Mary Wollstonecraft — "How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its ow…"
How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?
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More from Mary Wollstonecraft
"Pleasure is the business of women, according to the present modification of society, and while it continues to be so, little can be expected from such weak beings."
"I have a heart that is too open to be deceived."
"It is a melancholy truth; yet a truth it is, that women, as well as men, without a proper education, will ever be a prey to their prejudices."
"The world cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator."
"My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable …"
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.