Women are taught to indulge their emotions and thus have unhappy marriages because passion cannot be sustained. Gregory desire that women remain virtual slaves, enshrined in the home and concerned only with their "natural" proclivities of being modest, chaste, and beautiful. They are seldom independent and tend not to exercise reason. They are taught that their looks are of paramount concern, and they tend to cultivate weakness and artificiality to appear pleasing to others. Chapters two and three detail the various ways in which women are rendered subordinate. In the first chapter Wollstonecraft promotes reason and rationality and discusses the deleterious effects of absolute, arbitrary political power and the vices associated with riches and hereditary honors. They are treated as subordinate beings who care only about being attractive, elegant, and meek, they buy into this oppression, and they do not have the tools to vindicate their fundamental rights or the awareness that they are in such a condition. The introduction sets out her view that neglect of girls’ education is largely to blame for the condition of adult women. Talleyrand-Périgord, the late bishop of Autun whose views on female education were distasteful to Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a treatise on overcoming the ways in which women in her time are oppressed and denied their potential in society, with concomitant problems for their households and society as a whole.
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