Comparing the Rights of Women from Essays Through the Eras

Society has long since recognized the concept of men being superior to women, both in the aspects of physical strength and the ability to earn living for their family. It was a natural concept that based and formed the modern society: strong versus weak, superior versus inferior, non-marginalized versus marginalized. In earlier time, this concept materialized itself in the battle of the sexes, or what we knew as men versus women. Naturally, the existence of this issue provoked counteractions from the marginalized sex: women. At those times when women could not freely express their thoughts in verbal manners, they did it through writing. “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” by Mary Wollstonecraft, “Taking Women Students Seriously” by Adrienne Rich, and “The His’er Problem” by Anne Fadiman are mere few of many essays which raised the issue of women’s rights in society at large. They prodded, examined, and countered these issues with logical and sometimes persuasive arguments. On the other hand, in some other essays, the essayists used a tone of such anger that clearly conveys their disgust to the way women are treated in society. The main goal, however, was the same: to prove that equality had yet to exist between men and women, and to work on achieving it.

In response to an essay published in 1970 concerning rights of men, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote "Vindication of the Rights of Women." It covered the general issues of how women were being seen and treated in the society of her era. “Taking Women Students Seriously” (1979) by Adrienne Rich, on the other hand, focused more on the educational rights of women, how they were being treated in class, how they weren’t taken seriously in the manner of thoughts and expressions, and finally, how they needed to take themselves seriously in order to gain the respect they deserved. Finally, “The His’er Problem” (1998) by Anne Fadiman focused on specifically the domination of masculine aspects in the English language and literature. The three essayists, though their essays discussed the same general topic, possessed different outlooks on the way women were generally viewed in society, the implications of such views to their rights, and to what extents they could exercise those rights. These differences were influenced by the time periods in which they lived, but they had the same basic premise: women were not respected enough, and the same basic goals: women needed to work by themselves to earn that respect they deserved.

The ways society viewed women in each essayist’s era were different in accordance with the growth of feminism. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s essay, we could see that women were seen as the less important sex to the extreme extent by the society of her era. They are, “ridiculed or pitied by the writers who endeavor by satire or instructions to improve them” (559), and “are taken out of their sphere of duties, and made ridiculous and useless when the short-lived bloom of beauty is over.” (560). Such remarks, though they might have been victims of hyperboles, couldn’t have stemmed from mere insignificant degrading treatment from the society. These remarks showed that women, in Wollstonecraft’s era, were viewed no more than objects of desire, means of reproduction which could be easily disposed and ridiculed once those of the greater sex grew bored with them. These notions might have sounded absurd, but if one were to base their opinions solely from those remarks, it was easy to see that women were treated almost with no real respect for their identities. While in Adrienne Rich’s “Taking Women Students Seriously”, from the way she focused more on her students and their education, we could see that women