A Vindication of the rights of woman
Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity, and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. Mary Wollstonecraft's work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrage - Walpole called her 'a hyena in petticoats' - yet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.
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- It is with joy that I answer your question. And if I may be allowed to answer it philosophically. The books you find incredibly interesting may be the books the validate your worldview. There are many of these. The book you find eye-opening may be the books that open the door into the world of philosophy proper for you. There are not many of these because you only need to go through that door once I feel.
Also, I would observe that besides Ayn Rand (who for many is not a philosopher) not a single female philosopher has been mentioned here which I find is a damning indictment on the state of affairs of the world of ideas. To remedy that I would recommend to you read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft or anything by De Beauvoir (and do ignore her contemporary Sartre for he was nothing but a windbag).
I am delighted that you singled out Thomas Paine (who again is not a philosopher as such; must be something in the air in the States) and Arthur Schopenhauer. They are both tremendous stylists. I've said this many times before - I don't care how great a philosopher's ideas are, if they can't write well I don't want to know. Thus we have people here recommending Kripke or Frege or heck knows who like that who bludgeon you to death with their tedious logic. Avoid them I say.
Finally I would like to be clichéd and recommend anything by Nietzsche except for Thus Spake Zarathustra even though he himself considered it his best work and I would especially recommend Ecce Homo by him because it is a summation of his previous works by his own hand. Nietzsche was the supreme stylist and ruthlessly honest and fearless. Also I'd recommend A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues by a contemporary philosopher André Comte-Sponville. This is a remarkable book on virtue theory that takes in Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Woody Allen among others and is divided up by virtue which is extremely novel. It is fantastically written. Anything by Cioran as well such as The Trouble with Being Born. I'm trying not to typecast myself here! :)
And finally finally Sophie's World and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance while nice cute books are not true philosophy books. This is also why I wouldn't recommend Camus' The Outsider though someone did mention The Myth of Sisyphus. Borges falls into this category. Sophie's world is really a kid's book as well and one that I would perhaps recommend to children though I'd recommend Borges or Camus or Kafka first.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vindication-Rights-Woman-Penguin-Cla...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Second-Sex-Vintage-classics/dp/00997...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Penguin-Great-Ideas-Suffering-World/...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ecce-Homo-Becomes-Penguin-Classics/d...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Short-Treatise-Great-Virtues-Philoso...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Trouble-Being-Born-E-M-Cioran/dp/155...
- Where "classic literature" is specifically defined as:
“(B) CLASSIC WORKS OF LITERATURE.—The term ‘classic works of literature’ means the works of literature (including translations of such works)—
“(i) included in the Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 1990), published by Encyclopaedia Britannica;
“(ii) referenced in the article ‘Classics Every Middle Schooler Should Read’ by Thomas Purifoy, Jr. and published by Compass Classroom (as such article appeared on the date of enactment of this subsection); and
“(iii) referenced in the article ‘Classics Every High Schooler Should Read’ by Mary Pierson Purifoy and published by Compass Classroom (as such article appeared on the date of enactment of this subsection).
Of the first, "The selection of authors has come under attack, with some dismissing the project as a celebration of European men, ignoring contributions of women and non-European authors" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...
Of the latter two, Thomas Purifoy, Jr. is a Young Earth Creationist. Mary Pierson Purifoy is, I believe, his 26 year old homeschooled daughter, who then went to Liberty University, a conservative, private evangelical Christian.
Compass Classroom develops materials for Christian Homeschooling.
That sounds like a deliberate bias towards a white, male, English, Christian subset of classic literature. Not only doesn't they include something like "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman", it doesn't look like they even include Les Misérables, which we read in school.
While the first list includes Freud's "The Sexual Enlightenment of Children"???
Yeah, go ahead and explain why students should read that but not have an explicit allowance for Les Misérables.
- I actually have on my desk, right now, Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman."
To summarize one of her points from memory, she basically lays into Rousseau about having a lot of opinions on domestic life for someone who clearly doesn't even know how to set foot in a kitchen.
- Yes, "Feminism is for everybody" and/or "Gender Trouble" are just as, if not more, notable than "The Second Sex." Or maybe some of the earliest publications, like 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.'
Regardless of the details, there are certainly more than one notable work inside of feminism.
- The key word here is vacuum. It's pretty easy to come up with compelling arguments against individual examples of inequality, but these really only hold up on their own and yes, fall apart at the structural level.
I agree retreating to argue on the structural level is rhetorically weak. That's all that can really be said against it, and it's unfortunate, because someone saying how really you are a member of the oppressed (as seen in white supremacist and MRA groups) is much more alluring than some intangible narrative about structural inequality.
I say narrative because that's the form it has taken, and indeed had to take. Mary Wollstonecraft couldn't spend her time arguing point by point in a council chamber. She wrote books, compelling novels which had to fight viciously for every inch of ground on which they stood.
You've seen how easily people convince themselves that gripes of oppression are baseless, today, 200 years after A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. We've had academics write and study and provide rhetorical tools for generations now, building a narrative, because that is what is needed. To truly argue against it, it must be met on that same narrative ground.
