More than two hundred years ago, Wollstonecraft similarly asked why particular virtues should be regarded as specifically 'manly' and not — 'more properly speaking' — virtues that ennoble all humans. It's clear that debates concerning which characteristics are masculine and feminine rumble on even today and continue to chip away at the idea of equality.
One of Wollstonecraft's main objectives in publishing her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 was that women should be viewed as human first and foremost rather than as a separate and irreconcilably different species to men. She boldly declared:
I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties', and she railed against those male conduct book writers who instead considered 'females rather as women than human creatures
Way ahead of her time, Wollstonecraft was convinced that gendered behaviour was learned through education and experience, rather than being something with which one was born. This perhaps partly explains why her work, after initially being well received, was neglected until the feminist movement of the 1970s found in it a very modern sense of gender identity.
Women and natural history
In my new book, Creating Romanticism, I argue that Wollstonecraft had been led to this new understanding of woman's capacities in part by her reading and reviewing of works of natural history for a politically radical journal called the Analytic Review. During the time that she was thinking about and writing her Vindication, she reviewed a significant number of natural history books and in her reviews of them she considers issues that come up again in Vindication. For example, she was fascinated by the fact that species of animals and plants were capable, through domestication or cultivation, of degeneration, becoming physically weaker and prone to disease.
