Mary Wollstonecraft - Enlightenment Philosopher

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

Highlights:

• She argued that women had not been included in the Enlightenment slogan “free and equal.” Women had been excluded from the social contract.

• Her arguments were often met with scorn, even from some ‘enlightened’ men.

• Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay were British feminists. The most famous French feminist was Germaine de Stael.

• She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792.

• Wollstonecraft believed in equal education for girls and boys. Only education could give women the knowledge to participate equally with men in public life.

• She did argue that a woman’s first duty was to be a good mother. But, a woman could also decide on her own what was in her interest without depending on her husband.

Quotes:

"If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?"

"The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger."

"Let not men then in the pride of power, use the same arguments that tyrannic kings and venal ministers have used, and fallaciously assert that women ought to be subjected because she has always been so."

"Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience. Virtue can only flourish among equals."

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