Wollstonecraft first informs the men that women need proper education. “Female rights and manners” (3) should not be overlooked based of writing and “false refinement” (3). By using this Wollstonecraft explains that women deserves more and ought to have the opportunity to learn.

Education is a right, not a privilege. Educating women just on home making skills and how to be a wife essentially deprives them of their natural rights to an academic based education, and instead fills them with skills that only serve to help the other gender role. She also declares how parents and schools can do a better job of educating boys and girls and giving those “genders an equal playing field” (8). They should teach the children how to make rational arguments . In her mind, self-interest dominates society and we need to make steps to make people more compassionate, moral, and rational.

Rather than men writing books to inform that female education should be “directed to one point” (9) in order for men to be pleased. However, she also tries to get inside the men’s head to demonstrate that women don’t always follow them and can leave them. She first explains that these women can “govern a family” and take care of the babes “they bring into this world” (6). They know how to take care of themselves without the help of a man. By doing this she conveys a harsh reality to try to convince the men to agree that women’s education is needed. She also uses analogies to illustrate that women’s physical beauty is their temporal existence.

Wollstonecraft compares women to “flowers” that are planted in “rich soil and later fade” (1). She uses this to imply that society places immense value on beauty, but it does not last forever. Soon when the women are gone so is their function in civilization. She is trying to get the attention of the women to prove to them that their lives will be gone without the help of education from the men. That these men have always taken their lives into their own and act like they are not there.