A Vindication of My Right To Despise This Essay

              While I do not claim that women are in any way inferior to men, I despised this article. I only understood about a quarter of the whole thing, half of it being a random jumble of drawn-out phrases with seemingly no significance, and another quarter consisting of words and references that were beyond me (not entirely bad since it filled my previously vacant vocab list). Of the quarter I did understand, I found about half of it to be ridiculously far-stretched and many times even more sexist that just about anything I hear in the world today. For instance, at the very bottom of the third to last page, she says, "... let their virtues be the same in kind, though they may vainly struggle for the same degree." She doesn't even think women can be equal to men! That's not the only sexist remark in the essay either; she repeatedly uses negative stereotypes in her reasoning that are way more sexist than anything used in modern times.
             This brings up another point as well. All of her evidence/references obviously came from a long time ago, a time when sexism was much more prevalent. I know of no one today who would seriously consider reforming women's' education to be more suitable for learning how to please men as Rousseau apparently did in the 1700's. I already whole-heartedly agree that women deserve to be taught the same education and the same principles (if they wish) as men, and I already know that it is not any women's job to please men. I'm sure I'm not alone, either. I know of a lot of stay-at-home dads, and it's the norm nowadays for both parents to work. The old stereotype of the women preparing the husband's meal for when he comes back from work is dwindling in the world today. Perhaps people back then really did need a twenty page rant with lots of big words used to make it seem legit and important in order to see this, but we certainly don't. This article is just outdated and over-extravagant.
              Maybe my narrow mind simply can't comprehend her wise (or at least big) words, but the whole article read like a jumbled mess to me. She jumped from subject to subject, often coming to the same points later on in the article only to say the same thing with different fancy words. Every part that I was able to understand seemed to result in a no **** (duh) moment. After I wasted my time trying to grasp what exactly she was attempting to say, all of it, such as the multitude of occasions where she said that women shouldn't be blindly obedient to their husbands, was already completely obvious. I learned absolutely nothing from this article other than the fact that I should never read anything from the 18th century ever again. All twenty pages could be summarized to the last three pages, or even the just the third to last page. Hell, I can sum it up in one quick and easy-to-understand sentence:

Women should stop obediently following men and should stop being beautiful so that they can become more like men, and therefore gain manly virtues and principles, because they are obviously better than women's.

For everyone who didn't feel like wasting their time reading this essay, that's pretty much the whole thing. You didn't miss anything.