Mary Wollstonecraft Quotes on Knowledge
Wollstonecraft's epistemology, articulated across A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and the educational writings, holds that genuine knowledge depends on the active exercise of reason rather than on the receptive accumulation of opinions, and that the educational regime imposed on women in eighteenth-century European society — directed toward accomplishment, conversation, and the arts of pleasing rather than toward understanding, judgment, and rational inquiry — systematically prevents women from acquiring the knowledge of which they are otherwise fully capable. The framework draws on Locke's empiricist epistemology and on the Enlightenment ideal of universal rational agency, and turns both against the contemporary social practices that excluded women from the conditions under which the knowledge those frameworks valued could be acquired.
Quotes
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Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:
“Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.”
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Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:
“The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force.”
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Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:
“Genius will educate itself.”
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Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:
“Make them free, and they will quickly become wise and virtuous.”
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Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:
“Reason is, indeed, the only foundation of morality.”
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“You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track — the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.”
Letter to Everina Wollstonecraft (7 November 1787) -
“I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind — my wayward heart creates its own misery — Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child — long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I”
Undated letter to Joseph Johnson (October? 1792), published in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004), edited by Janet Todd , p. 206. -
“Till women are more rationally educated, the progress in human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.”
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) | Ch. 3