I really like this one. Thanks for posting it.
Thanks Bud! Glad you liked it.
Here are some from Mary Wollstonecraft (British, 1759-1797), author of
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787),
A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790),
History and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution (1793) and most famously,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). She was also the mother of Mary Shelley (of
Frankenstein fame).
One of Wollstonecraft's main arguments through a lot of her writing was that typical education for girls and women, such as it was in the late 1700s, only trained them to be submissive or to be ornamental. And this basic concern is seen in some of these quotations.
"I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves."
"The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger."
"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."
"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?"
"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."
"Virtue can only flourish among equals."
"Women are degraded by the propensity to enjoy the present moment, and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain."
"Women have seldom sufficient employment to silence their feelings; a round of little cares, or vain pursuits frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of sense."
"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. "
"Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience."
"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. "
"Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath. "