Comparing Approaches to Women's Rights in Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women and Beauvior's The Second Sex

Compare and contrast approaches to women's rights in Mary
Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women and Simon De
Beauvior, The Second Sex

Introduction
This essay is an attempt at contrasting as well as comparing the
feminist and women rights aspect found in the novels
A Vindication
of the Rights of Women, by Mary Wollstonecraft and
The Second Sex
by Simone De Beauvior. Both these writers belong to the three
waves of feminist criticism, Wollstonecraft from the first wave and
Beauvior from the second wave. Both of them highlight the
inequalities existing in the society between sexes, asking for equal
rights and conditions for women, like men have. However, both
were different in terms of their views, even though they both
believed that traditions and social constraints put women in inferior
position.
The surplus of themes that both these works have dealt with is
heterogeneous and divers. The responses these works have
presented across changing socio-economic and political settings,
across different backdrops, questioning the ascendant ideologies
are what have drawn me to this comparison (Bell, 2013).
Description, Analysis and Interpretation
Time and again, society has felt the need of redefining woman,
the grounds of their oppression and the road to their liberation. It
began with Mary Wollstonecraft, the earliest crusader for women’s

rights with the help of
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She
questioned the right of men in this work, and while agreeing that
physically men are superior to women, she emphasised that men
always dominated women by indoctrinating the ideas that
propagate the mental and moral subordination of women to men. In
this book she has managed to assert that women are not actually
inferior to men , but only strike as one due their lack of education.
Here, she focuses on the idea and value that education can bring. In
this tour de force feminist text Wollstonecraft campaigns for a
socialist world to be the basis for the building and preserving of
women’s equal rights and opportunities. The book even advocates
the equality of political, legal, social, moral and cultural rights
amongst men and women (Craciun, 2013). The moving book is still
today considered a pioneer work from the eighteenth century
literature, manifestation of feminist criticism and one of the first
literature exclusively expressing feminism, the first wave.
The burning torch of rights of women passed on from Mary
Wollstonecraft to Simone De Beauvoir, who in her book
The Second
Sex discussed the manner taken up by contemporary writers while
portraying social, sexual and ardent relations. Beauvoir shows the
way patriarchal myth is manipulated in various degrees, allowing
her to pronounce her exasperation with contemporary sexual
mores. Beauvoir associates misogyny to fascism and racism,
revealing the true picture of the subservient female who is trained
completely for suiting the male needs. Her book majorly influence