Mary Wollstonecraft

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.

Children, I grant, should be innocent but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.

Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives - that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.

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.

I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.

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?

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.

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, then by my example, how dangerous is the pursuit of knowledge and how much happier is that man who believes his native town to be the world than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.

No man chooses evil because it is evil he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.

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.

Virtue can only flourish among equals.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

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.

In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.

The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.