Mary Wollstonecraft
(1759-1797)

"Mother of Feminism"

birthdate: April 27
birthplace:
London, England

QUOTES

I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.

It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should be only organized 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.

The beginning is always today.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Let not men then in the pride of power, use the same arguments that tyrannic kings and venal ministers have used, and fallaciously assert that women ought to be subjected because she has always been so.... It is time to effect a revolution in female manners -- time to restore to them their lost dignity.... It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.

Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices...rather than to root them out.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

 

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