Quote of the day
Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.
From chapter II of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in London in 1792: an argument for women’s education and independence. The sentence’s precise date and place of composition are not established.
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Education against obedience
Wollstonecraft is speaking in her own argumentative voice, not through a fictional character. Her point is that women’s apparent dependence is cultivated, not proof of natural incapacity. To enlarge the mind is to develop knowledge, reason and the ability to judge: an education for moral independence rather than pleasing submission.
Immediately beforehand, she compares women’s education with that of military men: both may acquire polished manners without learning to think independently. Polish, in other words, is not judgement. The sentence continues by identifying the interests served by women’s ignorance; nearby, she challenges Rousseau’s educational prescriptions for Sophia, Émile’s female counterpart.
A writer enters the argument
Born in Spitalfields in 1759, Wollstonecraft worked as a companion, teacher and governess before becoming a professional writer, translator and reviewer. Her school at Newington Green brought her into contact with the dissenting thinker Richard Price. Education was therefore both a philosophical concern and a matter of practical experience.
Her A Vindication of the Rights of Men, published in 1790, answered Edmund Burke. Two years later, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman tested revolutionary promises of liberty against women’s exclusion. Where Talleyrand’s 1791 education report envisaged domestic education for girls, she advocated public, mixed-sex schooling and women’s capacity to support themselves.
A demanding vision of liberty
Her independence was not simply freedom from restraint. It carried obligations: reason should equip women for moral responsibility, citizenship and family life. The argument asks what kind of society could expect virtue from people whom it had trained to obey rather than understand.
A pioneering feminist philosopher, Wollstonecraft belongs to Britain’s political and literary inheritance. Her Scandinavian travel writing influenced Romantic literature; her daughter was Mary Shelley. William Godwin’s candid memoir of 1798 damaged her posthumous reputation, but her ideas did not disappear: readership and influence continued internationally throughout the nineteenth century.