1. Wollstonecraft explains that “The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams, and that they cannot have much effect on her husband’s heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is passed and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? or, is it not more rational to expect that she will try to please other men; and, in the emotions raised by the expectation of new conquests, endeavour to forget the mortification her love or pride has received? When the husband ceases to be a lover—and the time will inevitably come, her desire of pleasing will then grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps, the most evanescent of all passions, gives place to jealousy or vanity” (P 34). This statement points to the process of socialization that teaches women to focus on their beauty and external characteristics. Discuss with your group three effects of marriage that Wollstonecraft predicts will happen in marriage.

2. In the 18th century, virtue was defined as “A particular moral excellence; a special manifestation of the influence of moral principles in life or conduct” (OED). However, Wollstonecraft’s repeated references to virtue mean something more. She urges that “Women ought to endeavour to purify their hearts; but can they do so when their uncultivated understandings make them entirely dependent on their senses for employment and amusement, when no noble pursuit sets them above the little vanities of the day, or enables them to curb the wild emotions?” (P 39). Identify one other passage in the text that also addresses the idea of virtue. Why is Wollstonecraft’s definition of virtue important for transforming women from dependent creatures into valuable members of society?

3. Wollstonecraft is quite skeptical about love, stating baldly that there is a need to “restrain this tumultuous passion, and to prove that it should not be allowed to dethrone superior powers, to usurp the sceptre which the understanding should ever coolly wield” (P 32). What does she think are the consequences of teaching women to believe in the lofty powers of romantic love? Why does she say that “Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship!” (P 39).

4. Wollstonecraft notes, “How women are to exist in that state where there is to be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, we are not told. For though moralists have agreed, that the tenor of life seems to prove that MAN is prepared by various circumstances for a future state, they constantly concur in advising WOMAN only to provide for the present. Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection are, on this ground, consistently recommended as the cardinal virtues of the sex; and, disregarding the arbitrary economy of nature, one writer has declared that it is masculine for a woman to be melancholy. She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears, whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused” (P 56). From this quotation or nearby selections of Chapter 2, discuss why Wollstonecraft condemns marriage in her time.

5. In several passages in the text, Wollstonecraft attacks the idea that women should be encouraged to see beauty as their ultimate directive in life. Instead she encourages us to “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but, as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a play-thing. The sensualist, indeed, has been the most dangerous of tyrants, and women have been duped by their lovers, as princes by their ministers, whilst dreaming that they reigned over them” (P21). What are the effects of teaching women that this is their priority and value in life?