Philosophy
Wollstonecraft argues that women share human reason and require equal education, independence and civic standing.
What looks like a natural shortcoming of a group can be the product of how that group is taught and kept dependent. Raise people to treat their looks as their chief power and their minds bend to serve that one aim, so they appear frivolous because they were trained to be. The argument blames a false system of education written by those who saw women as objects of attraction rather than as human beings.
Virtue is a human achievement, not a set of separate rules for each sex. The first ambition should be to have a good character as a human being, and any trait praised in one sex, such as charm or elegance, should be judged against that single test. The sexes may differ in degree but not in the kind of goodness they should pursue.
If both parties have reason, neither has the right to be the sole judge of what is right for the other. Excluding someone from the authority to reason for themselves cannot be justified once their capacity to reason is granted. Where minds are actually allowed to work, the stronger intellect tends to lead, whatever the sex.
The argument openly grants that men are physically stronger, then refuses to let that one fact carry every other inequality with it. Bodily strength is real, but treating it as grounds for lowering minds and characters is an overreach. Admitting a true difference makes it harder to defend the false ones built on top of it.
Mothers do much of the earliest teaching of children, so keeping women ignorant degrades the minds of the next generation, sons included. If half of society is shut out of knowledge, progress in knowledge and virtue stops for everyone, because truth must be common to all. Educating women is presented as a public necessity, not a private favor.
People denied real strength do not become harmlessly docile; they turn to manipulation and petty tyranny over whoever they can control. Cunning is what power looks like when it has no open, legitimate outlet. Weakness cultivated as a virtue therefore corrupts both the weak and those around them.
Because marriage holds society together, husbands and wives should be formed by the same education so they can be true companions. Teaching the sexes on different models produces partners who cannot share thought. The proposal is schooling on one common pattern rather than separate curricula.
When a person must marry to survive, the bond becomes an exchange of attraction for support rather than a free partnership, which the book likens to legal prostitution. Romantic passion fades with time, so a lasting marriage rests on friendship and shared care for children. Economic independence is what lets marriage become a union of equals.
A taste for fashion and flirtation is not inborn but trained, and it makes those who cultivate it resemble an idle aristocracy, vain and useless. The remedy is the industrious, useful ambition of working people rather than decorative leisure. The book applies to women the same criticism of idle privilege that the age of revolutions applied to rank.