My thoughts on “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” by Mary Wollstonecraft is that it was a good first start for women’s rights.  I think that she chose the way she approached her argument to appeal to the men’s sensibilities of the time. By focusing on the fact that more education would make a woman a better wife and mother would appeal to the men’s idea that women need to be in the home and taking care of the family.  She had to start small to make a foundation to build on later.  Think of it like going up a flight of stairs, you don’t jump from the bottom step to the top step, you have to take one or two steps at a time to make it. Trying to leap too far sets you up for failure.  She talked about things being more “manly” but also pointed out that women shouldn’t be too manly and I think that she wanted men to feel like they could keep their own hobbies and recreational activities to themselves so that they wouldn’t think that women were trying to take it over. I’m sure that the men of the time would say, “What’s next, are they going to go hunting, too?”   She nips this in the bud by proactively saying that women shouldn’t do those things.  Mary paved the way for women’s right today. Today boys and girls have the same education in school. Men and women both play sports and hunt and ride motorcycles if that’s what they want to do.  If it wasn’t for Mary’s ideas women’s roles in society might not have changed much at all and women would still be focused on being wives and mothers.