Chapter IX — on the pernicious effects of unnatural distinctions — opens with an image of structural causation that runs throughout Wollstonecraft's analysis: the evils of society flow from the excessive respect paid to property. When property — rather than reason, virtue, or talent — is the basis for social esteem, everyone is corrupted by the scramble for it, and those excluded from it entirely are corrupted most of all.
Women in Wollstonecraft's society are almost entirely economically dependent: on fathers before marriage, on husbands after. This dependence produces a systematic corruption of character. A being who must please in order to survive will develop the arts of pleasing — cunning, flattery, dissimulation — in preference to the arts of thinking. The dissembler who must read others' desires to survive cannot be expected to cultivate the independence of mind that virtue requires.
Wollstonecraft's solution is structural, not merely educational: women must have access to the economic independence that makes genuine virtue possible. This means not only better schooling but the right to participate in civic and professional life — to earn, to own, and to act independently of male patronage. Without economic independence, even the best-educated woman is reduced to managing her dependence more skillfully rather than escaping it.
The argument appears in Chapter IX of the Vindication. Wollstonecraft's analysis of property and dependence anticipates later socialist-feminist critiques, though her own framework remains within Enlightenment liberalism.
