Mary Wollstonecraft — "I am not a mere tool, but an agent."
I am not a mere tool, but an agent.
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More from Mary Wollstonecraft
"I may be an enthusiast, but I am not a visionary."
"Pleasure is the business of a woman's life, according to the present modification of society."
"Many are the causes that conspire to render women more dependent than men; and one, not the least, is the false system of education, which is adopted for their sex."
"I am not arguing for the rights of women but for the rights of humanity."
"I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! All my feelings are on the tortured rack; but I will not be a fool, if I can help it."
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.