Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraftwas an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth27 April 1759
I think schools, as they are now regulated, the hot-beds of vice and folly, and the knowledge of human nature supposedly attained there, merely cunning selfishness.
... in the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment ...
The most perfect education ... is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent.
... the whole tenour of female education ... tends to render the best disposed romantic and inconstant; and the remainder vain and mean.
Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.
Till women are more rationally educated, the progress in human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.
Life cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator.
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness.
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
I love my man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.
The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force.
Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship.
But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!