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
As a sex, women are habitually indolent; and every thing tends to make them so.
I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.
... to improve both sexes they ought, not only in private families, but in public schools, to be educated together. If marriage be the cement of society, mankind should all be educated after the same model, or the intercourse of the sexes will never deserve the name of fellowship ...
A king is always a king - and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse
[I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.
The two sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other.
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.
Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.
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.