"THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wollstonecraft Mary)

This is a rough sketch of my plan; and should I express my
conviction with the energetic emotions that I feel whenever I think
of the subject, the dictates of experience and reflection will be
felt by some of my readers. Animated by this important object, I
shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style. I aim at being
useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing
rather to persuade by the force of my arguments than dazzle by the
elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding
periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial
feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart. I
shall be employed about things, not words! and, anxious to render
my sex more respectable members of society, I shall try to avoid
that flowery diction which has slided from essays into novels, and
from novels into familiar letters and conversation.

These pretty superlatives, dropping glibly from the tongue, vitiate
the taste, and create a kind of sickly delicacy that tums away from
simple unadorned truth; and a deluge of false sentiments and
overstretched feelings, stifling the natural emotions of the heart,
render the domestic pleasures insipid, that ought to sweeten the
exercise of those severe duties, which educate a rational and
immortal being for a nobler field of action.

The education of women has of late been more attended to than
formerly; yet they are still reckoned a frivolous sex, and
ridiculed or pitied by the writers who endeavour by satire or
instruction to improve them. It is acknowledged that they spend
many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of
accomplishments; meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed
to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing
themselves--the only way women can nse in the world--by marriage.
And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they
act as such children may be expected to act,--they dress, they
paint, and nickname God's creatures. Surely these weak beings are
only fit for a seraglio! Can they be expected to govern a family
with judgment, or take care of the poor babes whom they bring into
the world?

If, then, it can be fairly deduced from the present conduct of the
sex, from the prevalent fondness for pleasure which takes place of
ambition and those nobler passions that open and enlarge the soul,
that the instruction which women have hitherto received has only
tended, with the constituion of civil society, to render them
insignificant objects of desire -- mere propagators of fools! --
if it can be proved that in aiming to accomplish them, without
cultivating their understandings, they are taken out of their
sphere of duties, and made ridiculous and useless when the
short-lived bloom of beauty is over,[1] I presume that rational men
will excuse me for endeavouring to persuade them to become more