Women Suppression in the 18th Century:
18th century women were living in a time of great female suppresion that demanded limited, frivolous education for females and discouraged female sexuality. Daniel Defoes novel Moll Flanders accurately portrays women's education as learning accomplishments such as music, reading, writing, French, and dancing (Defoe 54).
Mary Wollstonecraft is recognized as one of the first feminist. She wrote a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which spoke against this frivolous education: "That the instruction which women have hitherto received has only tended, with the constitution of civil society, to render them insignificant objects of desire--mere propagators of fools!--if it can be proved that in aiming to accomplish them, without cultivating their understandings, they are taken out of their spheres of duties, and made ridiculous and useless when the short-lived bloom of beauty is over..." (Wollstonecraft 173).
18th Century Women also faced a sexual double standard:
18th century women were expected to be virtuous or sexually chaste, although the men of this period were not held to this expectation: "...the conduct expected of women as virgins, wives, and widows rested on the assumption that sexual desire was proper to the male and unbecoming to the female" (Brophy 27). "While a wife must be above reproach, she must tolerate, even expect, a much lower order of conduct from her husband, both in sexual promiscuity and in other masculine prerogatives such as drunkenness" (Brophy 11). If within a marriage a woman realized that her husband was cheating on her, during this time period a woman was to treat her husband with patience and gentleness, but if this same situation was reversed, death was a fit punishment for the woman (Brophy 11).
