Mary Wollstonecraft Quotes on Justice
Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) extend the eighteenth-century natural-rights tradition to defend the equal rationality, dignity, and political standing of women. The Vindication of the Rights of Woman argues that the apparent inferiority of women is the product of a deformed education that systematically cultivates dependence, vanity, and immaturity in place of the rational virtues that would permit women to take their place as equal citizens, mothers, and rational moral agents. The argument turns on the claim that virtue is the same in both sexes and that political justice requires educational and social reforms commensurate with that claim.
Quotes
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“It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.”
Ch. 4 -
“Virtue can only flourish among equals.”
A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) -
“A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)”
It may be confidently asserted that no man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. And the desire of rectifying these mistakes, is the noble ambition of an enlightened understanding, the impulse of feelings that Philosophy invigorates. -
“A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)”
Virtue can only flourish amongst equals. -
“Tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former want only slaves, and the latter a play-thing.”
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) | Introduction -
“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?”
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) | Ch. 3 -
“Till society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed, because they will be obeyed, and constantly endeavour to settle that power on a Divine right, which will not bear the investigation of reason.”
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) | Ch. 11