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theoretical analysis. They understood clearly enough that in their own
time they were being made to live like bats and they saw the contra–
dictions between this oppression and the ideology of liberty and
equality; at that historical point to go beyond such insight and such
forceful protest could only be millenarianism-as they well knew . In a
final dedication of her book on marriage to the Queen , Mary Astell
addresses the future: "In a word, to those Halcyon, or if you will
Mzi/enium
Days, in which the Wolf and the Lamb shall feed together,
and a Tyrannous Domination which Nature never meant, shall no
longer render useless if not hurtful, the Industry and Understanding of
half Mankind!"
When feminism next really reached a new crescendo, with Con–
dorcet and Mary Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution, it was the
hurtfulness not the uselessness of the oppression of women that was
uppermost in the writers' minds. The principles were clear; Condorcet
was emphatic in stating them. "Either no member of the human race
has real rights, or else all have the same; he who votes against the rights
of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, thereby adjures his
own." It is as bad to be tyrants as to be slaves . Men and women are
degraded by the oppression of women . But what is new to the
argument, and best expressed in Mary Wollstonecraft 's
A Vindication
a/the Rights a/Women
(1792) is the constant analysis of the damage
done
to
women anu therefore to society by conditioning them into
inferior social beings . The theme is present in the seventeenth century,
but a hundred years of confirmation has made its mark: "femininity"
has been more clearly defined as fragility, passivity, and dependence–
economic and emotional. Wollstonecraft inveighs against such false
refinement :
In short, women, in general ... have acquired all the follies and
vices of civilization, and missed the useful fruit ... Their senses
are inflamed, and their understandings neglected , consequently
they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility,
and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling . Civilized
women are therefore so weakened by false refinement, that ,
respecting morals , their condition is much below what it would be
were they left in a state near
to
nature .
Between the end of the seventeenth and the end of the eighteenth
century it would seem that among the middle classes the social
