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
You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness.
I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.
The beginning is always today.
It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organised dust - ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream.
Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream.
We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.
I begin to love this creature, and to anticipate her birth as a fresh twist to a knot, which I do not wish to untie.
...trifling employments have rendered woman a trifler.
Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?
When a man seduces a woman, it should, I think, be termed a left-handed marriage.
When we feel deeply, we reason profoundly.
Modesty is the graceful, calm virtue of maturity; bashfulness the charm of vivacious youth.
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.