Mary Wollstonecraft Women Quotations

Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.

I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.

Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives; - that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.

If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits which engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour.

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.