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
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness.
You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.
I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.
The beginning is always today.
... we never do any thing well, unless we love it for its own sake.
Let us, my dear contemporaries, arise above such narrow prejudices. If wisdom be desirable on its own account, if virtue, to deserve the name, must be founded on knowledge, let us endeavour to strengthen our minds by reflection till our heads become a balance for our hearts...
For years I have endeavored to calm an impetuous tide -- laboring to make my feelings take an orderly course -- it was striving against the stream.
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.
Simplicity and sincerity generally go hand in hand, as both proceed from a love of truth.
...men endeavor to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society.
We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.
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.
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.