Quote of the day
I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.
From Chapter IV of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in London in 1792: a response to Rousseau on women’s education. The sentence’s precise circumstances of composition are unknown.
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Independence, not dominion
This is Wollstonecraft’s own argumentative voice, not a fictional speaker or a recorded address. Immediately beforehand, she advocates physical exercise for girls rather than an upbringing in timidity. Rousseau’s contention that educating women like men would diminish their influence over men supplies her opening: what he presents as a loss, she welcomes as liberation.
The distinction is between governing others and governing oneself. Women should develop independent judgement and moral responsibility, rather than secure influence through beauty, cultivated weakness or manipulation. Her subsequent comparison with opposition to teaching poor people to read and write makes education a matter of power, not merely accomplishment.
Education in a revolutionary age
Published in London by J. Johnson in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman entered debates about education and citizenship sharpened by the French Revolution. Its dedication addressed Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, whose educational proposals confined girls to domestic education. For Wollstonecraft, their exclusion exposed a contradiction within the promise of revolutionary reform.
She had already challenged Edmund Burke’s attack on the Revolution in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, published in 1790. The later book brought women’s education into this wider moral and political argument. Her purpose was not to exchange male domination for female domination, but to challenge dependence itself.
A British intellectual legacy
Born near Spitalfields in 1759, Wollstonecraft worked as a companion, teacher and governess before establishing a literary career. In 1784 she helped found a school at Newington Green, where the Dissenting minister Richard Price became an important intellectual influence. Her working life encompassed fiction, translation, educational writing and reviewing.
She died in September 1797 after an infection following the birth of the future Mary Shelley. Hostility towards her unconventional private life subsequently damaged her reputation; later feminist scholarship helped restore her standing. Her enduring contribution to Britain’s intellectual history was to make women’s education a question of moral and political principle, rather than merely social polish.