Mary Wollstonecraft — "To be independent of public opinion, is the first step towards dignity."
To be independent of public opinion, is the first step towards dignity.
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More from Mary Wollstonecraft
"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."
"It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world."
"I have been so much accustomed to hear of the rights of men, that I begin to ask, what are the rights of women?"
"The being who can govern her own house, and make her husband and children happy, is more respectable than a queen."
"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye."
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.