Mary Wollstonecraft — "I am not a mere shadow, but a substance."
I am not a mere shadow, but a substance.
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More from Mary Wollstonecraft
"I am not fond of thinking, I like to feel."
"False notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of the mind, and instead of just principles, fill the imagination with romantic stories."
"I have been in love with a man of my own sex, and have found him as capricious as any of the other."
"The most holy band of society is friendship."
"I have always been of opinion, that the only way to make women rational creatures, and free citizens, is to allow them to pursue their own interest, and to follow the bent of their own inclinations."
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.