PhilosophersMary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft

Women share the same reason: educate them accordingly.

Enlightenment · Feminist philosophy1759 – 1797 United KingdomEnlightenment philosopherPioneer of feminismPolitical thinkerEducator
I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.
Rights of Woman, ch. 4, answering Rousseau.
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Liberty is the mother of virtue
Rights of Woman, ch. 2.
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I plead for my sex—not for myself.
Rights of Woman, dedication to Talleyrand (first edition, 1792).
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the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex
Rights of Woman, introduction.
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Misconceptions

False
"The mind has no sex" is a phrase of Wollstonecraft's.

The phrase is usually attributed to François Poullain de La Barre (On the Equality of the Two Sexes, 1673). Wollstonecraft defends a related idea in her own words: she blames Rousseau for giving "a sex to mind" and "denies the existence of sexual virtues".

Nuanced
She wanted women to become identical to men.

She grants that men have more bodily strength and that women may have different duties. What she rejects is a reason and a virtue different in nature. In the first edition she even writes that, freed from prejudice, women will fall into a "subordinate, yet respectable" station; she replaced that sentence in the revised edition.

Nuanced
She demanded votes for women.

Her central fight is women's education and independence. Political rights appear only in passing, in chapter 9: she "drops a hint" that will raise laughter, she says, that women ought to have representatives in government.

False
She despised motherhood and family life.

On the contrary, she wants educated women because they raise the children: to form citizens, "their mother must be a patriot". She grants that most women are called to be wives and mothers; she asks that they be so as rational beings, not as toys.