Responce to Wollstonecraft excerpt

This was a bit of a shock after the meticulously logical (as well as modern) outline of Guns, Germs, and Steel. The title and date lead me to expect a carefully structured academic argument, not such a personal essay. Although I enjoyed a few of Wollstonecraft's more artful phrases (eg. "out Quixote Cervantes"), I at times found her argument difficult to follow when she began to discuss what she might have written instead, or why she wasn't going to write about a topic about which she was writing. Most aggravating were the tangential supporting arguments she squished in around the corners. Many of her metaphysical ponderings about the nature of love and evil did eventually relate back to her arguments for the moral capacities of women, but they were not always presented in an effective way, or even in one contiguous piece.

To do every thing in an orderly manner, is a most important precept, which women, who, generally speaking, receive only a disorderly kind of education, seldom attend to with that degree of exactness, that men who from their infancy are broken into method, observe.

So maybe it's not her fault. Or maybe people in general just didn't write in such an "orderly manner" during her time.

The greatest criticism I have of the substance of this essay is that it focuses exclusively on the upper class and bourgeoisie. Wollstonecraft names idleness, preoccupation with appearance, and lack of education as deficiencies in the required feminine character. During the late 18th century, a woman of the lower class could not afford idleness or a "fondness for dress." Education would be out of the question for her; her husband and sons would be lucky to be literate. In the lower class, sexism usually extended to subordination and condescension without the insulting pampering.

Wollstonecraft's social exclusivity is not the only indication that her mode of thought is strongly flavoured by the principles of the Enlightenment. The terms "natural" and "instinctive" are used numerous times throughout the essay as she asks the reader what is quintessentially "feminine." At a time when intellectuals were seeking the "natural" solutions to everything, and "natural" often meant "intended by God," it was easy for philosophers like Rousseau to leave women out of a social revolution by explaining that the natural, and therefore best, social structure places women below men, where they can best express their natural qualities of gentle deference. Wollstonecraft's refutation of "nurture" rather than "nature" must have been wildly unpopular. She clearly supports "natural" religious virtue for humankind as a whole, but refuses to accept double moral and social standards for the sexes. However, she chose to chop this provocative assertion up into little bits wedged into remote parts of the essay, and she rarely committed to more than rhetorical supposition. Was she trying to placate less receptive readers by interspersing it with the more familiar ethical preaching?