A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
1792
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
1792
In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft did something no serious philosopher had attempted: she argued, with rigor and fury, that women were rational beings entitled to the same education as men. Written in direct response to a French report declaring women fit only for domestic instruction, this incendiary text tears into the prevailing prejudice that female weakness is natural rather than cultivated. Wollstonecraft contends that women have been deliberately kept ignorant and ornamental, trained to trade on beauty rather than intellect, and that this calculated subservience serves the interests of a patriarchal order terrified of female autonomy. She demands to know: if reason is what distinguishes humans from beasts, why is woman denied its exercise? The answer, she makes devastatingly clear, is power. This is not a gentle petition but an indictment, and its passionate logic laid the groundwork for two centuries of feminist thought.
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“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“[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.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“I love 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.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
“I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.””
— Mary Wollstonecraft
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Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. Lex, lex-books.com/book/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman-with-strictures-on-political-and-moral-subj-cd91b9b1-4de9-4cfb-aff0-396864fd108f.Wollstonecraft, M. (1792). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman-with-strictures-on-political-and-moral-subj-cd91b9b1-4de9-4cfb-aff0-396864fd108fWollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman-with-strictures-on-political-and-moral-subj-cd91b9b1-4de9-4cfb-aff0-396864fd108f.
