To begin with, my first interaction with Mrs. Wollstonecraft (whom I also know as Frankenstein's grandmother) was when I was seventeen and was part of the debate team in my school. For one of our debate, the topic was whether the evolution in women's social role had been a positive or negative thing. It also was the first time I could read some work by different feminist and it made sense. But, at the time, I couldn't find any edition of this book in particular. So, when I saw it in my local bookstore, I had to buy it.

This essay basically talks about how women had been made stupid and vain by men, while several intelectuals attributed this qualities to their nature (yes, the eternal debate of nature/nurture). Of course, Mrs. Wollstoncraft is against that idea. She argues that there is no natural preference for dresses and other ornaments, but that women have been raised to prefer them over books and cultivating their intellect. Even if some people may argue that we are way over that idea, I'd say otherwise. Maybe it's because I live in a very sexist country, but I still know of girls (about my age), whose only goal in life is to grab a husband and have a bunch of kids. If you don't have that, you're going to be miserable and sad. And I'm not talking about poor women who haven't had any chances of a good education. I'm talking about girls educated in the same private school as I, where debates such as the one mentioned above were held. The ideas were in the air, but most of them didn't catch them. Even in my own university, I've heard classmates dismissing a girl because she wasn't "girly" (a.k.a: she doesn't wear dresses). There's also people who say that Engineering is a career for men, while Education is clearly female.

So, even within educated people today we find this slight prejudice: women are inherently different to men (I'm not talking about brute force. Wollstonecraft herself mentioned that men are naturally stronger physically than women). There are things which are for men, and things for women. And that's the reason why we still are amazed whenever we have a politician choosing a woman for his cabinet, and that the fact that a female CEO will always be asked in interviews how difficult it was for her to renounce to her family life (I've never read an interview to a male CEO in which the journalist asks this question). And, as Mary Wollstonecraft did, I'm not going to blame only male society of this. Women are at fault here, too. They accept these impositions that come from elsewhere, instead of looking inside of themselves and finding their own ideas about themselves. It's almost ridiculous that even today we're still relying in the same ideas our ancestors had. We all have heard that women are worse in Maths than men, which several studies in the last years have proved a false thing. We have the same capacities for reason, as Wollstonecraft argued. It's just that some women decide to to exercise it.

So, despite this being a book written more than two hundred years ago, the idea of society it presents still exists. There's a long way to go if we want to finally overcome these old ideas and start writing new ones. Ones that conform to actual reality.