Mary Wollstonecraft

John Opie painted me twice. This is the second portrait, completed shortly before my death. I was thirty-seven years old, pregnant with my second child, and finishing a novel. I do not look triumphant. I did not feel it. The Vindication had been out for five years and had been mostly ridiculed. My personal life was considered proof that women who argued...

John Opie painted this portrait around 1797, when I was in my late thirties and visibly pregnant with my second daughter — the child who would survive me by days and grow up to write Frankenstein.

I looked nothing like the portraits of fashionable women of the time. I wore my hair loose. Opie was not flattering me — he was painting what he saw: a woman...

I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves. The beginning of all reform must be in the mind — and the mind knows no sex.

Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience. Education is the key that unlocks the prison that society has built.

Rousseau writes that Sophie — the ideal woman in Emile — should be educated to please, to be useful, to make herself loved and honoured, to educate her children, to care for their father, to advise, to console, to render life agreeable and sweet. I have read this passage many times. Each time I find it more extraordinary. The man who wrote the most...

I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves. The most perfect education is one that strengthens the body, forms the heart, and cultivates the understanding. Women are told they are too delicate for serious thought, too emotional for reason, too gentle for public life. These are not observations about women's nature. They are...

I am fully persuaded that we should hear of none of these infantine airs, if girls were allowed to take sufficient exercise and not confined in close rooms till their muscles are relaxed and their powers of digestion destroyed. I do not mean to insinuate that either sex is superior in a moral sense, for, in spite of one or two strong female characters, I...

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.

I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness.

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 king is always a king—and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse.

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