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
When poverty is more disgraceful than even vice, is not morality cut to the quick?
When we feel deeply, we reason profoundly.
Modesty is the graceful, calm virtue of maturity; bashfulness the charm of vivacious youth.
Love, from its very nature, must be transitory.
The absurd duty, too often inculcated, of obeying a parent only on account of his being a parent, shackles the mind, and prepares it for a slavish submission to any power but reason.
I think I love most people best when they are in adversity; for pity is one of my prevailing passions.
I must be allowed to add some explanatory remarks to bring the subject home to reason-to that sluggish reason, which supinely takes opinions on trust, and obstinately supports them to spare itself the labour of thinking.
Good habits, imperceptibly fixed, are far preferable to the precepts of reason.
At school boys become gluttons and slovens, and, instead of cultivating domestic affections, very early rush into the libertinism which destroys the constitution before it is formed; hardening the heart as it weakens the understanding.
... 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 ...
... wealth and female softness equally tend to debase mankind!
... the conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the operations of its own reason ...
... in the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment ...
[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.