The Enlightenment's emphasis on reason created in turn a lively conversation about its apparent opposite: emotion. In insisting on the rationality of women, Wollstonecraft drew out the radically egalitarian implications behind the Enlightenment project. Reason was above all universal everyone had access to it and, consequently, everyone should choose to be bound by its decrees. For Kant, whose work Wollstonecraft very likely knew through her continental friends and translation work from German, the Enlightenment rested on a belief in the power of reason to discover binding moral, scientific, and philosophical truths that trumped the authority of old prejudices and traditions.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another” (Kant, 54). The most famous definition of the Enlightenment, though very late in the movement, comes in Immanuel Kant’s essay, “What is Enlightenment?”: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. (Wikimedia Commons) In Vindication, Wollstonecraft is very critical of the deleterious effects of romance novels on the aspirations of young women.Ī Vindication of the Rights of Woman should be understood within the context of the Enlightenment as a movement containing complex and often contradictory political, religious, and philosophical implications.
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