Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf both focused their attention on the role of women in society, despite living in different historical and cultural contexts. While Wollstonecraft fought for the rights of women to have a national education, seeing it as among the universal and inalienable rights afforded to all of mankind, Woolf wanted instead to form a new cultural tradition of female writers.

"A Vindication of the Rights of Women" was a product of enlightenment philosophy, focusing on the rational basis for equality between men and women. "A Room of One’s Own," however was a product of post-WWI Britain and focused on appealing to the senses of the reader through stream-of-consciousness writing.

While they both differed in their approaches and their interpretations of the needs of women as individuals, they both fought for the rights of women in a time where they were heavily and overtly marginalized and oppressed.

Wollstonecraft was truly a child of the enlightenment. Writing in 1792, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" was a direct response to the philosophies of the French Revolution. She believed wholeheartedly in the concept of universal rights as endowed by a god, and that enlightenment thought could improve society and the world by making the people more rational, and therefore more virtuous.

Universal rights were commonly accepted in enlightened circles, and her notion of a liberating deity was similar to John Locke’s philosophy of inalienable rights as given by a creator. Further, the idea that reason could benefit society as a whole was embraced by enlightenment philosophers like Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Cesare Beccaria. Those who were most likely to be literate at this time were middle and upper-class men and women. Most importantly, they were generally men who imbibed enlightenment philosophy. As such, her work was written for an audience of philosophes. Yet, over a century later, another feminist writer rocked the world with her critique of women in fiction.

Virginia Woolf made a much more radical argument, in many respects than Wollstonecraft. A product of the post-WWI culture, at least upon writing "A Room of One’s Own," she approached society in a much more pragmatic way, using a strange combination of scientism and romanticism to appeal to the reader.

People found her work entertaining to read and she was relatively popular, already having been a successful novelist, by the time she published the book. On top of that, the British population was more literate and women had more educational opportunities than ever before. These facts made "A Room of One’s Own" more accessible to the average citizen.

To Mary Wollstonecraft, men and women needed to share these rights equally in order for women to

“emulate the virtues of man . . .”¹ because women were just as capable of reason as a man. In her mind, virtue, having one eternal standard (that is, from Providence), could not be different for men as it is for women. That would suggest different standards of virtue. As such, their morality was grounded in the same concepts as men’s morality, or else morality was subjective. Virtue, then, was founded in truth and fortitude – that is, reason and rationality – just as it was founded for men.² In this endeavor, Virginia Woolf agreed with Wollstonecraft, although not as extremely. Woolf believed that truth could not be objectively determined through emotion. In her examination of the science of sex, she concluded that “[t]hey had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth,” and were therefore “worthless for my purposes” and “worthless scientifically.”³

While both agreed on the role of non-fiction, however, it is Mary Wollstonecraft's analysis of fiction that showed the most striking difference between the two women in their approach.

To her, focusing on culture, as opposed to education, made women slaves to sensation; particularly, novels captured women's attentions and distracted them, which “prevents intellect from attaining that sovereignty which it ought to attain to render a rational creature useful to others, . . .”⁴

Novels, in her mind, were useless in the endeavor for truth and rationality because they distracted women from learning and from understanding the world around them, making them unfit members of society. Virginia Woolf vehemently disagreed with this assessment. Woolf saw fiction as a means of conveying the truth of one's day-to-day life.⁵ Novels served as a means of delivering a message in a logical progression, which explained why much of A Room of One's Own was written as through it were fiction. It shined a light on the thought processes of the author while maintaining the author's integrity, provided that the reality of their lives shined through their work. Otherwise, those works lacked integrity and hindered the pursuit of truth in fiction. It was once emotion superseded reason, or once masculine values plagued feminine work, that the work lost its integrity.⁶ The sexist belief that the works of women were naturally inferior was internalized by many women, lowering their mental vigor simply “by the need of opposing this, or disproving that.”⁷ In reality, then, it was not novels that distracted women and made them slaves to their sensations in Woolf’s mind, but the sexist view of their work.

Wollstonecraft continued by stating that women were caged, in a sort, by a forced sense of “innocence,” (which was, in her mind, synonymous with ignorance) to make them more obedient and accepting of societal oppression and the oppression thrust upon them by despots and tyrants. Women were made not only weaker mentally, but weaker physically, by being expected to maintain certain sensibilities.⁸ Woolf concurred that the stereotypes thrust upon women caused a detriment to their health. She recognized the effects these standards had mentally and physically, and expressed them in her analysis of women like the hypothetical sister of William Shakespeare, Judith:

For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. ⁹

Femininity and the standards that came with it created many problems for the best and brightest among women in England during their respect times, an important similarity between them.

