “the pretty superlatives, dropping glibly from the tongue, vitiate the taste and create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns away from simple unadorned truth” (Wollstonecraft, 2006, p. 1461). Wollstonecraft’s piece marks the beginning of the outward feminist movement and helped pave the way for female writers.
