A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects

The phrase “blind obedience” recurs throughout A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft uses the phrase to describe the state of degraded dependency women are expected to show towards men. She also uses the phrase to describe the expectations that all tyrants have—whether they be kings, the wealthy, schoolteachers, or a parent or religious authority. It is not obedience Wollstonecraft objects to, but obedience that is “blind” and so does not derive from reason or independence. Essentially, the phrase “blind obedience” is part of her consistent attack levelled at all types of tyrannical power and insurmountable hierarchies that exist in society, “as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a play-thing” (24). 

Weakness and frailty are the two primary attributes Wollstonecraft uses to describe the stereotyped woman in society. For example, Wollstonecraft quotes Fordyce as saying that women “are timid and want to be defended. They are frail” (98). Society—and men in particular—believe that women are inherently weak and frail, hence their need to be “defended” by men. Wollstonecraft argues against this depiction of women, seeing the attributes of weakness and frailty as a type of prison men have caged women in precisely so that women might remain dependent upon and subordinate to men.