Critique On The Article A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women By Wollstonecraft
Race, Socio-economic class, and sexuality complicate the gendered experience covered by the news article called Undocumented immigrant charged with murder in killing of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts by John Bacon in multiple different ways. Race complicated this article because of the fact that the attacker was an immigrant who was illegally in the United States. Socio-economic class complicates this article because the two main people involved grew up in various environments. Most importantly sexuality complicates this article because it brings to the table the safety of women and how they often times feel in danger when trying to do stuff such on a daily basis because of some men. Having said that reading through the second half of the essay from A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Wollstonecraft I found multiple connections suggesting it responds to this current event, even though it comes before the event happened.
To start, the article about Mollie Tibbetts really strikes me as a power struggle of how women face simple dangers when going out specifically around men and how they are expected to “obey”. For example, the article about Mollie Tibbetts states that Rivera (mollies attacker) got out of his car and started running behind her leading her ideally to feel threated taking out her phone to call the police and that’s when Rivera panicked abducting Mollie. I think that Rivera’s choice in all this coincides with something found in our reading by Wollstonecraft that states “women should never for a moment, feel herself independent …. with respect to the female character, obedience is the grand lesson which ought to be impressed with unrelenting rigor”.
Wollstonecraft is stating that women should show obedience and never feel independent which falls into place with possible beliefs of Rivera that he could pursue Mollie without her threating and standing up for herself because she is a woman. Both these passages relate by pointing out the power difference between women and men and different ways. Wollstonecraft tends to do it in a way that’s more straight to the point by specifically stating things about women’s independence compared to man and women’s obedience to man. Meanwhile Mollie’s story offers a direct example of this all unfolding, it doesn’t necessarily explain what Wollstonecraft is trying to get across, but it gives an example that compare to her words. I think that between these two articles it’s important to realize that women are proven inferior to men whether they like to admit it or not. This often times renders them unsafe in situation’s as Mollie was put in even if they try stating up for themselves, as sad as that is its true.
Last but not least both of these passages also tell us that even though time has passed between these two articles not a lot has changed. Analytically between these subjects’ men are still superior and women even though they may act like this isn’t true by doing the same things as men.
I personally believe that the assigned reading was non-efficient in addressing the intersectional aspects of socioeconomic class and race. I believe this because I found it hard to find aspects of these two things in our reading of Wollstonecraft. This generally to me was because I found Wollstonecraft relaying aspects of sexuality over these two things by trying to prove men’s power over women. Although, I must admit that Socioeconomic status does help declare outcomes of situation’s like mollies on the daily.
