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
"I am not a creature of impulse, but of deliberation."
"Ignorance is a frail base for virtue."
"I have a heart that is ready to burst with the tenderest affection, and a head that is full of the most exalted notions."
"A woman who is not a mother, is not a woman."
"To be more loved than esteemed is a precarious tenure."
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.