Mary Wollstonecraft — "To be useful is more honorable than to be ornamental."
To be useful is more honorable than to be ornamental.
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More from Mary Wollstonecraft
"Pleasure is the business of women, according to the present modification of society, and while it continues to be so, little can be expected from such weak beings."
"I have a soul that is too active to be idle."
"A man should not be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday."
"The desire of being always in a crowd, of being always seen, always admired, is a sure mark of a little mind."
"Why are women not to have the same education as men? Because it would render them masculine and disgusting."
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.