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.
Mary WollstonecraftRead
Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives; - that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.
Interpretation
Empowering women leads to better family dynamics, provided men fulfill their roles responsibly.
Mary Wollstonecraft emphasizes the importance of nurturing rationality and freedom in women, arguing that when women are treated as equals, they are more likely to become supportive partners. However, she also highlights the necessity for men to actively engage in their responsibilities as husbands and fathers to ensure a harmonious family life.
In practice
Discussing gender equality at a women's rights seminar.
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.
But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!
The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.
Women are degraded by the propensity to enjoy the present moment, and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.
Perhaps the seeds of false-refinement, immorality, and vanity, have ever been shed by the great. Weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and defections of their race, in a premature and unnatural manner, undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society!
It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weaknesses.
Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all β¦ is not to have one.
Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true and assured I have gotten either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.
God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.
There exists a world. In terms of probability this borders on the impossible. It would have been far more likely if, by chance, there was nothing at all. Then, at least, no one would have began asking why there was nothing.
Every aspect of life is pre-programmed to rise to its highest creative possibility. We don't have to make that happen, but we have to allow it to happen. And that itself is the struggle of life: resisting the resistant mind.
I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.
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