A Little Wollstonecraft and Friedan Comparison

The concepts of autonomy and independence, while approached in differing ways, flow incessantly through A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the opening chapter of The Feminist Mystique. Both authors, Mary Wollstonecraft and Betty Friedan, speak with a tone of elitism and, while the points discussed warrant careful attention from the audience, both appear to locate themselves above the duped women who aim all their energies toward the pursuit of men for their happiness. However, these two influential women recognize with passion the massive weight of societal expectations and the amount of training which renders women necessarily dependent on men, although there are innumerable differences between what these women (Friedan and Wollstonecraft) deem meaningful in women’s lives.
Mary Wollstonecraft reflects that only in an autonomous state can any creature of reason and virtue find fulfillment in her life, and asserts that this must remain independent of factors of love and companionship. “…whether she be loved or neglected, her first wish should be to make herself respectable, and not to rely for all her happiness on a being subject to like infirmities with herself.” Friedan’s piece, especially her emphasis on women’s desperate search for men demonstrates this salient similarity that is present throughout these two pieces. However, for Friedan, education is not the simple answer, as Wollstonecraft envisioned its ability to facilitate autonomy of women. It seems as though the growing consumer culture of the time, coupled with the frenetic life-style led women of the 1950s and early 1960s, affected even the most educated of women who were supposedly valued as equals to their male counterparts. The need for women to have a separate identity independent on others (as a mother or wife) is addressed as Friedan relays the way many women claim to feel a void where their own distinctiveness and personality should be housed. This theme is present in Wollstonecraft’s discussion of the artificiality and transient nature of the woman who betters herself physically to impress a man while neglecting her spirit and mind, the only transcending aspect of her being. This obsession with beauty, even as women are being admitted into universities at higher numbers then ever before, still continues, although I believe it is indicative of our affluent consumer culture and is extended to both women and men. Such historical and economic changes continue to prove the elasticity of our ideas of femininity, although at the core, the desire to please men continues to be engrained.