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
"I am not a mere ornament, but a helpmate."
"I am not a creature of fashion, but of nature."
"Many are the causes that conspire to render women more dependent than men; and one, not the least, is the false system of education, which is adopted for their sex."
"The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger."
"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."
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.