Currently reading this, stumbled on this lecture. Thank you, it is great to hear you discuss the conservative streak - because I noticed it and found it challenging to read.
Really good and educative video on western political thought, i am from Delhi university , India. i liked your video a lot. thanx for this great video.
@@adamrosenfeld9384 Hi Adam - sorry to be picky but...! Am about to start an MA degree in Victorian Studies and so keen to learn about MW's contribution to early feminism. Men - what is their problem? (Discuss). Anyway, enjoying your lecture to pick up the key arguments MW put forward. Thanks!
her puritanical viewpoint in that day of age isn't that remarkable to keep repeating. She is a woman after all, she knows how dangerous it can be to get pregnant. In that time. Socially but also a matter of life and death. She herself is an example of how dangerous it can be. Not having the right environment, giving birth in stressful situations only makes it more dangerous. It's not that weird for women to be more puritanical in that sense and more easily condemn having to much focus on bodily pleasures. As for them it can turn out very sour fast, while for men it's not equally as dangerous.
This is old but I'm still objecting to what that guy said "she's just a product of her times" no way, this is a satire she's making you believe what shes trying to convey and leaving open ended questions making you look dumb. that's the point of a satire, it makes you question her seriousness.
Zoinks & Lola: I also find this to be a compelling reading, that Wollstonecraft is being satirical. However, one thing that really challenges this reading for me is the way that Wollstonecraft is so openly critical of anything resembling deception. - We get it in the dedicatory letter to Talleyrand in a somewhat bigotted slam on French culture - "This, together with the system of deceptiveness that the whole spirit of their political and civil government taught, have given a sinister sort of knowingness to the French character. . . .and a polish of manners that injures the substance by driving sincerity out of society." - We get it in the introduction, where she goes out of her way to disavow any rhetorical trickery - "That is a rough sketch of my plan; and I offer now three remarks about how I aim to carry it out. (1) I shall refrain from pruning my phrases and polishing my style, because it is important to me to affect the thoughts and actions of my readers, and I’ll do that better if I sometimes express my conviction with the energetic emotions that I feel.(2) I shan’t waste time elegantly shaping my sentences, or fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings that come from the head and therefore never reach the heart; because I want to persuade by the force of my arguments rather than to dazzle by the elegance of my language. (3) I shall try to avoid the flowery diction that has slid from essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and conversation; because I’ll be dealing with things, not words!" - And we get it in her criticism of the so-called "feminine" version of intelligence, namely cunning, which has an inherently deceitful character. - Sarcasm and irony and satire seem so out of character for Wollstonecraft because they seem to be somewhat "sneaky" ways of arguing, and Wollstonecraft seems to have little respect for this sort of approach, instead praising straightforwardness whenever she gets the chance. Now perhaps she's being ironic when she is criticizing deceptive rhetorical strategies (like irony and satire), but this seems to open the floodgates to all sorts of possible interpretations. Sometimes the only (or best) way to make sense of a text is to read it ironically, but things really start to get really messy really fast once we've decided that we aren't going to take an author at her word.
