Mary Wollstonecraft — "I am not a mere woman, but a rational being."
I am not a mere woman, but a rational being.
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More from Mary Wollstonecraft
"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 …"
"I shall be at a loss to discover why marriage has been called the tomb of love."
"I have ever found that the women who have most power over me are those who have the least ambition."
"Security is the very first characteristic of happiness."
"Women are rendered feeble and wretched by a variety of causes, some of which are natural, but more are artificial."
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.