Mary Wollstonecraft — "It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent …"
It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.
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More from Mary Wollstonecraft
"I am not a mere echo, but a voice."
"It is a great misfortune to be born a woman."
"Pleasure is the business of a woman's life, according to the present modification of society."
"To be useful is more honorable than to be ornamental."
"I am not a slave to any system, nor a devotee to any sect."
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.