While both women accepted that stereotypes affected women in a detrimental way, they differed as to why. Woolf believed women functioned in society as a “looking glass . . . reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size;” by criticizing and demonstrating critical thought, they shrunk the reflection, making men feel small as women showed themselves as, in many respects, almost equal.¹⁰ As such, feminine stereotypes were designed specifically to make women internalize a feeling of inferiority to men so that they may continue to serve as a suitable human self-esteem booster. Wollstonecraft saw these stereotypes as detrimental, not because of the internalized inferiority of women on its own, but because of the lack of education given to women as a result of those stereotypes. Particularly in response to Rousseau's characterization of the ideal woman, Sophie in Emile, she concluded that, logically, either women were moral beings or women were weak characters subject to the “superior faculties of men;” Wollstonecraft concluded the former to be true.¹¹ It was arguments like these that justified preventing women from receiving equal education. However, individual education provided a sense of virtue and wisdom agreed upon by society to be that of Providence to grant independence and to enforce the morality of society. Virtue not based on reason was “a farce,” and anyone who acted without reason could not be virtuous. Yet, the education of women in the late 1700s provided a disorderly and chaotic outlook on life where women relied heavily on tradition and observation instead of on reason to understand the world. This left them understanding simplicity without knowledge of the complexities of life that could help them adjust behavior in a virtuous way. Consequently, women became victims to the prejudices they formed in their day-to-day lives and became blind slaves to authority, making them victims of the absolutism, tyranny, and despotism so despised by enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau; they further left them acting in indecent and immoral ways. These values were passed on to children, perpetuating the system further.¹²

To Wollstonecraft, women needed to prove their place as rational creatures. If acceptance showed their inferiority to men, then women would be inferior with a new instilled sense of virtue.¹³ To prove their place in society, they needed national, equal education.¹⁴ If their rationality were to be proven, then they needed to be given access to political independence, more employment opportunities to maintain a sense of financial independence, and autonomy from their husbands, who should “generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, . . .”¹⁵ Virginia Woolf agreed with Wollstonecraft’s assessment of the need for equal opportunity, especially in employment. As she related the story of “Mary” in A Room of One’s Own, she accounted seeing several men and women working in their day-to-day lives as she walked down the streets of Oxbridge. She pondered on why it was that the women who saved lives and took care of children earned less than, or were seen as less important than, the coal-heavers, the lawyer, or the barristers; in truth, she longed for a day when women stopped begin the protected sex and took on male work roles.¹⁶ While Woolf only argued explicitly for financial independence and privacy for women, she advocated for a sense of androgyny in one’s work, especially in fiction. She believed perfect clarity of experience in writing required that “one must be woman-manly or man-wonanly” and not be wholly male or female when conveying thoughts and opinions. Otherwise, these thoughts became riddled with biases and half-truths that muddied the message of the work.¹⁷ She further lamented at the lack of intellectual freedom women had throughout most of their history, pointing out that the poor lacked the means to learn and had no way to travel and contemplate the world around them. This, alongside the societal standard for women to remain in the house left them unable to produce works of literary genius. “Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady ‘cut off from what is called the world,’ however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written War and Peace.”¹⁸ However, it was perhaps the degree to which each woman emphasized their respect points that created the most remarkable contrast.

The most striking difference between Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf was what they considered to be the most important emancipator for women in society. Wollstonecraft saw education as the ultimate liberator for women, while Woolf believed that privacy and financial independence would naturally change their status. While Wollstonecraft touched on numerous topics in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she focused most of her attention on education. She believed education was at the root of virtue, and so women needed to be educated to act in moral ways and to teach their children right from wrong. Through virtue, all things became possible. These virtues would make women better wives, better role models for their children, and more effective educators. Political participation, which needed righteous thought and the ability to reason, would become feasible. Workplace inequity would be a thing of the past.¹⁹ Virtue could improve society drastically. It was, as such, the greatest emancipator. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, took a different approach to life. She saw education as a necessary step to the progress of women, to be sure, but she believed that the true emancipator for women started at home. By 1929, the year A Room of One’s Own was published, women already had greater opportunities than women in 1792. Woolf chastised women for not taking advantage of their new-found privileges to go to college, own their own property, save money, and vote. Judith Shakespeare, to Woolf, lived in every woman. If women would use these advantages to improve themselves, she would “walk among us in the flesh.”²⁰ While women had these new privileges, they still were not free from the stereotypes thrust upon them. They were clearly important to Virginia Woolf, but not what would liberate women from these societal standards. In truth, “freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art [of writing]; . . .” in short, women needed the freedom to express themselves. In order to accomplish that, they needed the privacy and financial support to free themselves of the responsibilities of life and produce great works.²¹ In essence, women needed to escape the looking glass role thrust upon them by men by seizing their financial independence, privacy, and education, which decreased the sense of male superiority in society. Only by doing that could progress be made for women.

Two women, both writing in completely different historical and cultural contexts, wrote profound works that championed feminist causes. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a product of enlightenment philosophy, a testament, in the minds of women like Mary Wollstonecraft, to the empowering nature of reason. However, A Room of One’s Own sprung for post-WWI Britain, where romanticism and positivism had gained more of a foothold in the minds of the average person. That work was a true testament to the power of fiction in conveying truth. While both women differed in approach, largely due to their philosophical and cultural differences, they both fought for the rights of women in a time when men would not, a fact that made their works truly profound