vamenro's blog

This paper is based on a comparative study about how the topic of education has been approached by three different authors taking into account the historical moment they were living. Lots of examples reinforce my explanation because I think the works I have chosen speak for themselves.

I started it with a clear idea, the subject of education fascinated me when I worked on it in my first project with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. I thought that Mary Wollstonecraft and specially this book paved the way for many other writers, so I started to look for other authors which I could compare  Mary Wollstonecraft with.

First of all, Virginia Woolf was my favourite and I thought about working in A Room of One’s Own but finally it did not fit me. Maybe because this book was too mentioned or I do not know but Three Guineas got my attention at the end. To be honest, I had no idea about what ‘Guineas’ meant and it aroused my curiosity. After reading this book I knew that I had hit the nail on the head.  So again I had to find the third author who would complete my particular ‘triangle’. Obviously, she had to be Betty Friedan. She was the right author for this paper because unlike Wollstonecraft and Woolf she would provide an American vision of women and her work The Feminine Mystique was wonderful.

So I read these books carefully, highlighting every word, every idea or paragraph which I considered it was relevant for my paper. It took me several days but after exploring them I knew that they had many connections.

I was interested in showing differences and similarities between them so due to the fact that they were published in different periods of time, I reckoned essential to put them into a political background to know about cultural, social and political turmoil which surrounded these authors. In this section I do not talk about the general traits of each period, I just concentrate on the crucial facts to understand why Wollstonecraft, Woolf and Friedan wrote it and to see a development in the topic.

Two other sections have been created with plenty of examples which support my arguments. One of them is to explain the only difference which I have considered important and it is how the same topic has been explained through different contexts, through different perspectives with regard to the evolution of our history. So, depending the moment these works were published they will focus on different topics typical of their age.

The other large block in this paper is based on similarities established between these works,  although this part has been split up into different ones: education seen as the key to all problems suffered by society; how sex, women and trade have dehumanized women; how the main institutions in the patriarchal system have banned a true education for women and the reasons to demand equality in education for both men and women.

So in this paper the importance resides on themes dealt with and the narrative techniques by which Wollstonecraft, Woolf and Friedan use in their works to gain credibility among readers.

On the other hand, I have written a conclusion to sum up what I have learned from it.

In the weblography all the references used in this paper have been given and others which I have visited to become rich about these works.