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
"False notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of the mind, and instead of just principles, fill the imagination with romantic stories."
"It is a happy thing for women, that there is a kind of fashion in their ideas, as well as in their dress."
"I have a heart that is full of gratitude, and a head that is full of schemes."
"It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore to them their lost dignity – and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world."
"I am not afraid of being singular or of being thought whimsical."
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.