Mary Wollstonecraft — "How can a being be noble who is only good because she is afraid of being wicked?"
How can a being be noble who is only good because she is afraid of being wicked?
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More from Mary Wollstonecraft
"How can a being be called rational who is only allowed to reason when she is to obey?"
"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 am a solitary being, who has no ties to bind her to the world."
"It is a happy thing for women, that there is a kind of fashion in their ideas, as well as in their dress."
"Few have been taught to think, and fewer still to reason."
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.