Mary Wollstonecraft — "The desire of being always admired is the reason why women are so often useless."
The desire of being always admired is the reason why women are so often useless.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Mary Wollstonecraft
"I have a heart that is too tender to be wounded."
"I have been so accustomed to hear beauty of the mind extolled, that I have been led to expect something more than ordinary, when I have met with a woman with a cultivated understanding."
"Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience."
"I am not a mere echo, but a voice."
"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.