Wollstonecraft agrees that women have a place in the home, because they are biologically bound to their children, however, she thinks that women should pursue ambitions outside of the home. She professes that women are capable of performing their duties as mothers, and yet not allow those duties to define them as human beings. .
Women's first wish should be to "make herself respectable, and not rely for all her happiness on a being subject to like infirmities with herself" (Wollstonecraft, 111), because man is equally weak and susceptible to failure. Hence, women should be independent so they do not rely solely on their husbands for any means. Rousseau proposes that even though men are "vicious and always faulty, [woman] should early learn to submit to injustice and to suffer the wrongs inflicted on her" (Rousseau, 1300). Gentleness is a male praised female characteristic because gentleness can so easily turn into a weakness. It is because women have not been taught to be autonomous, and ignorance of any other lifestyle but marriage, that woman is under the abused control of man. Rousseau calls this control natural, while Wollstonecraft contends that men have control because no other options exist for women (Wollstonecraft, 266). .
Society, and men who constructed it, have subjugated women by not allowing them a chance to equal education, so that they might gain reason. Women are taught that they were created to be the toy of man, they are merely "his rattle, and [they] must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused" (Wollstonecraft, 118). Girls learn to be coquettish so that they might catch a husband, to have babies and be a mother. Rousseau professes that women are naturally coquettes and "woman is specially made to please man" (Rousseau, 1255). In the opinion of Wollstonecraft, these misconceptions of females being characteristically, gentle, weak, submissive, less virtuous (if at all virtuous), cunning, and dependent, have been perpetuated by the subjugation of women.