Mary Wollstonecraft Quotes on Virtue
Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) argues that virtue cannot have one standard for men and another for women: virtue is the same in both sexes because it is the activity of the same rational soul. The cultivation of women in eighteenth-century European societies — through educations centered on accomplishment, appearance, and pleasing rather than understanding, judgment, and responsibility — produces creatures characterized by the simulacra of virtue (modesty without principle, chastity without self-respect) rather than virtue itself. The argument turns on the Enlightenment claim, inherited from Locke and Rousseau but turned against Rousseau's own treatment of Sophie in Émile, that genuine virtue requires the independent exercise of reason and that the social conditions for that exercise must be extended equally to women.
Quotes
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Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:
“I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”
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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) -
Attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft:
“How can a being be generous who has nothing of its own? Or virtuous who is not free?”
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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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“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) -
“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.”
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) | Dedication -
“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 -
“The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful to society, had that society been well organized.”
Letters Written in Sweden(1796) | Letter 19