 One of Wollstonecraft 's most scathing critiques in the Rights of Woman is of false and excessive sensibility , particularly in women . She argues that women who succumb to sensibility are " blown about by every momentary gust of feeling " and because they are " the prey of their senses " they cannot think rationally . In fact , she claims , they do harm not only to themselves but to the entire civilization : these are not women who can help refine a civilization — a popular eighteenth @-@ century idea — but women who will destroy it . Wollstonecraft does not argue that reason and feeling should act independently of each other ; rather , she believes that they should inform each other . 
