Mary Wollstonecraft — "How can a being be called rational who is only allowed to reason when she is to …"
How can a being be called rational who is only allowed to reason when she is to obey?
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More from Mary Wollstonecraft
"Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority."
"I perceive that the most respectable women are the most unhappy."
"How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?"
"I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves."
"I have a soul that pants for liberty."
About Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
English writer and proto-feminist philosopher whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is the founding text of modern feminist theory. Closely associated with Thomas Paine (Rights of Man co-conspirator and revolutionary contemporary) and William Godwin (her husband and philosopher of anarchism). For an intellectual contrast, see Edmund Burke, Anglo-Irish conservative and parliamentarian — Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was the explicit target of Wollstonecraft's first book — A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), written in the weeks after Burke's appeared. She extended the argument to women in her second Vindication two years later. Burke's tradition-and-prescription conservatism is the worldview Wollstonecraft's career was structured against.