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The French Revolution spoke of liberty. Saint-Domingue asked whether the word crossed the ocean. When France hesitated, the enslaved answered for themselves. I negotiated when negotiation served freedom and fought when fighting served it better. Principles that require permission are not yet principles.

I wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in six weeks in 1791, while the ink was barely dry on Paine's Rights of Man and Burke's Reflections were still being argued over in every pamphlet shop in London. I was furious at Talleyrand, who had just written to the French National Assembly recommending that women's education be confined to domestic arts.

I...

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...

The conduct and manners of women prove that their minds are not in a healthy state. Taught from their 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. They dress; they paint; they nicknack. Their faculties are kept from maturing by the very education designed to...

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...

If women are to be excluded, without having a voice, from a participation of the natural rights of mankind, prove first, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, that they want reason.

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

I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour. For this distinction is, I am firmly persuaded, the foundation of the weakness of character ascribed to woman.

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.

It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.

How can woman be expected to co-operate unless she know why she ought to be virtuous? Unless freedom strengthens her reason till she comprehend her duty, and see in what manner it is connected with her real good.

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