a) Read excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). What is Wollstonecraft’s argument?
b) Research the role(s) of women and social class during the Victorian time period.
c) How does Emily Bronte portray women in the novel, particularly Catherine and Nelly Dean? To what extent do they fit the traditional roles of women during the Victorian time period? To what extent does Bronte support Wollstonecraft’s argument
Example of relevant article:
Ford, Thomas H. “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Motherhood of Feminism.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3/4, 2009, pp. 189–205. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27740589.
Example of relevant book:
Griffin, Emma, Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (New Haven, CT, 2020; online edn, Yale Scholarship Online, 17 Sept. 2020), https://doi-org.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/10.12987/yale/9780300230062.001.0001.
Example of relevant articles:
Bannet, Eve Tavor. "The Marriage Act of 1753: "A most cruel law for the Fair Sex"." Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 30 no. 3, 1997, p. 233-254. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecs.1997.0008.
Perriton, Linda and Josephine Maltby. "Working-Class Households and Savings in England, 1850–1880." Enterprise & Society, vol. 16 no. 2, 2015, p. 413-445. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ens.2015.0008.
Example of relevant article:
Garner, Naomi Jayne. "'Seeing through a glass darkly': Wollstonecraft and the confinements of eighteenth-century femininity." Journal of International Women's Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, Nov. 2009, pp. 81+. Gale In Context: World History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A229721062/WHIC?u=nypl&sid=bookmark-WHIC&xid=aeddb3fe.