Mary Wollstonecraft Quotes on Mind
Wollstonecraft's philosophical psychology, developed across Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Original Stories from Real Life (1788), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and the more famous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), holds that the mind is not differentiated by sex in the substantial sense the contemporary social order assumed. The same rational faculties — understanding, reason, imagination, will — are present in male and female alike, and the apparent intellectual and moral inferiority of women is the predictable product of an educational and social regime that systematically prevents the development of these faculties in half the population. The framework draws on Locke and Rousseau (against Rousseau's own treatment of female education in Émile) and supplies the philosophical psychology underlying Wollstonecraft's broader political and educational program.
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:
“Reason is, indeed, the only foundation of morality.”
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“Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world; and this is not a woman's province in a married state. Her sphere of action is not large, and if she is not taught to look into her own heart, how trivial are her occupations and pursuits! What little arts engross and narrow her mind!”
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), "Matrimony", p. 100 -
“Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788; 1791)”
Good habits, imperceptibly fixed, are far preferable to the precepts of reason ; but, as this task requires more judgment than generally falls to the lot of parents, substitutes must be sought for, and medicines given, when regimen would have answered the purpose much better. I believe those who examine their own minds, will readily agree with me, that reason, with difficulty, conquers settled hab -
“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 get it.”
Undated letter to Joseph Johnson (October? 1792), published in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004), edited by Janet Todd , p. 206. -
“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.”
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) | Ch. 3 -
“How can a rational being be ennobled by anything that is not obtained by its own exertions?”
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) | Ch. 3 -
“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.”
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) | Ch. 4 -
“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 -
“Nothing could be more natural than the developement of the passions, nor more striking than the views of the human heart. What delicate struggles! and uncommonly pretty turns of thought!”
Mary: A Fiction (1788) -
“It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows, into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain, must be obtained by their charms and weakness.”
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) | Ch. 4 -
“We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.”
Letters Written in Sweden(1796) | Letter 19